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Learn to create a Digital Book using Pages for Mac or iPad

Creating Digital Books with Mac and iPad is a free resource available in the Apple Bookstore.

Publisher Description

Writing and publishing a book might seem daunting, but don't worry. This guide, developed especially for educators, shows you how incredibly easy it is to design, create, and share your own professional-looking digital books using Pages on iPad or a Mac. Filled with step-by-step instructions, detailed screenshots, photos, illustrations, audio, and video, Creating Digital Books on Mac and iPad covers what you need to know about planning the structure of a book, working with text, illustrating with objects, adding media such as audio and video, building in navigation links, and much more.  

This book goes beyond a simple user guide, providing useful design tips and suggestions for increasing the educational value of what you publish using Pages. Whether your objective is creating new resources tailored to your community's needs or breathing life into your existing curriculum, this guide will help you produce fun, immersive digital books that gets students more excited about what they're learning.

Consider using Novel Effect to make reading much more fun!

Reblogging this from TCEA's TechNotes, originally posted 4/1/19:
https://blog.tcea.org/reading-with-novel-effect/

TAKE READING TO THE NEXT LEVEL WITH NOVEL EFFECT

written by Dr. Bruce Ellis April 1, 2019

Creating an Effect

That’s exactly what the creators of Novel Effect hope to do. The free app for both Apple and Android allows you to read a book aloud while it provides special effects and relevant audio. Instead of speech-to-text, think of this as speech-to-sound effects. As you are reading out loud, the app listens and provides audio to enhance the reading. Leaves rustle, animals howl, and footsteps crackle as you tell your tale, adding life to every line and engaging your audience.

Whether you are reading aloud to your class, a parent reading to his/her child, or a student reading aloud to his or herself or a small group, Novel Effect is a clever tool that follows your lead and makes reading (and listening) that much more fun.

...

Suggested Classroom Uses

To start, have students locate a book to perform for the class, either individually or in pairs. It’s okay if the book is below the student’s reading level. Let this activity be about building fluency, using voice and inflection to add interest, and pacing. If you find that you don’t have time for every student or group to perform, consider having Flipgrid set up so that they can each record their performance. This allows students to find and enjoy stories that other students have performed.

Then you can get really creative. After your students have had a chance to read with Novel Effect a few times, allow them to create their own set of sounds and music to go with a text of their choice. For this, you may prefer that they use a shorter text or one that would need fewer audio effects so that student don’t get bogged down. For free sound effects, consider using the following websites: Free Sound, Partners in Rhyme, Sound Bible, ZapSplat, and the BBC Sound Effects. Or, if you are really adventurous and want to create your own sound effects, then read Robbie Janney’s post on ShutterStock Blog. In it, he even provides some great video to get you started on your journey.

When will you be ready to give up paper?

Philadelphia's Christ Church "Vinegar" Bible

Face it. People seem to love paper. Especially paper books — there is something about the feel, the smell, and the tactile satisfaction of turning pages, that remains dear to many readers. In fact, our ongoing romance with paper may have somewhat slowed the move towards becoming “paperless.” Newsweek magazine tried it by changing to a digital-only edition at the end of 2012, yet, a print edition of Newsweek was relaunched on March 7, 2014. And, even though millions of Kindle e-readers have been sold (Forbes estimates roughly 43.7 million Kindle devices had been cumulatively sold through the end of 2013), GeekWire reports that sales of paper books are on the rebound, with sales increasing in 2014 by 2.4%.

An August, 2009, a New York Times article speculated that in 5 years, more students would be learning from digital texts and online resources in place of paper textbooks. At that time, teachers and district leaders in Arizona’s Vail Unified School district began the Beyond Textbooks initiative (http://beyondtextbooks.org), an online resource that has since grown to more than 100 partners in Arizona, California, Idaho, and Wyoming, with more than 12,000 teachers sharing their best lesson plans and online learning resources. The success of the Beyond Textbooks program was recognized at the ISTE 2014 conference in Atlanta, Georgia, when it received the “Digital Content and Curriculum AchievementAward.”

How might the Beyond Textbook model help other schools? The good news is that the digital divide seems to be narrowing as more students are connecting online using a variety of either personally- or school-owned digital devices. When coupled with the abundance of free or inexpensive cloud-based services, such as Google Apps for Education, or Microsoft One Drive, the age of being able to teach and learn in a truly paperless environment may have arrived.

