Five Bells - English Teachers National Conference Sydney. October, 2012 – AATE and ETA NSW
The ‘little fidget wheels’ of iBook Author
Julie Bain
O’Connor Catholic College, ARMIDALE
jbain@oconnor.nsw.edu.au
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Julie Bain is a secondary English teacher and librarian at O’Connor Catholic College in
Armidale, NSW. She has presented at previous state, national and international English
conferences. Her interest in using multimedia for teach and learnin stems from studies in diversity,
trasnformative learning and multiliteracies education.
ABSTRACT
On 19th January 2012, Apple released its application iBook Author for iPad. This
presentation will explore on English teacher’s search for answers and meaning using this app. as she
seeks to find ‘diamond quills and combs of (pedagogical) light’. The presentation will explore
ways English teachers can tailor the application for secondary senior English curriculum. It will
describe the processes, the appropriations, the appropriations, concerns and considerations adopted
in the development of an iBook using the multimedia application. Some of the issues presented will
include copyright, ownership and matching content with the Australian Curriculum: English, while
focusing on literary content. The presentation will attempt to breathe life across the glazed surfaces
of technology.
Keywords: iBook, iPad, iBook Author, Orwell, Module B Critical Study of Text.
CONFERENCE PAPER
The aim of this paper is to explore one English teacher’s experience of writing an iBook using
the application released on iBook Author by Apple in January 2012. The information that was
released with the application suggested that the app. could create and publish amazing multi-touch
books for iPad.
The release information for iBook Author suggested that the application could create
‘stunning iBooks textbooks’ using ‘Apple-designed templates’ and that one could embed ‘multitouch
widgets’
including
photos,
movies,
keynote
presentations
and
more!
(http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/ibooks-author/id490152466?mt=12) Apparently there were a few
simple steps to publish the iBook. This paper will follow my journey that actually took more than
just a few simple steps to publication. This is not to say the application was particularly difficult to
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use, but finishing the text to my satisfaction was more problematic than first imagined. There’s a
video explaining the process on the above link.
The release of iBook Author came with the following blurb:
iBooks Author. Create and Publish amazing Multi-touch books for iPad
Available free on the Mac App Store, iBooks Author is an amazing new app that
allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks — and just about any other kind of
book — for iPad. With galleries, video, interactive diagrams, 3D objects and more, these
books bring content to life in ways the printed page never could.
http://www.apple.com/au/ibooks-author/
What appealed to me about the iBook Author application was the idea that an iBook (the
finished product after using the process driven application) is multimodal. It includes a range of
different modes that would support my students’ learning as well as being a text to which teachers
could refer and use as a teaching resource.
These multiple modes available in the iBook include visual, auditory, as well as digital and
linguistic modes. Multiliteracies pedagogy is supported by the belief that multiliteracies has at its
centre the idea of a social and culturally responsive curriculum. The idea of a transformative
agenda of multiple literacies sits well with some of Orwell’s political agendas that talk of
egalitarianism and equity. iBooks are multimodal texts which mean the boundaries between the
modes can make complex meanings that affect how students see themselves as learners and
demonstrate aspects of knowledge construction, making the form of representation integral to
meaning and learning more generally (Jewitt, 2008, p. 241, 245). In the Unit 1 of the Australian
Senior Seconddary Curriculum (the Structure of English) students ‘explore how meaning is
communicated through the relationships between language, text, purpose, context and audience’
Source: Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). And this statement
matches well with the syllabus directives in Module B in the current NSW Board of Studies Stage 6
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English Syllabus. According to Hassett & Curwood ‘teachers must do more than simply use current
theories of reading to engage with new forms of texts - they must understand how multimodal texts
engender new roles for the reader, as well as new roles for the teacher’ (Hassett & Curwood, 2009,
p. 270). My plan was to engender these new reader (and writer) roles. iBooks not only afford
teachers opportunities to construct specific texts for resourcing their teaching but I imagine that
student portfolios could also be constructed using iBook Author in order allow students to ‘respond
imaginatively, interactively and analytically, creating their own texts and reflecting on their own
learning’ (Source: Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA)).
