Ebook Success!

Alfred has finished his ebook, complete with voiceover, on the Lighthouse iPad. It was wonderful. I think I will have to give his aide, Catherine, a box of chocolates next week, to thank her for the amount of trouble she took getting this done. I am lucky - she is a retired teacher who decided to come back into the school system, but our aides in general are very very good.

It was exactly what I had had in mind when I made up this assignment - the simple pictures and sentences on each page and the young man's voice reading it. He did have to have the occasional gentle whispered prompt from his aide, but in general, he did all the things he needed to do - chose pictures that told the story, put them - mostly - in order and read from them. And the student is rather proud of this, despite all the arguing he did with his aide when he was working on it! He asked me if I would be showing it to the other teachers and I said I would, as soon as I can get it on my own iPad.

I have spoken to the speech therapist who runs Lighthouse and discussed the buying of this particular app, plus a more sophisticated one, for all students, but she was ahead of me in this, and also said she should be able to configure the computer for email. That means Alfred can download it on his own iPad and show his parents, but at this stage only in PDF, which is unlikely to have sound, because he only has the Kindle app, not iBooks. So if we want this project to work, we need to have access to iBooks on the student accounts, plus access to email they can use to send work to their teachers. There WAS a student email set up, but the principal suggested it might not be a good idea, because all the students had the same login, which might lead to anonymous bullying. Back to the drawing board! :-(

I will be showing him what this student has done as soon as I can, so he understands what can be done with an iPad provided we have given the students access to what they need.

Fingers crossed!

More iPad ramblings or: Making Ebooks!

My integration student has been making an ebook!

I mentioned this in an earlier post, but this morning I actually got to look at it. And his aide was back, so he had one to one attention which I can't give him.

Last Friday I was absent in the afternoon, gone home with a temperature to moan and groan in my bed, but before I left I had a chat with him and asked him to continue gathering photos from Up, the movie he has been studying. He was to put them in order and keep them on the iPad camera roll for when he had time to put them together. He got the Lighthouse iPad in exchange for his and did what I had asked him.

Today, his aide helped him put the photos on the ebook creation app, BookBuilder. BookBuilder is really only good for picture books, with a little bit of text, but for that it's terrific. It isn't finished, but when it is, the integration aides will arrange to have email configured on it so that it can be emailed from the iPad both to him and to me. Then he can take his iPad home and show his achievement to his parents and I can show his achievement to staff looking for ways to use the iPad.

And then we can go through the whole business of trying to get that particular app made available to students who aren't integration students and so on and so forth... And email made available to them all, so they can email their work to their teachers... (They were working on that and it was all set up when a problem was pointed out and they had to start all over again).

But meanwhile, I'm thrilled to bits that this particular experiment seems to be working and very happy with this students and think his aide - who is also excited about this - deserves several bouquets.

Last Book Club Meeting For Term 1

In the end, our final meeting for the term was just a party. I bought goodies for the students to enjoy and oh, they did! Talk about locusts! ;-)

Priyanka didn't turn up because her other passion is soccer and there was a student versus staff game going, but she will be back next term. The others were there, from Year 7 to 9, eating, drinking horribly strong lime cordial and chatting. Rakibur wanted to see what his reward could be from the Allen and Unwin web site, once he finished reading the manuscript, so he went on line and looked at the catalogue, then went out to see the last few minutes of the soccer game.

And the others spread out after they had eaten and drunk enough. I did ask if they wanted anything to read for the holidays, but they reminded me with a smile that they had manuscripts to read. Two of them read them then and there. Emily lay across the comfy chairs, reading Pretty Little Liars and telling me how wonderful it was. Kaitlyn sat at a table with her manuscript. Nusaiba and her friends joined us for the first time; they have taken manuscripts for the first time too. They have taken a new student under their wings and brought her along, though she isn't really a reader, but it's nice to know this girl, who's in my homeroom, is not alone. Perhaps soon I can find some reading matter she'll enjoy.

At the end, some of them helped me tidy up and I gave away the last f the food to those who wanted it, not that there was much left. I gave Kaitlyn the rest of the cordial, which she swears she can drink neat!

Next step is to get permission for the Reading Matters excursion. It's not free, but not expensive and such a nice thing to do.

Did I ever mention I love running Book Club and the kids in it?

Reflecting On Term 1

This year, I got some new Book Clubbers and some of the old. Two year 7 students have joined - hopefully, there will be more. I have had inquiries. We're doing a full meeting every second Wednesday (we used to do every Thursday half of lunchtime). So far so good - I hope to take them to the Reading Matters student day next term and perhaps we can discuss that this week. They are picking up this year's Allen and Unwin manuscripts - only four to choose from this time. No one wanted the Catherine Jinks novel, but we have takers for the ones by Sean Williams, Steven Herrick and a writer I hadn't heard of, but whose blurb sounded the most interesting.

We have been monimating books for the YABBA awards, too. That occupied an interesting lunchtime and I bought some new books on request.

