Introduction from the Second Grade Online Science Book

I wanted to create an iBook for our second graders. Especially after our podcast with Peter Pappas, I felt on track to use his provided tutorials to complete the job. But then, the reality of finding the appropriate media led to a course change. My story is reported through my school blog, Innovative Practices at ACDS.

________________

One of the difficulties of having young students do online research is finding websites written at the appropriate reading level. Last year, the second-grade teachers and the instructional technologist tried a WebQuest for the second-grade science unit on germs and healthy habits. Most of the sites we found were written for a much older audience. This year, we decided to pull information from websites and books to write our digital book to replace WebQuest. One important consideration would be to match text with helpful images and video to further the second graders’ understanding.

We looked at the possibility of creating an Apple iBook. We could write the book using iBooks Author and then download it to a class set of iPads. We would need to download any video to insert into the iBook. One difficulty is finding a video that was shared under Creative Commons agreements. A second consideration was that it could not be in Adobe Flash, which needs to be supported on the iPad. A final deal breaker for the iPads was that the students could access the book from home to reread the text and review the videos. Learning about viruses, bacteria, and fungi takes work. It would be necessary for the students to access the book repeatedly.

An essential aspect of having technology literacy is choosing the right tool for the task. In this case, it became clear that publishing on the Internet would be the way to go. Flash-based videos could be embedded or linked to the pages of the book/website. Students could access the digital book from school and home. The book could be updated on the fly as the students provide feedback and as new resources are discovered.

While the web-based book fulfills these criteria, it does not allow students to personalize the text and media. Underlining, highlighting, and taking notes in the book, as in an iBook, is only part of using a website as a book if one uses browser add-ons. In time, we will have the students use the MindMeister web-based mind mapping tool to record their questions and understanding for easy access, whether reading the book at school or home.

If you missed the link to the book at the start of this post, here is another link to get you there.