As schools contemplate the idea of “going paperless,” education leaders must be thoughtful about whether adequate systems are in place that will help guarantee a successful transition. In addition to making sure the infrastructure will provide adequate bandwidth to support connectivity, are the staff and students ready to adopt a new way of thinking about “how we do our work?” For administrators, it’s important to model and promote a paperless workflow by making use of online surveys and forms, meeting agendas, shared calendars and collaborative note-taking.

For teachers, going paperless needs to be thought of as more than posting digitally-captured worksheets online. Learning tasks will need to be redesigned so that students are provided opportunities to create, collaborate and communicate in ways that take advantage of digital tools. Teachers may access a variety of free online classroom management services such as Edmodo, Schoology, or Google Classroom, in order to support instruction, collaboration, and the management of digital products. A variety of cloud-based and "Web 2.0" services are available that provide students with the ability to create online products or portfolios to demonstrate their learning, thus making it easy to “turn in” links to their published digital work.

Those of us who may have a habit of printing out online articles or email messages, should make an effort to embrace the idea of moving to cloud-based services such as Evernote or Google Drive. These services will not only store our documents, images, and media online, but they also provide powerful search tools that help us find and access our information from just about any device that can connect to the Internet. My personal favorite tool is Evernote which allows me to clip web articles, capture handwritten notes, snap photos, and record voice in my notes, plus giving me the ability to share and collaborate with others, even those who are not Evernote users.

Are you ready to take the plunge and "be" paperless?

Pages 5.2 update brings improvements to ePub creation

For those interested in creating ePub documents, there are some improvements to the process now available in the new Pages 5.2 update:

From: http://www.macworld.com/article/2140800/making-ebooks-in-pages-5-2-heres-what-works-now-and-what-still-doesnt.html

For example, you can now manually insert page breaks into an ebook by using Pages’s break tools, rather than having to use the template’s “Chapter Heading” template to do so.
But that’s not all: The Pages 5.2 update last week actually mentioned “improved ePub export” in its release notes, and added a few more fixes. That’s right: Not only did someone take the time to improve ePub export for Pages 5.0, but they seem to actively be working on making it better with future releases.
....
You (mostly) don’t need Apple’s four-year-old ebook template: Because the export recognizes page breaks and section breaks, you can use those along with custom text styles to create your ebook table of contents—you don’t have to download Apple’s template. That said, Pages takes a shortcut here with its text styling; if you look at the code of your resulting export, all text styles come out as various CSS classes for the paragraph tag.

As much as I love iBooks Author and the awesomeness of multi-touch ebooks, the ability to create a document that is "ePub 3" compliant, allows a wider audience beyond those possessing only iPad or Mavericks OS.

Paper Books vs. eBooks? Research prompts more questions...

Today's headline: "Students Reading E-Books Are Losing Out, Study Suggests" from this NYTimes article by Annie Murphy Paul, begins with the question "Could e-books actually get in the way of reading?"

One item to consider in evaluating the research presented by Schugar and Schugar at last week's American Educational Research Association's (AERA) Annual Meeting, is the definition of "e-Books." Access to digital text and e-Readers is quite varied across computing devices. For instance, some eBooks are actually "apps" — dedicated stories that often contain multi-media components, and are not viewed using an eReading device or dedicated eReader application.

Is it too soon to make judgement on the value of digital text over paper-based books? Based on the comments posted to the author in this article, I have more questions than answers — perhaps you will too.

Customized: Build Curriculum for any Mobile Device

Build curriculum for any mobile device, with a free online eBuilder from Digital Wish!

If you can drag-and-drop, you can build an eBook. In this Sept. 4, 2013 webinar hosted by the NMC Horizon Project, Digital Wish's Executive Director, Heather Chirtea demonstrates how to build digital eTextbooks, activities, and lesson plans with very simple drag-and-drop skills through a computer's browser. Digital content can be saved as an app that can be downloaded to any smartphone, tablet, Apple or Android device.



Teachers can sign up for a free eBuilder account at http://www.digitalwish.com/dw/digitalwish/ebuilder. Completed eBooks are hosted on a "Marketplace" channel within the eBuilder account.

Connected! Readmill redefines eBooks as Social Networks

The Future of Media Lab recently reviewed Readmill, an eReader app released late last year for both iOS and Android:

Readmill makes each and every book its own self-contained social network, allowing readers to discuss, share and review from inside of the e-book. If you find a passage you like, you can highlight it and comment on it right from within the book. Other users reading the book and even the author can see these comments and add their own thoughts, starting a discussion within the book, without ever having to leave it.

According to the Readmill.com website, however, it's noted that discussions are not limited to the app:

Highlight and comment on passages as you read, and share them with friends and followers. Every highlight can be viewed on the web (at Readmill.com), making it easy to start a discussion with other people, even if they are not using Readmill. 

