Tech Talk Digital publishing students’ work: where, how and why Lucius Von Joo Lucius Von Joo currently teaches at Kanda University of International Studies, Japan. He graduated with an EdM in Comparative and International Education and has taught deaf education, elementary education and EFL/ESL in California, Japan and New York in the past 10 years. His research interests include computer assisted learning, film and documentary content based learning, discussion skill pragmatics, teacher training origins and application of lessons, student educational backgrounds and learning approaches, video-cued multivocal ethnography, and family and communities as educators. A publisher friend of mine mentioned the other day that he has noticed an increase in digital publishing. In this conversation he mentioned that the digital publishing channel allows many less funded projects to be published in a much faster time span. We both talked about how we do not look forward to the disappearance of books but agreed that digital publishing is definitely a useful alternative. Regardless of any debate, the digital publishing process got me to thinking about an easy way to validate my students’ efforts through publishing. I searched through many options and settled on an online program called Issuu. Issuu fit best with my group due to ease of use, look of finished product and the ever-enticing price tag of free. Issuu publishes documents in a flash format that you can flip through as if you are actually reading a book or magazine. The online format allows validation for students work and can be set privately for class viewing or published publically to the web. I have separated this tech talk into three parts: setting up an account with Issuu, preparing student documents for publishing, and publishing to a digital library. I will also add in a few tips and tricks that assisted the digital publishing process to go quickly and smoothly. Setting up a class Issuu account for digital publishing 1.
Go to issuu.com. From here, you can see many other publications from professional and amateur writers. As a quick side note, this landing page is a great resource for students to have access to magazines in English that match their interests. Go to Create account.
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In my case, I wanted the entire class to publish works into a joint library. I chose to do this so that all the students could see their peers’ works easily. Because it was going to be a class account, I made the account name and password something easy and public that the students could remember. If you want to have separate accounts and libraries for each student you would just have them follow the below steps to make unique accounts versus one that the class shares. You can put your own name in the name section, as this will never be public on the account. Next, for the profile name, pick something easy for you and your class to remember (as noted you can not change this name after it is picked). The email can also be yours as students can just use the profile name when logging instead of your email. Finally, pick a password that is also easy to remember for your group. Fill in the encrypted words, accept the terms and agree. You will get an email to confirm the account and then you are set. It is a good idea to do this before class time so that you have the account ready for students when they sit down to publish.
Preparing student documents for digital publishing As I mentioned above, Issuu is a digital publishing platform that puts PDF or document files into a flash based book-reading platform. Students can write their books in any word processing program and then digitally publish their work. In my example, my students used Microsoft Word but any word processing program would work. 1.
Have the students produce any text for digital publishing. For my students’ first digital publishing I had them write short fiction stories. As a basis for their books, I had them form small groups and take multiple unrelated pictures through a scavenger hunt warmup that they later, unbeknownst to them, had to write a story around. Because the books are digitally published, I thought the pictures would help with the aesthetics of the finished product. The students put the photos into a word document and then wrote a story around the pictures.
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After writing the books, my students found free domain book cover images through Google images, which they uploaded into their word document as front and back covers. To do this first go to Google images and type in the kind of book cover you want. Then go to advanced search and set the usage rights to: free to use share or modify. My students also did this with textured paper images and placed them behind the text in their stories.
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After the students formatted their books, we saved the word document as a PDF. This is a helpful step, as it will control any reformatting that can often happen in doc format. To do this in Microsoft Word you just go to save as and choose PDF as the file format.
Uploading student documents for digital publishing 1.
Go to issuu.com login and then go to Upload.
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Choose the file(s) you want to upload and fill in the required general information about the document. This part may take a little time for students to fill in so be sure to give enough class time for publishing. I also found that when many of my students tried to upload Word doc files at the same time there were some traffic issues. However, using the PDF file format seemed to remedy this, because the file size is much smaller regardless of images.
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If you would like to make your students’ work private; for only the class to view, make sure to change the publishing options to private as the default is set to publish. If this step is missed, the published files can always be changed to private later on in the files settings within the library.
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Next, click Upload. The file should be available in your library in about a minute.
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You can then click on any of the published works in your library and view the flash. On this page you can share it, get embed codes, write comments, add links, print, and download the document.
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Select Click to read the document and this is where you get to page through as if it were a live book.
The Overall Benefits: 1. Digital publishing gives students a boost of extrinsic motivation with a clean finished product that can be looked back on and compared to future works. 2. Students are able to save their work digitally for long-term access and placement into online portfolios or resumes. Whereas most paper copies tend to get lost and saved documents are only a little better off lost in archives of class files and folders. 3. The books and papers students make can be easily shared through the normal social network channels. 4. As a teacher, it is easy to grade the finished product and there is no concern of losing the files once they are published. 5. The platform is simple to follow and I find that after the students have gone through the process once, it is very easy for them to use the software again. 6. The digital publishing will always be there for students to look back on and save as a portfolio to share or learn from as they continue to study language. 7. Can be viewed on an IPhone or IPad regardless of the flash format
Possible Limitations: 1. Issuu like most digital publishing programs I tested produces a flash based file versus an HTML 5. However, at this time the digital publishing forums that did produce HTML 5 files all cost a fee to use. 2. As I mentioned before files to be uploaded should be saved as a PDF to make the upload process quick while keeping the original format. When my students first uploaded their books to Issuu as doc files they were reformatted and shifted around. Final Remarks: Issuu was a huge success in my writing class. When my students found out that they were going to be publishing their stories online, it raised the bar for their output. This is a program that I have also used myself to send papers to a colleague or embed into a website to enhance the aesthetic. The nature of this program opens up many doors for publishing and organizing student work. lucius-v@kanda.kuis.ac.jp