The sales of e-books are increasing globally, due largely to their portability. These e-books are, however, mainly electronic versions of print book with little interactivity, other than the ability to highlight passages, take notes, change font size and navigate easily within and between books. A number of e-Textbooks are available for use in school and university education but are not yet widely used and many are, again, not particularly interactive. It is now possible to produce truly interactive e-books (digibooks) which incorporate elements such as video, audio, galleries of photographs, overlays, drag and drop, feedback, maps, animations, quizzes, dictionaries and much more. Several companies such as Bookry and LearningApps are developing widgets for e-books to facilitate this interactivity. These digibooks facilitate learning in a more personalised manner, allowing the pupil (and teacher) to become co-author and engage in the editorial process, improving literacy as well as digital skills. These books can also send data back to the teacher, facilitating marking, assessment and feedback. None of the schools involved in this project currently use e-books in their teaching and none of the schools have staff with any training in the production or use of e-books. The aim of this project is to facilitate, explore and assess the use of interactive e-books (digibooks) for teaching and learning in a range of subject areas across our schools. We will produce a resource bank which can be used in our schools and world-wide to help teachers and pupils to produce, customise and /or use digibooks for teaching and learning purposes. We also aim to compare e-books (which are Android and Windows compatible) with iBooks (compatible with Apple devices) in terms of ease of production, editing and use. A further aim is to investigate the transferability of these different types of digibook and to integrate both digibooks and the associated pedagogy into the schools' curricula, supporting digital inclusion. We want to internationalise the education of our young people and to improve their linguistic and digital skills in the process. The schools involved in the project are: Dollar Academy, Scotland , an independent, co-educational day and boarding school, IMB Brugges, Belgium, IES Francisco Giner de los Rios, Spain, and IIS De Amicis, Italy, which have pupils from varied backgrounds and with varied abilities and V. gimnazija, Zagreb,which has many pupils with high educational aspirations. The main subject areas which will be covered initially are Modern Languages, Science, History and Computing. In the first year of the project, teachers will be trained by sub-contracted experts in Scotland in the production and use of both e-books and iBooks. This will involve task-based training and will include coverage of topics such as choice of software, copyright issues, storage etc. Following training each school will choose at least two particular elements (resource types) on which to focus. Over the following 4 months pupils and staff at each of the schools will create and collate resources of their chosen types for incorporation into digibooks ( focussing on using either Windows or Apple as a platform, although Dollar staff will use both) and will upload them to the resource bank website. They will also start to produce digibooks for use in their own subject area . At a meeting in Spain pupils and teachers from all of the project schools will train each other how to make all the resource types, how to make a digibook and how to produce and run a webinar. Back at school, staff and pupils will work on making digibook manuals, which explain how to create/ download and use their selected types of resource. These will be uploaded to the resource bank along with a wide range of resources. Further training will occur and more resources will be collated, produced and trialled ( including via webinar) in 2018-2019. Each school will also trial one or more of the digibooks produced by another partner school. A project meeting will be held in late 2018 in Belgium at which teachers will discuss and evaluate progress to date and plan further work. At a meeting in Italy in March, 2019, pupils and staff from the project schools will collaborate on running a workshop for local teachers. Project pupils and staff will train the local teachers in the production and use of the various resources in the resource bank and how to make a digibook, as well as how to use digiboooks in their teaching. Two webinars will also be run, one by and for pupils and one by and for teachers. All resources will be uploaded to the Erasmus+ dissemination website for open use, with links to this site from each of the schools’ websites. The final project meeting will be held in May, 2019 at which the resource bank will be finalised and dissemination assured. The resource bank will remain available indefinitely and will be regularly updated.
Sales of interactive e-books (digibooks) are increasing globally, due largely to their portability and the fact that they facilitate learning in a more personalised manner; their low cost, sustainability and multimedia content are also invaluable. The anticipated result of this project was increased knowledge and understanding of how to make and use digibooks for use in teaching and learning across a range of subject areas. Longer term it was expected that this project would result in the production and use of digibooks by teachers and pupils for educational purposes. The schools involved in the project are: Dollar Academy, Scotland, an independent, co-educational day and boarding school, IMB Brugges, Belgium, IES Francisco Giner de los Rios, Spain, and IIS De Amicis, Italy, which have pupils from varied backgrounds and with varied abilities, and V. gimnazija, Zagreb, which has many pupils with high educational aspirations. At least 10 teachers and 25 pupils from each school were directly involved in producing digibooks and widgets and many more (approximately 600) staff and pupils received training in widget production. The aims of this project were to explore, assess and facilitate the use of (digibooks) for teaching and learning in a range of subject areas across our schools and to produce and use our own digibooks and a resource bank for use in digibook production by other teachers. The objectives were to: explore the various types of digital books (ebooks and iBooks) and associated software and to investigate both their use for teaching and learning purposes, and their transferability (e.g. the use of iBooks on Windows systems); provide access for a large number of pupils and teachers to digibooks and to resources for creating and personalising their own digibooks; develop a website containing these resources for use in schools; trial the resource bank in the various partner schools; make the outputs available to other schools and teachers in a variety of forms and to run a dissemination event and possibly a webinar in which we trained others to make their own digibooks. The objectives were all met. The main activities were: e-books (Android and Windows) were compared with iBooks (Apple Books or just Books) in terms of ease of production, editing and use including transferability; we compared the different types of ebook-creating software available; we trialled the use of webinars as a training tool and as a tool for dissemination. Teachers were trained at an international meeting in the production and use of both types of digibook and of widgets of various types. Pupils and staff collated resources for use in a resource bank. At an LTT meeting in Spain, teachers trained pupils in making widgets and digibooks using these and other resources. Staff and pupils at each school collated resources (photographs, music, videos etc) and uploaded them into a central resource bank. Staff also started to produce digibooks for use in their own subject area. A website was constructed and these resources were uploaded onto it alongside training manuals for the use of eBooks, Books and widgets. Non-project staff at the schools and teachers from other schools were trained in widget production at workshops. Many pupils are now using digibooks/widgets made for the project.The incorporation of 'fun' activities into books and into lessons via the use of widgets facilitates learning in an interactive manner. Project meetings were held at which teachers liaised, discussed and evaluated progress to date, and planned further work. Staff and pupils from all 5 schools ran widget workshops for over 100 pupils and staff from the Italian school. A widget training webinar was also run from the meeting in Italy for pupils in Scotland. Over 700 pupils were trained in total. The final product is a website (www.erasmuspublish.co.uk) on which training materials are available, alongside digibooks produced by all of the partner schools and training manuals for using Kotobee, Books and Bookwidget. Longer term benefits: The digital skills of participants improved significantly. Teachers cascaded training to other members of staff and pupils at their own schools, and to teachers from other schools, and continue to do so. Work on digibook/widget production and on integrating widgets, digibooks and the associated pedagogy into the partner schools' curricula, is continuing, supporting digital inclusion. E.g: IES F. G. de los Rios is using Google classroom to assign widgets to students for homework, and over 70 students are using an ebook made for the project to study Economics; V. Gimnazija is involved in trialling new experimental curricula and teaching strategies (including digital technologies) for the local government; an award of £500 has been given to fund the production of an ebook and widgets for use in the Support for Learning and Home Economics departments at Dollar Academy.