The iPads - aargh! My class blog is a success so far and is good for what it is, but it's not enough for my needs. One of my students, who is an integration student, has been borrowing one from the integration unit, Lighthouse, to enable him to use the Book Creator app to make an ebook, but his aide isn't with us this week or the first week back and I found out only this morning that he is only allowed to use it when she is there. And he's been doing an ebook, which is not possible on his own iPad, because he doesn't have the app and can't access it. And right now, his own iPad is in for repair anyway. The system was down for a while, but after a time I managed to get him going on a school laptop and he was actually working! But we will have to find a way to get the photos he downloaded on to the camera roll of the iPad and I'm rather thinking it might work out simpler to get him to put them into a PowerPoint instead of doing the ebook I'd hoped for him to do.

Another student had his iPad confiscated for downloading games (and I want to know how he did that) - they ALL have games! So now the school is taking up all the iPads for reasons I don't know, but I'm betting that it won't be possible to download anything at all when they get them back. They have book apps on the computers, but no way of downloading books. At least, not with the school's approval. They still can't email their work to their teachers.

In fact, pretty much all they can do is type up work that they then can't email or even load on to their Home drives, make KeyNote presentations that they can present in the interactive whiteboard room, but not hand in (see above for the reasons) and look things up online. What's the point of having these computers if the best things about them are blocked?

Time to start finding more ways around this. Maybe it's something I can do on the holidays coming up at the end of the week.

 

More Reflective Stuff: on Using iPads

Last year, when I heard that our new Year 7 kids were going to be given - or, rather, leased - iPads, I went and bought my own, so I could play around with it and learn lots. Well, I did learn lots and this year, I could hardly wait to get started with my Year 8 class.

But they are still just getting their computers back in dribs and drabs and meanwhile, I have discovered that some of the things I was hoping to do are going to be difficult or impossible because the kids don't have access to the iCloud which would enable them to email me their work. And their ebook app is only Kindle, which means I can't set up the ePub ebooks from the wonderful app I bought, because they can only use Mobi. I'm limited to taking posts off a blog and putting them together in Ebook Glue, which allows you to put together the last 25 posts from your blog. I've set up a special blog, but I've had to do a class blog on Kid Blog and from there I will have to copy and paste their writing into the Blogger blog, from which I can ebook their work. A bit messy and will mean more work for me, but the only way. It doesn't supply you with a proper cover, just the standard thing you get in books you download from Project Gutenberg, and the title will always be the name of your blog. But I can do it.

I do understand why the school has to put some restrictions on, but why so many that the iPads can only be used to look up stuff on the Internet? They have supplied Pages and Keynote (the Mac version of PowerPoint), but you can't email work done on them to the teacher, and I'm not even sure the print utility is working. A student told me that you can email via Messages, and I will have to get him to show me how, but guess what? They have blocked Messages too!

Some kids are missing apps that others have and apparently, this year's Year 7 kids have more apps than the Year 8s and for most of them the App Store is greyed out.

Rolls eyes! Looks like another year of working around restrictions! Oh, well...

Back To School 2013!

Ack. Back to 6.00 am risings. Back to Year 8, a class I will have to get to know and hope I can get on with. Back to trying to run a library on $3000 a year, if they haven't taken off more or decided, over the holidays, that we will have to ask a co-ordinator for money every time we need to buy something.

We began yesterday. I took a pile of donations from my book blogger friend Stephanie Campisi. Today I'm taking some more. A huge bag that should keep the readers going for a while. We spent most of yesterday in meetings. Thank heaven I don't have a class today - they only have Year 7. I will have a little time to prepare, if not for getting the library going, then for class.

LATER...

The day is over. I was caught up in plenty of first-day stuff and did very little else. I opened the library at lunchtime to see who would come and met some Year 7 boys. Two of them wanted books - lovely!

Tomorrow I 'll have a book club meeting to arrange days and activities. Hopefully there will be more manuscripts to read and maybe some writers. Can't wait to show the younger ones the ebook apps!

Holiday stuff

I'm trying not to think too much about the year to come. The timetable at this stage is scary, with most of my class time with my new home room lumped together on Fridays plus a literacy period, so I won't be in the library much on Fridays. And they have removed a period of Pathways to make room for more maths so I not only have to work out how to get the fundraising unit done in half the time, but I'm "underalloted" so will get pulled out of the library for covering other people's classes more often than I like.

So, no, I'm thinking holidays. Yesterday was the first day of 2013. I washed the floors, cleaned the bathroom and wrote a few hundred words of my novel. Hopefully I will write some more today.

And while I was doing my house cleaning, I had some dough rising. My poor oven has been out of action for quite a while, so today or tomorrow I will be calling a plumber to see if I can get it fixed finally. But meanwhile I've discovered pan-fried bread - flat bread rather like naan, which takes about fifteen minutes to make, counting the time you spend mixing. I got it from the Internet, on Taste.com.au

And yesterday I made use of the Greek cookbook my library tech, Lucy, gave me before the holidays, to make pita bread. It uses yeast. I'm not sure what I did wrong, but most of the pitot rose high enough to be rolls - flattish hamburger bun type rolls. And guess what? Delicious! :-) So maybe if I can work out why it happened I will do it on purpose next time. I had one this morning with a delicious soft cheese left over from my Yuletide picnic. Yum! I have no idea how it would toast, but hopefully I will have finished all my pita breads before they get stale.