Yesterday was the first meeting of a group of teachers on our campus who are interested in learning to use iBooks Author to create and publish interactive books for the iPad. We will be meeting monthly throughout the year and the group will be led by Laura Wright who created and published her first book(The Life of an Eanes Pioneer Child) with her Third Graders last year and is currently working on her second publication. 

The goal for each of our participants is to publish a book by the end of the year. The books will stem from the curriculum of each teacher's grade level and will be a compilation of contributions from both students and teachers. Each month's meeting will focus on one of the aspects of creating a book and the time between meetings will be spent exploring that aspect and collecting student work. During our first meeting, Laura helped them set up two iBook files: a sandbox file for them to practice creating the various parts of their final product and the file for the final product itself. The teachers left with instructions to explore their sandbox file before our next meeting. 

This is a pilot program in this district and I will be using this blog to chronicle the progress that is made throughout the year. 

Check out this List.ly list of resources for iBook creation. 

Erin Krieger is bravely diving into the use of a relatively new software, iBooks Author (the one that Laura Wright's class used to create their Pioneer Books) in her 5th Grade class. 

The students researched a particular decade and are using Pages on their iPads to record their research findings and store the images for their project. Once they have completed that process, they can begin to copy it all over to iBooks and begin the process of creating their book.