As an educator and on-the-side graphic designer with not a little Adobe InDesign experience under my belt, I met Apple's announcement of the iBook Author software with a raised eyebrow and not much enthusiasm. Sure, Apple tends to change the game when they enter a new market, but I figured "getting people to publish their own materials" as textbooks in the new textbook store didn't seem that big of a deal.

Anyway, I downloaded the (free) Author software tonight ... and was blown away.

Granted, this is NOT InDesign. After all, iBook Author is a FREE program, so I don't expect it to have every glyph and tool and perk that Adobe sells us (for hundreds of dollars *cough*).  That said --

INTERFACE

The iBook Author software launches to something any user of Pages (or iWork programs in general) will recognize: a set of useful templates to get you started, plus tons of pre-loaded styles and placeholders. Since the software is set up for authoring books, it offers an easy way to insert chapters, sections, a glossary, table of contents, media files, photos, and text (from Pages or Word documents or just type it in). I realize that I'm more familiar than many folks with page layout software, but within an hour I'd tracked down most of the user options.

TEMPLATES

The software offers a few basic templates to get people started with page design. The simplicity will delight some and anger others. Again, this is FREE book design software (and much more elegant and stable than anything I've ever seen at this price) so I think people need to calm down and recognize what Apple is giving away here. The templates each fit a type of typical textbook: math, science, humanities. The layouts follow good design principles, so even if you know nothing about book design, if you work within the setup Apple gives you (instead of throwing it all out and trying to begin from scratch), you'll end up with a nice-looking textbook.

The templates are fully customizable, though it will take a little time and know-how to crack open all the Styles and modify the fonts. You can replace photo placeholders with your own photos. Obviously, authors will need to use copyright-free photos or pay royalties since nearly everything you can nab on the Internet isn't licensed for commercial use. Good thing I have a deep catalog of Italy, Spain, and England photos, right?

I tried importing my MEd thesis (an integrated teaching unit) into a template from Word. It was a pleasant surprise. Most of the page formatting worked out ok. I'd have to invest probably 5-10 hours to get the unit ready to publish as a short textbook, but the software gives me a lot of options (number of text columns per page, page breaks, insert media).  I plan to finish this one as my trial run and post it for sale in the textbook market. (Can't hurt to be an early adopter!)

TOOLS

Right out of the box, Apple's software lets authors drop in photos or movies or tables or interactive photos/diagrams. There's a widget for quizzes as well, so savvy educators with classroom experience can insert the kinds of on-the-spot assessment at just the right moment.  For example, if I were working on a Latin chapter for 3rd declension adjectives (my lesson plan material for tomorrow), I'd add a 10-question review of the relevant vocab. Simple and useful.

It looks like film clips would take some work. Unless you work out a deal with a content creator, I imagine everything on YouTube is offlimits. BUT -- you don't have to upload your iBook textbooks to the iTunes store for sale. I could format a companion textbook for my Latin students (to reflect the adaptations Jack and I have made to the BJUP Latin textbook to make it appropriate for 6th/7th graders) and distribute it for free to all of my students.  No need to publish officially.... which means I could run YouTube clips through a tool like MPEG Streamclip to convert them for iBook use.

Authors can customize nearly everything, from font color and style and size to the way pages are laid out. Book layouts offer many options for customization. I can't wait to try out the interactive diagram feature. 

EASE OF USE

This is where Apple stuns me.

As I mentioned, I know my way around InDesign. I like InDesign. I'd happily work in a publishinghouse doing book design if I could land the job, because I like the work.  But Apple has come along and dropped an incredible tool right into the hands of Ordinary Joe.  

Want to publish an iBook of your family's secret recipes? You can do it. Just bust out your camera, shoot the dishes as you cook them, and enter the text.

I could type up my notes from Dave Conley's England trip, insert my photos, and load it onto my iPad as a resource.

Any teacher, Sunday School teacher, counselor, trainer, work supervisor, or PTO coordinator can sit down and create a nice-looking book for a community of iPad owners. Bottom line: You don't have to be a specialized designer to get a basic book onto the market.

Are there limitations? Sure.  Is there still a role for a page designer with serious InDesign chops? Of course. Will graphic designers be impressed with Apple's new software? Of course not. It's not meant for them. 

But in the same way that the digital camera made all of us more open to photography, and the digital video camera has spawned a fresh generation of filmmakers who don't need thousands of dollars to buy 35mm film, Apple's textbook publishing software is going to spawn a vibrant group of educators and authors in the world of electronic publishing.

LIMITATIONS

• These iBooks are for iPad use. If you don't have an iPad, you can't read them. Apple wants you to buy their tablets and use them in your business or classroom. And iPads aren't cheap....so you've got to be working somewhere that's adopting technology (and has the funding for it).
   