Readmill supports ebook formats ePub, PDF and Adobe DRM, and books from stores such as Kobo and Feedbooks can be bought and brought into Readmill. The Readmill.com website will allow you to manage your library and store all of your books in the cloud for free. Readers are invited to join their community of readers and authors, and Readmill will periodically send emails recommending "books of interest," based on what is on your reading shelf.

Connected! "Reading with Others" using Subtext

I am happy to announce that we have arrived in the future -- and it is amazing!

"I want to be able to share my thoughts with my students, my friends, and my colleagues, and to hear their thoughts and ideas. Books of the future will be connected: connected to other books, connected to other users -- to see what others are highlighting, to see their notes -- in essence, reading with others." These words (from the "Books of the Future" video created at the 2010 Apple Distinguished Educators Summer Institute) expressed our dream, as educators, for what we described as books of the future.

During that summer of 2010, when we were dreaming about the future of digital text, the iPad was only a few months old. We were excited about the personalization the iPad offers readers using the iBooks app: changing font size and type, adjusting the background color, dynamically looking up dictionary definitions, text to speech, and the ability to create digital highlights and notes. E-mail provided the ability to share notes from the book, however, we dreamed of the possibility of reading becoming a social experience. Little did we know, that others had a similar dream.

Our vision of a connected book has arrived -- it's name is Subtext!

Subtext is a free iPad app that allows classroom groups to exchange ideas in the pages of digital texts. Teachers use our tools to layer enrichment materials, lesson plans and assessments into the pages of texts; while students build a reading history and body of content with lifelong benefits. Subtext’s service extends the reading experience far beyond traditional books and aligns with the Common Core Standards across reading, writing and 21st century digital skills.

Teachers can access their Subtext accounts using a web browser, however, at this time, only to create and share digital assignments. And, although Subtext is an iPad only app, access from other devices and web browser Subtext reading, is under development.

Here's what teachers are saying about Subtext:

Teachers Talk About Subtext from Subtext Video on Vimeo.

Watch the following video from the 2013 EdReach.us Summer PD series to learn how Subtext is being used by teachers in a variety of grade levels and subjects:

   

Getting Started with Subtext:

• If your students have access to iPads, you will want to visit the Subtext website to learn more about the special features for teachers, such as the ability to monitor your students' individual progress, and to connect (there's that word again) with other educators, who may be teaching with the same text, and see what they are highlighting, discussing and ways they are challenging their students thinking!
• Watch more Subtext videos on Vimeo.
• Follow Subtext on Twitter.
• Take advantage of the "Free Book for Teachers" offer from Subtext and start a reading group at your school!

Is it time to break the Textbook habit?

From Education Week:

"Maybe now is the time to break the dependency on textbooks.

Breaking the Habit
There are numerous reasons why many schools believe it's time to break the textbook habit. Most schools have a variety of ways to meet the needs of students and those typically revolve around the use of technology. It's time for teachers to be treated like professionals again, and an over-reliance on textbooks makes the book the expert and not the teacher. If used at all anymore, the textbook should be a base and not be the driver behind the conversation or the information."

Read the full article here.

Customized: More than just a textbook

From USA Today,

Due to the control that college textbook publishers have on the industry, there has been a recent push for open-source material in what Slate called the open educational resources (OER) movement. Heading the pack for OER is Boundless, a start-up company that uses open-source (free) information to rebuild textbooks for students. The digitized copies of the textbooks are then available for students to use on their tablets or laptops.

(Read the full story here)

From the Boundless.com website:

Beyond a textbook. Way beyond. 

Textbooks haven't changed in centuries, except for their price. Boundless textbooks offer innovative features that help you make the most of your study time. For free.

• SmartNotes: Your full book, condensed to just the essential key points, key terms, and examples.
• Interactive Notebook: Highlight important terms and add notes to key concepts. View all your notes and highlights in an easily sortable notebook that you can organize by time or book chapter.
• Flashcards and Quizzes: Study key terms and more with flashcards, then quiz yourself to see how much you know
• Study Guides: Boundless lets you condense all your notes and highlights, view and edit on any device, and share as a PDF with your friends, classmates, or study groups.
• Instant Search: Chapters, key term definitions, and anything else at your fingertips. Fast and intuitive navigation so you can spend more time studying and less time searching.

College Students Boost Digital Adoption

Connected: According to this Coursesmart survey, the average college student uses 3 devices daily, although the majority (51%) report bringing a laptop rather than a print textbook.

