AISWA Languages Teachers' Stories

iBooks Author

The iPad can provide students with massive amounts of viewing, reading and listening texts so it's a great tool for language learning. Finding the perfect content or exercises, however, can be a challenge. With iBooks Author, teachers can create interactive, multimedia content tailor-made for their students' learning needs.

iBooks Author is a FREE app for Mac or iPad and once a book is created, students need only to connect once to the Internet to download it; after that, the iBook is stored on their iPad and can be accessed at any time.

Read and watch Elisabeth Rosinel's story of creating an iBook for her Year 9 students in 2013.

The iBook saves students downloading multiple videos and PDFs and then having to remember to read and watch everything. The iBook guides students throughout the course materials and includes audio, video and print texts with interactive exercises. A table of contents shows students everything they have to review and teachers can even provide a self-check section to help students monitor their learning.

Would you like to see and use a sample iBook? Yes, so would we. So if you have made an iBook we can attach to this story, please contact AISWA Languages. Alternatively, keep watching this space - we just might create one over the summer holidays and add it to this story.

Meanwhile, here are a few links that I have found useful:

What is iBooks Author? The Apple website gives a good overview.

Find iBooks Author in the App Store. If you have OS X 10.7.4 or later you can download the app for free and run it on your laptop or iPad.

Ideas for using iBooks. The iTeach Lounge Blog has some useful ideas and is designed especially for teachers.

Step-by-step guide by a teacher for teachers. Matt Hentchen will talk you through a really detailed how-to video on You Tube. It is 29 minutes long.

As always, your comments are appreciated, especially if you have worked with iBooks Author.

Moya McLauchlan, Editor.

30 November, 2013