While our school has taught the Higher School Certificate Advanced English course for
several years my concern was that we, as an English Department, was teaching the same texts every
year and might be losing impetus in our teaching. Therefore, in my Advanced English class for the
Higher School Certificate course in 2012, the English Department agreed, for our Module B,
Critical Study to use the essays of George Orwell as our prescribed material which included the
essays ‘Why I Write’,‘Notes on Nationalism’,‘Good Bad Books’,‘The Sporting Spirit’,‘Politics and
the English Language’,‘Writers and Leviathan’. These texts are both challenging to teach but also
link with past literary texts, other than novels, with which our students were familiar.
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What does the syllabus require? Module B ‘requires students to explore and evaluate a
specific text and its reception in a range of contexts. It develops students’ understanding of
questions of textual integrity’ (BOS, 1999, p. 52). Students are also required to ‘explore the ideas
expressed in the text through analysing its construction, content and language’ (BOS, 1999, p. 52)
as well as exploring context and perspective.
The selection of Orwell’s essays was also chosen in order to help our students develop skills
in both critical analysis and argument and to demonstrate to them that essay writing was far more
extensive than the prescribed school essay with an introduction containing a thesis statement, a
body in which each paragraph began with a topic sentence and a conclusion was succinct and
complete.
As a secondary school student, many years ago, I recollect reading the writings of George
Orwell, most notably Marrakech (1939) and Shooting an Elephant (1936), two powerful and
palpably visceral essays. These essays both inspired me to write but also to engender, in that
writing, a style that tried to challenge the establishment. It was the 1970s after all and revolution
and resistance were part of the every day news and as a teenager, as part of my desire. Most
particularly I enjoyed the way metaphor seeped through the whole narrative of the text, which read,
for me more creative than assuming the form of an essay.
The original plan, for the iBook, was to provide a comprehensive text that included Orwell’s
biographical information, photographs and videos, discussion points about the relevance of his
essays in 2012, any presentations that I had used in class for teaching purposes and links to internet
sites that were both relevant and information to critical study. All in all I had planned to write a
complete work called Essayist – George Orwell, including some quiz questions that would self
correct in order to demonstrate to students how their knowledge of Orwell’s essays was
progressing.
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In the back of my mind, as well, was the thought that I might make some money from this
venture. Some hurdles sprang up and they included things like American tax indemnity forms,
copyright issues and the most difficult hurdle to jump, the most massive, mountainous hurdle, the
issue of time poverty. Time poverty proved to be a maleficent stumbling block.
Being a self-taught tech-head meant that my skills using technology are adequate but limited
but I like to try and try I did. One piece of advice that I received from a student who was studying
technology was that if it doesn’t work the first time there are other doors into doing what you want,
you just ‘have to be brave and click things!’ iBook Author is not a difficult application to navigate.
But first I had to download it. That was simple and quick. I downloaded the app. in iTunes on my
MacBook Pro and opened the app. on the laptop. The thing that did confuse me a little was that you
build the iBook on your laptop but read it on your iPad. So the laptop is about process and the iPad
demonstrates the product.
To start a new book all you have to do is go to menu, click File and New on the menu bar. A
number of templates open and you just highlight whichever template you want to use and click
choose. The menu is self-explanatory and has submenu titles that include Book Title, Intro Media,
Table of Contents and Glossary. The template is set up with image and text boxes and chapter
headings. There are all familiar boxes and have text that says ‘Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
suspendisse nulla pretium, rhoncus tempor placerat fermentum…’ etcetera. Within the chapter
there are sections. So logical people would probably decide on the logical sequence for their
section and chapter headings first. I’m not logical. But the plan went more like this.
I had collected a number of images and links about Orwell before beginning the unit,
information about his time, his early life, his politics, information on the Spanish Civil War, just to
provide some biographical and historical context for my students. I thought it would be good to
start at the very beginning.
