Wednesday 17 November 2010

Creative Story iBook about Merapi - Grade 1's First Joint Work

The Grade 1 students at the Jakarta World Academy have been following the recent eruptions of Mt. Merapi in Central Java. The students are very concerned about what has happened to the people living near the volcano who have lost their homes.
These Grade 1 students decided to write a story about what happened. To make the story more accessible to their age group the class teacher encouraged the class to write it in the style of a fairytale. The students were able to write a few sentences of their own each, which when put together make up the whole story.
The class has two iMacs so the students took turns to write up their story in Comic Life (a program that these young learners are already familiar with) on the computers to be later dropped into Pages to get it ready for iBook conversion.
So far each student has typed up their words and drawn a picture to accompany their part of the story. Now we are getting it into the correct sequence so that each page can be inserted into a Pages document ready for exporting as an ePub. The reason for making an iBook is that many of these children have iPads or iPod Touches at home and they want to be able to read their book on those devices. I am planning to have a small workshop when the book is ready for parents so that they can learn about how to put an ePub on the iPad and how to view it. We are also planning for our next research activity (individual student work) to be published as iBooks. I will also make a pdf version of the book for those students who don't have an iPod or iPad.

I'll keep you all posted.

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