Reposted from Coursesmart (http://www.coursesmart.com/media#pr12):

-- Research Shows That Majority of Students Are More Likely To Bring a Laptop Than a Print Textbook to Class with 53% Of Device Owners Reading eTextbooks Frequently -- 

SAN MATEO, Calif., May 23, 2012 –CourseSmart®, the world's largest provider of eTextbooks and digital course materials, today announced the results of a survey revealing college students' growing reliance on technology. The survey of more than 500 currently enrolled college students found that nearly all college students (98%) who own a device have used it for school and a majority of these students (53%) read eTextbooks frequently. Further, 90% of college students say they save time studying with technology -- including mobile devices, digital textbooks, eReaders and tablets. 

Fielded by Wakefield Research, an independent research consultancy, the survey revealed that technology has become a significant part of students' everyday lives with the average using three devices daily. A majority (67%) can't go more than one hour without using some sort of digital technology, with 40% not lasting more than 10 minutes. "The survey underscores the undeniable influence technology has on today's college experience. As technology continues to evolve and digital devices become integral to the evolution of higher education, it's encouraging to see the positive impact on learning outcomes as students utilize advanced devices and digital course materials to streamline and improve their learning environment," said Sean Devine, CEO of CourseSmart. 

The Digital Backpack 

Once the backpack staple, print textbooks are losing their reputation of being indispensable. Only 5% of students say textbooks are the most important item in their bag and a majority of students say they are more likely to bring a laptop (51%) than a print textbook (39%) to class. Digital devices also allow for on-the-go reference to information with 79% of college students reporting they have done a quick search on a mobile device or tablet to verify something right before a test or a quiz.
According to the survey, technology is also streamlining students' studies. The study found that 68% of college students who save time using technology report saving two hours or more each day and nearly one in six students (14%) saving five hours or more. Further, nearly 3 in 5 students (58%) report that they frequently are unable to complete required reading in time for class and of those, a majority (51%) said they would be more likely to do so if they had digital textbooks that could be accessed on a mobile device, eReader, laptop or tablet.

The move to digital textbooks still a long way off

Oct. 1, 2012: Adoption Rates of New Styles of K-12 Teaching, by Robert Nillson
In this blog post, digital textbooks are included in Enterasys Networks' survey of "new styles" of teaching. Infrastructure is cited as a major factor in supporting digital learning.

Of those not currently using digital textbooks, 37% are planning to use within 3-12 months, while 43%  indicated no plans to move to digital textbooks. What needs to be done so that all students have access to digital textbooks?

Quoted from: http://blogs.enterasys.com/adoption-rates-of-new-styles-of-k-12-teaching-infographic/

Migration to new styles of teaching and the digital classroom is speeding up at the K-12 level, but could be held back by the lack of a capable network infrastructure. Enterasys Networks conducted a survey to better understand how rapidly K-12 schools are adopting digital textbooks, video content, the flipped classroom, online assessment, social media, and customizing student access to the Internet. The results of the 255 responses are presented in a new Infographic. 

The survey found that more than half of K-12 schools are using digital text books or plan to use them within 12 months. In fact, about 38% of schools plan to use only digital text books within 5 years. However, only 26% of schools have a network infrastructure that can easily accommodate this move. Similarly, less than half of schools say their network infrastructure is adequate to handle the demands of video content in the classroom.

Infographic authored by Enterasys Networks. To view the original post, see the original K-12 Survey Infographic.

Boundless Freedon with Open Source Textbooks

This from http://edudemic.com/2012/08/boundless-textbooks-free/
Although it looks like the priority is at the university level for now, you can sign up for the public beta of Boundless at http://www.boundless.com/
=====

The world of digital textbooks is more than heating up. It’s on fire. Amazon just launched a digital rental option for textbooks. Companies like Chegg are becoming academic hubs that can improve your education experience through more than just textbook rentals.

But all of the options to use digital textbooks have cost money. And teachers as well as students simply don’t have much.

Until now.

Boundless just launched the public beta version of its brand new site. What is Boundless? It’s a way to easily turn all of the open source information that exists in the world into a simple easy-to-use digital textbook. And it’s free.

