Session Resources

1. Download When Ebooks Go to School (Epub format)
2. When Ebooks Go to School Bibliography
3. Read the rest of this entry…

I was down in Columbus, Ohio this week to attend eTech Ohio‘s annual educational technology conference, OETC13. I was involved in a number of interesting sessions, but my one “official” conference presentation was a BYOT titled “Student-Created Multimedia eBooks on the iPad in Grades K-3.”

The Google Site I created as a resource can be found here. I included quite a bit of background information that covers the current research on ebooks for young children, types of ebooks, selecting ebooks and also evaluating ebooks. This content is Flash-based, so if you’re trying to review it on an iPad, you’re out of luck. Sorry! But trust me, it is good stuff, so find a desktop or laptop and go through it!

The BYOD activity for the session is here. Please feel free to borrow, steal, use or remix with your students or teachers. If you’re just looking for my app recommendations from the session, here are the FREE ones and the PAY ones. If you want to learn more about how the session went, read on…

Read the rest of this entry…

Tonight I will be sharing some digital storytelling resources with one of Dr. Denise Stuart’s graduate classes here at The University of Akron.  I’m primarily planning to do some live demos of a variety of web-based and iOS options, but here are a few examples of published work from a few of the resources I’ll show. The complete list of resources I’m sharing are available from this Google Doc.

Animoto

A short piece that incorporates text and music to tell the story of a pumpkin’s lifecycle. The images used were created win Powerpoint and saved as .jpeg files. Those .jpegs were imported into Animoto for sequencing and audio integration. The finished story is available to view online or as an embedded video.

Make your own slideshow with music at Animoto. Read the rest of this entry…

Session Date:    02/14/2012
Session Room:    D233 – 235
Session Start Time:    1045
Presenter: Jeremy Brueck

The iPad revolution is here! Even our youngest students expect a learning space that integrates digital tools, accommodates a mobile lifestyle, adapts to individual learning styles & encourages collaboration. Teachers must become proficient in an mLearning pedagogical approach grounded in an understanding of mobile technologies hardware, software & OS. How does a teacher incorporate all these technology tools into meaningful learning? Help your students use iOS apps to tell their own stories, boosting reading and writing skills. Find out which apps work best for what grade levels and learn management techniques for projects. Attendees will learn about many different iOS apps to support and enhance the reading and writing process. This session will prepare K-5 administrators, teachers and parents to support student use of iOS devices in the elementary classroom.

Session Date:    02/15/2012
Session Room:    C213 – 214
Session Start Time:    0800
Presenter: Jeremy Brueck
Co Presenter(s): Kelly Kendrick; Kimberly Brueck; Tammy DeDominicis

I’m going to rush to get this post out ahead of the big Apple Education event on Thursday. All the hype is pointing to some sort of announcement of an easy way to create custom books for the iBook app. While this is certainly exciting news, I’m sure it is going to come with a bunch of “How to Use [Apple's Newest Thing] in Education” tweets,  blog posts, lists and presentations. So ahead of all the hipster, fanboy, and hater posts that will inevitably follow Apple’s big announcement tomorrow, I’m bringing you this post. Option 1 from my Creating Custom Digital Content for iPad: Educators Have Options series!

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the Creative Book Builder app for iPhone and iPad. Created by Tiger Ng, this app is currently selling for $3.99 in the iTunes Store.

Creative Book Builder enables everyone to create, edit and publish ebooks in minutes. Creative Book Builder can import document from Google Docs and parse HTML output into chapter. Create unlimited number of chapters add title, description, images, videos, audio recording, music, links, and lists. CBB lets you sort your content’s ordering within a chapter and customize your cover image.

What I did with CBB:

My plan is to base this project on a second grade Rocks & Fossils unit that my wife and a colleague originally developed in 2005. That unit contains a collection of resources ranging from a section of a science textbook, videos, digital photos and a couple PPT presentations. I have all the various source files stored on my Dropbox account and in my iTunes/iPhoto albums so I can access them as needed across devices. Read the rest of this entry…

For the past few days, I’ve been in beautiful Sedona, Arizona to attend and present to a group of early childhood educators from Arizona and New Mexico as part of the Southwest Institute Summer Literacy Institute.

Southwest Institute for Families and Children (SWI) is a non-profit research and development organization focusing on children’s health and education.

Below you will find the slidedeck from my presentation to this dedicated group of early childhood educators, many of whom serve high-poverty children and families from the Navajo nation.

This past week I had the privilege to present some of my e-Book research with my colleague, BK You from the Southwest Institute for Families, at the inaugural Early Education and Technology for Children Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. This unique event was sponsored by the Waterford Institute and featured well-known speakers such as Dr. Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams and Dr. John Dexter Fletcher, just to name a few.

Read the rest of this entry…

As IEAR app reviewers, we sometimes stumble across an app that just oozes of potential but isn’t there quite yet. With a $14.99 price tag, Pictello, from AssistiveWare packs quite a punch with its unique opportunity to create and publish visual stories. However, IEAR app reviewers can’t help but notice there are some critical features that are missing from the app at this time. Meg Wilson (@ipodsibilities) and Jeremy Brueck (@brueckj23) share their educational insights into the positive features of the app, provide possible areas of classroom application, share their Pictello story codes and point out some places where they hope to see Pictello grow in future releases and updates.

Read the rest of this entry…

e-Books will likely be a part of future early childhood classrooms, and in light of the thin evidence base on their role in curriculum and instruction, we undertook a formative study to investigate what e-book pedagogy for early literacy might look like in the early childhood classroom [1]. We approached our research from a design perspective—much like an engineer—creating a prototype model for implementation in the classroom and testing it to begin a winnowing process that informs the educational design (e-books in preschool for purposes of early literacy instruction) and identifies design features that are feasible and preferable in an instructional model [2, 3].

At this early stage of prototype creation, we conceptualized an e-book instructional model that was purposefully under-specified to allow a wide-angle view of what it takes and what happens when e-book technology is inserted into the preschool classroom. The model consists of four components grounded in e-book studies [4] and the knowledge base on early literacy instruction for young children [5]:

• The e-book as a technology-mediated environment
• The physical place of e-book reading in the classroom
• Engagement in e-book reading for small groups and individuals
• Explicit instruction using e-books

Our research objectives were to observe, define the salient attributes and rate the functioning of each component in situ toward the goal of framing a model for replication and further testing. To this purpose we employed a qualitative approach that focused on sorting, clustering and aggregating observational data to derive quality indicators and design features.

The following is a brief overview of some of the data collected during Phase 2 of our 2010-2011 study.