It appeared to require choosing a template and plopping materials into the boxes. From the
folder, I had created for Orwell, on my desktop I plopped in a number of images and then I realised
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that I was breaching copyright. I didn’t have either the time or inclination to wait for copyright
permissions so instead I appropriated an image of Orwell sitting at his desk and fed it into another
iPad app. called WordFoto. This app. allowed me to print words that were significant to Orwell
over the image in order to create a new image from the appropriated earlier visual text. This is the
new and original image that I used as the beginning of the iBook:
After considering copyright the next step I chose was to removed all the images from the draft
copy of the iBook, and to consider the order of the information I felt important to include in the
text. But first I decided upon a name for the book: Essayist: George Orwell, not a particularly
profound title, but I’m learning and this seemed like a fairly safe bet.
Instead of having a number of chapters, which are easily available within the template format
of the app., I resorted to include a number of subsections. The order of these subsections started
generally and moved into a more specific form as I assembled the information I planned to include
in the iBook. The sections (after a brief biography) were:
1.1 ESSAYS – form and function
1.2 Politics
1.3 Some biographical information
1.4 Some critics
1.5 Another critic
1.6 Connections (to contemporary society)
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Each of the subsections included images, links, several keynotes, the Apple equivalent to
Microsoft’s Powerpoint, that I had used in class to demonstate content and context. I also included
links to YouTube videos for biographical information. It is really easy to include links to webpages
so I added links that to letters about Orwell in the BBC Archive, as well as critics writing about
Orwell’s works. I also included some question types (in table form) that might fit under the
umbrella of Module B, Critical Study along with some widgets with simple multiple-choice
questions about Orwell’s essay writing. One aspect of the book, of which I am quite pleased, is its
ability to link to Prezi.com, and online presentations that I’d constructed, again for in-class work.
This, I think, is one of the main benefits of the iBook for teaching and learning. Students can revisit
this class-time information to review the concepts of Module B and how they might structure
critical responses to the prescribed texts. Because the links to Prezis are active, if I add more
information to the presentations, that information can be immediately reviewed in the iBook.
I am also pleased that these resources of language, image and digital rhetoric should be
deployed independently and interactively (Unsworth, 2001) and augment traditional forms of
literacy (Unsworth, 2003) which underpins my desire to construct the book in the first place.
The construction of the book also allowed inclusion of widgets that allow a kind of
interactivity. Widgets are interfaces that allow access to the app. The easiest one I found to use
was one that allowed for an interactive quiz. Along the top of the page of iBooks Author there is a
menu which includes a plus sign that allows the author to add pages, buttons that allow changes in
view from portrait orientation to landscape, buttons that insert text boxes, shapes, tables, charts and
widgets. Then there are two buttons preview, which is symbolised by the image of an iPad and an
upward pointing blue arrow that publishes the iBook. At the right of the page there are inspector,
media, colour and font buttons and these buttons work in much the same way as menus in word
processing application, and web page construction applications.
If you click on the widget button a drop down menu appears which includes buttons for
gallery, review, media, keynote, 3D, interactive image and html. And this is where the time poverty
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kicks in. I could only focus on one so chose the review button, feeling a little like Alice and the eat
me and drink me bottles in Alice in Wonderland. This button affords the author to create multiplechoice questions with A, B, C and D responses. The questions I constructed included information
about Orwell’s biography, questions about essays and structures therein. The option to choose a
number of options within the drop down menu is very easy to use and you can add and subtract
questions as you choose.
There were a couple of issues that did cause me minor concern. Firstly because I had a paid
subscription as an iOS app. creator my Apple account email could not be used for the publishing of
the iBook as well, so I had to create a new email account, which isn’t a major issue but it does mean
there is an extra email account out there that I would previously not created. The second issue of
concern was when I submitted my iBook for publication I received this message:
Dear Julie Bain,
One or more assets from your submission, ESSAYIST - George Orwell, need to be replaced:
Ticket
Ticket
Type:
Apple
ISBN:
Vendor ID: B_ESSAYIST_GEORGE_ORWELL
#:
Book
ID:
1534189
Asset
6
Full book asset:
Formatting
Notes:
Aug,
14
2012,
8:53AM
Apple:
Some relevant items are not visible in portrait mode (examples: interactive 1, the question types table, etc.). Please fix or, as
an alternative, set to landscape mode only.
