Your Final Projects are due by midnight on 7/27 EST. You are asked to upload all of your material to Curriki then post a small description below this entry while including a url to your Curriki product. Please double check all links to ensure that they are working. Once I review your Final Projects, I will send you a confirmation and grade.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have. I've been fielding the questions when they come in. One recent issue was with the formatting being lost in Curriki. Please see my response below:
"Try typing everything in MS Word and then uploading it. I believe that way it will retain the formatting. Another alternative is to type it into a Google Doc and then 'share' it with everyone. This option will give your document its own url which you can then paste into Curriki with an explanation."
Welcome to the 'beginning' of the 'end', but not the 'end' of what has 'begun'!
This semester I've tried to guide you through what some people consider very complicated topics:
Navigating through Open Source content,
Digital books, and
Mobile devices.
Through my "Internet travels and wanderings" while researching content for this course, I've come across countless resources that I knew were useful and valuable, but as the semester progressed, I was never quite sure where some of these items would best connect under a certain week's themes. Therefore, throughout the semester, I collected many of these resources (from webinars, to videos, to readings) that I thought would be interesting to most of you with the hope of getting the chance to show you before the semester was over.
Well, this is our last session, so it's now or never. (After all, your Finals are due by midnight EST Friday, 7/27.) If anyone is having trouble meeting the deadline, just drop me a line and ask for an extension. I've got to complete the grading by Monday, 8/6.
In this, our concluding session, I've included this potpourri of remaining resources that I know to be powerful, useful, and practical. These resources never made it into this semester's weekly sessions either due to the sheer size of the workload per week or b/c I just couldn't find the best fit for them. So, knowing the value of these items I couldn't very well not share them with you. That's why I've added this compilation in Session 10.
As I stated above, your Final Projects will be due by midnight of July 27th. I'll add an additional blog entry for you to post a brief summary of your F.P. later this week where you'll also include the url for the Curriki page where it can be found.
As I was reading through last semester's Final Projects I noticed that some people ran into some techno-trouble uploading material to Curriki, so if you would rather put your material in a Google Shared Doc. and then just place that link into Curriki, then that's fine. Feel free to let me know if you have any questions.
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Let's start this week with a video explaining Project Gutenberg. (If an ad comes up, make sure you skip it.)
by Michael Milone, a research psychologist and educational writer at Renaissance Learning. He asked students in two fourth-grade classes located in the Upper Midwest to read up to six books from a selected list of a dozen popular fiction titles that included Eleanor Estes's Ginger Pye (Harcourt, 1951), Gary Paulsen's Lawn Boy (Random, 2007), Mary Pope Osborne's Sunset of the Sabertooth The 31 students—who read a total of 135 books, 69 on the Kindle and 66 in print—were asked to alternate between reading half of the books on the Kindle and the other half in a bound, printed format.
Kansas State Dept of Ed. This webpage contains open access resources and digital textbooks that are available within the public domain. They are not copyrighted and may be customized, modified, or combined with other materials.
Enjoy these resources! It was a pleasure working with you this semester. The enthusiasm in some of your posts was contagious. Through the years I've worked with plenty of districts that didn't encourage their employees to strive and reach for new goals. I hope this course has convinced you that over the next few years we're going to see exponential growth in the use of eBooks for all purposes. Education won't be far behind, and you, the participants of this course, will be the leaders of this movement.
You can't talk about eBooks and Digital Content and not address Apple's dominance in the tablet arena. There's no doubt that their current market share (61% in Q3 of 2011) is a force to be reckoned with. I've taught this course a few times before, but its content and focus has shifted a tremendous amount. What was important and trendy in the 2010 Spring semester is very different today. The first iPads didn't hit the shelves until April of 2010. No one could have predicted the explosive growth, so given this information I've decided to spend the bulk of this week on Apple's iPad and the new iBooks product.
In March of 2012 Apple came out with their newest version of the iPad. Some call it the iPad 3, but that's not official.
Learn about it here, but I warn you, you'll probably want to buy one after this:
Then see some of the engineers demo the product:
And lastly, here are some of the additional features:
Now let's transition to their most recent publicity hype for the new iBooks project called the Apple Education Event read about it here. Let's remember though that as interesting as this sounds it's all just a big commercial. Apple's in the business of making money, so you won't find many mentions of Open Content. The first 10 minutes are just talking, but the demonstration starts around minute 10.
Now a few of you may be interested in learning how to create books using Apple's iBooks Author tool. It may be too advanced for most of you, but if you ever want to learn how you can always come back to our class web blog here and refresh your memories. We hear about that here.
Now if you wanted to find textbooks for your iPad then you can see an overview here:
We've now seen the promos, infomercials, and Apple employee demos, so let's balance things out with some outside reviews, analysis, and feedback.
First let's start with a webcast recording from Edukwest entitled: "What do iBooks mean for the eBook/eTextbook industry?"
Summary: The eTextbook industry got a big publicity and market education boost with Apple’s announcements in 2012. What it didn’t get was the market revolution it could have.
You can take a break now! Go for a walk and clear your head. I'm sure that's been a lot of video. When you come back I'd like you to read, "The new iPad (2012) review" from iMore. They have a nice breakdown of the pros, cons, and overall assessment.
=============================================================== Next you can use the following three sections as a go-to guide to help you answer most of the faq's.
And we'll end this week with some of the general stats for the iPad and when it will be available around the world for those of us taking this course from outside the US.
This week we are focusing on eReaders. Our session is linked in the left hand margin. The syllabus has recently been updated so be sure to view it and check out this week's new required readings. In your comments this week on our blog, please share your thoughts and experiences about your e-book reader preferences in the comments below, and also do your own research (try to visit a store and test a few out, sometimes you need a push like this to get you some hands-on experience) and include a nugget of info that I didn’t cover this week to share with your peers. Next week we’ll delve into the merits of using these devices for education. There is a lot of info here comparing and contrasting. Don't get too worried if you can't retain it all. Just save these links and use them for future reference and take plenty of notes.