This is one of the most exciting announcements that came across my inbox over the past few weeks. Boundless is shaping up to truly disrupt the digital textbook industry and the newly launched tools are robust enough to do just that. But enough hyperbole and hot air, here’s what you should know:

How It Works

• Boundless taps into the world of free & open access information and turns it into a beautiful yet functional digital textbook.
• It’s iPad-friendly, works on laptops, and issimple enough for teachers of any aptitude to use.
• The system generates digital resources for you based on the textbook you would normally have used in the course.
• You can still use the printed textbook and use Boundless as a free digital supplement.
• There’s an instant search feature built into the new Boundless UI.
• You can digitally highlight and add notes to all of the content. I could see this being a big help to anyone nervous about deploying technology that could replace printed textbooks.
• Boundless has a fun new feature called SmartNotes Premium which boils down all the content into easily digested factoids, summaries, and roundups. It’s like having a customized ‘Top 10′ list for each topic you’re reading about. This feature is $20/course just FYI.
• The digital textbooks have no expiration date. They’re not rentals or anything that would cost you money since it’s all open source.

StoryNory: Free Audio Stories for Kids

Randy Damewood presented an online PD session for "The State of Tech PD in your PJs" conference via "Google+ Hangout" technology, titled the "Future of Textbooks Here and Now" (look for the recorded session on YouTube soon). Randy shared a variety of strategies and resources for student learning beyond the "ink-on-paper" world. One resource of note is the StoryNory website, providing free audio stories for kids since 2005.

Storynory is available on iTunes in the Kids and Family Podcast section. If you subscribe (for free) to the iTunes feed, you can easily download and transfer the latest stories onto your iPod. Many classic  fairy tale stories are available, including the complete Alice In Wonderland. Have a listen!

The conversation continues... Beyond the Textbook

Several ed-tech bloggers have been sharing news of an upcoming "Beyond the Textbook Forum" that is being hosted by Discovery Education this week. A search of the #beyondthetextbook hashtag in twitter will reveal the conversations that are occurring, such as those prompted from Angela Maier's blog post:

I want to invite you to participate virtually and share your ideas with the team  as it relates to the future of textbooks or the future of reference materials.
Here are some questions to consider posting or tweeting about at using the #BeyondtheTextbook Hashtag

• What materials are you currently using?
• Are they adequate and representative of the knowledge and expereince you want to enagage your students in?
• What are your thoughts about open source courseware and materials?
• Where is your number one place to turn, when you seek information that is beyond the scope of your textbook and curriculum materials? 

Join the conversation!

Textbooks of Tomorrow: Infographic

Infographics are great for summarizing information ... they're just a bit long on the page.


Via: OnlineEducation.net

Future of the Book ... Chapter 2

So many developments in a year's time! Are we moving in the right direction? What are some important components to consider for future textbooks?

Please add your voice to this conversation: 

http://todaysmeet.com/futuretextbooks

Hall Davidson (from Discovery Education) presented a session at the Feb. 2012 TCEA conference titled "Take a Page from the Perfect Digital Textbook." You can view/download his presentation slides at http://linkyy.com/HallDavidsonHandouts

If you have more specific ideas, enter your thoughts on Hall Davidson's open Google spreadsheet:
http://linkyy.com/other

From NPR: Discussion on the Digital Future of Textbooks

On Tuesday 1/24/12, the NPR program OnPoint (hosted by Tom Ashbrook) hosted a discussion about the Digital Future of Textbooks (http://onpoint.wbur.org/2012/01/24/future-of-textbooks) with guests John Bailey, Katie Ash and yours truly. Here is the show description:

The revolution brewing in your child’s backpack. One little computer tablet may soon replace all those big old textbooks.

Apple employees demonstrate interactive features of iBooks 2 for iPad, Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012 in New York. IBooks 2 will be able to display books with videos and other interactive features. (AP)

It hits in middle school.  The twenty-pound school backpack.  Loaded with notepads and pencils and gear and – above all – textbooks.  Big old heavy paper-and-ink textbooks loaded with math lessons and history and diagrams of frog intestines.  It sounds so 20th Century.

Now, there’s a push on to throw out the textbooks and load everything a young student needs onto one little nifty tablet computer.  Weighs just a pound.  Carries the world.  As many digital textbooks as you like.  Ready to dazzle.  Will they work?
This hour, On Point:  when textbooks go digital, go tablet.

The OnPoint podcast will be available for the next 2 weeks, however the stream will always be available via the OnPoint website. If you happen to listen, please consider leaving a comment with your thoughts.

Future of the book is closer

Apple's new iBooks2 app, the availability of low-cost textbooks from some of the major textbook publishers, and iBooksAuthor for content creating content, might cause school districts implementing a 1:1 environment with iPads to rethink their plans for providing content on mobile devices for students. 

Take a look at the textbook titles in the iBookstore (http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks/publishers.html). iPad owners with iOS5 can download the free book called "Life on Earth" from E.O. Wilson, to get a sense of the features available in this new format.

See more at: http://www.apple.com/education/#video-textbooks