Please log in to iTunes Connect to view this request and upload replacement assets:
If you have any questions about this report, contact us at the iBookstore.
Regards,
The iTunes Store Team
The ticket showing the concern looked like this:
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There is of course, comfort to be found in the iTunes Store Team’s immediate response, but
there was no real explanation about how to fix this problem. Eventually I figured out that the
images I had included were too small, or too large, so after some fiddling the problem was solved
and I received the following email:
Dear
julbain1@gmail.com,
The
following
book
is
Title:
ESSAYIST
Author:
View
in
now
available
Julie
the
on
the
George
iBookstore:
Orwell
Bain
iBookstore
You can track the status of your books in the Manage Your Books module on
iTunes
Connect.
Regards,
The iBookstore team
Once the iBook has been published, when reading it on the iPad, the reader has the
opportunity to highlight particular parts of the text, click on define, which takes the reader to a
dictionary for the highlighted word, insert notes and search for meaning on the web or in Wikipedia.
In terms of using the iBook for study these are useful aspects for learners to explore meaning and
annotate texts included in the iBook.
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In keeping with Orwell’s political concerns, I was concerned about who owns the iBook once
it is published. I took some comfort from an article I read that was written by Erica Sadun entitled
‘iBooks Author owns your format, not your Content’ where the author posits this opinion:
According to Apple intends to control the sole paid delivery portal for this technology, freely offering the tool to
create new .ibooks files, taking a 30% cut of all commercial material developed using this specification. At the
same time, they're the ones who are developing both the authoring tools and the distribution apps on their own
nickel.
Essayist – George Orwell is free so the 30% commission to Apple is moot. However there are
limitations that result from Apple’s ownership of both the authoring tool and the iBook distribution
service.
CONCLUSION
When I planned to write this iBook I had anticipated a much larger publication, with more
detail, including Orwell’s essays and a range of material to show student responses as well. I had
foreseen that I’d video our History teacher coming into our class and explaining totalitarianism,
Stalinism to the students as well as video of some of our, rather heated classroom discussions.
However, time constraints, prohibited that grand scheme. As it turned out the iBook is a useful
revision tool for students to review the work we covered in class and some of the readings we
discussed. iBook Author is a very easy app. to use. I imagine that student publications using this
kind of application will become more prevalent with the implementation of the Australian
Currciulum. The benefits of the iBook are, for me, connected implicitly with its multimodality and
the diverse range of resources that can be included therein. Support is available from Apple, iTunes
and the iBookstore team at a moment’s notice which make iBook authoring a reasonably painless
experience.
REFERENCES
Australian
Curriculum,
Assessment
and
Reporting
Authority
(ACARA)
2012,
http://consultation.australiancurriculum.edu.au/Subject/OrganisationSection/e93b914e-ed204a17-b08c-8becd386a99a
11
Hassett, D. D. and J. S. Curwood. 2009, “Theories and Practices of Multimodal Education: The
Instructional Dynamics of Picture Books and Primary Classrooms.” The Reading Teacher 63(4):
270, 282.
Jewitt, C. 2008, “Multimodality and Literacy in School Classrooms” in Review of Research in
Education February 2008, Vol. 32, pp. 241–267 DOI:10.3102/0091732X07310586© 2008 AERA.
http://rre.aera.net
NSW Board of Studies. 1999, Stage 6 English Syllabus, NSW Board of Studies, Sydney NSW.
Sadun, E. 2012, iBooks Author Owns Your Format, Not Your Content. Website (available) cited
10 August, 2012 –
http://www.tuaw.com/2012/01/24/apple-moves-open-standards-forward-with-ibooks-authorformats/
Unsworth, L. 2001, "Developing multiliteracies in content area teaching." Changing dimensions of
school literacies."
Unsworth, L. 2003, "Reframing research and literacy pedagogy relating to CD narratives :
Addressing 'radical change' in digital age literature for children", Issues in Educational Research,
vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 55-70.