• Obviously, the Apple software doesn't provide content. If you don't know anything about a topic, you won't write a very good book.  The iBook store has a gatekeeping process, and posting a book for sale requires getting a seller account through Apple and letting them vett your book. But that's not going to stop the drivel from hitting the online store. Oh well. Used bookstores are full of crap too, but I still think they're awesome.
   
• Free software =/= expensive Adobe InDesign powerhouse features.  Duh.  If you want (or need) ultimate control over your publishing layout, you probably shouldn't be relying on free software. Go hire a professional.
   
• People savvy enough to run a YouTube video through a format converter will be ripping off a lot of possibly-copyrighted content and never get caught if they aren't selling their books online. But on the upside, a lot of videomakers post their material to YouTube and Vimeo under a "creative commons" license, which allows others to use their work as long as they're given proper credit and the new user isn't making money off it. So my homegrown Latin textbook that I use in-house can make use of my carefully-curated collection of links and teaching videos. 

All that said -- 

Apple has given us a great tool. I'm hoping educators who have invested millions of hours into crafting great lessons will be brave enough now to step out there are write their own textbooks. 

Because, to be honest, published textbooks suck most of the time.  

There are some bandwagons worth jumping on, and Suzanne Collins's YA series The Hunger Games proved worthy of the hype. 

Together the 3 books tell the life of Katness Everdeen, a 16year old girl alive in a post-apocalyptic North America of the future. The society remembers little of the "America" that lies in rubble beneath them. Currently, a dictatorship centered in The Capitol (in what used to be Colorado) rules 12 districts ruthlessly. Want, starvation, and scarcity form the atmosphere of the novel, as each district specializes in making a certain product for the Empire.  Katness lives in District 12 which sounds like West Virginia -- it's nestled in the coal-rich Appalachian mountains.  It's a small district that's less bothered by all of the tyrannical practices, yet the people live with far less than they need. 

Having lost her father in a mining accident years before, Katness takes to the woods to hunt for food (illegally). She cares for her mother and sister until the Reaping for the Hunger Games -- an annual atrocity of the Capitol to remind the 12 districts what happened to them 75 years ago when they attempted to rebel. The government destroyed district 13 completely, imposed draconian shortages on the other 12, and force each district to send 2 tributes to a gladiatorial contest called The Hunger Games for the amusement of the rich, indulgent Capitol district population. Bread and circuses, indeed.

The teen tributes must kill in order to win, and the winning tribute returns to his/her district with a bounty of food for the coming year. Losers die gruesome deaths in the large outdoor arena via other tributes or through snares and traps left by the gamemaker. This isn't a book series for the faint of heart. 

I won't describe more of the story; you ought to just read them for yourself.  They're very fast-moving, well-written, and rich with good characters.  I'm not an overly-fast reader and I could take one down in a solid day of reading. You will find complex characters in this world, portraits painted with moral nuance and authenticity. I highly recommend the series. 

The series muses on the cost of war in the lives of those who fight it.  As I worked through the 3rd (and final) book in the series, I considered how Collins was introducing a generation of young readers to the issues facing our veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. The books are in no way gratuitous with their violence, but the author does not shy away from the graphic violence that comes with war. And the nightmares. PTSD in a horrifyingly-real and comprehendible form.

Further, Collins forces you to consider the price of rebellion. Americans sit on warm couches in safe homes and judge the world's political movements. We did not have to fight the Arab Spring. We do not live in an Afghanistan where a woman trapped and tortured in a basement for months has to wait for the government to declare an investigation into the crime. Terrorists don't firebomb our busy shopping malls like they do in Israel or shoot protesters in the Occupy Wall Street movement like the Syrian government is dealing with its uprising.  For all our problems, we live a charmed life.

Go live with Katness and her uprising for these 3 novels. You'll be glad you did. 

Talking Points for Parents

If your kids are reading The Hunger Games, they should be asking questions about war and survivor syndrome. If they aren't, prod them into some good conversation. Kids learn recent history primarily through their home lives, so get familiar with the Iraq and Afghan wars and some of the issues facing veterans as they come home.

• Let younger kids (middle schoolers) talk through what's happened to Katness and her friends during the Hunger Games. They need an outlet and you can help them connect the fictional storyworld to the reality our veterans face as they try to reintegrate into "normal" society. 
   
• Talk about the difficult choices Katness faced and the moral dilemmas. Kids profit from considering "what would I do if faced with this situation? what moral principles should guide me here?" and talking through those questions in a safe, non-judgmental environment.
  (Translation: Don't freak out, even if your kid considers destroying the entire planet with a nuke or bludgeoning your neighbor to death. She's thinking out loud, not determining her life's moral code. If you hear bad thinking, question her assumptions or mention consequences that she might not have realized.  99% of kids will think themselves back out of bad reasoning if the discussion remains civil, nonjudgmental, and unemotional.)
   
• Refresh your own knowledge of biblical ethics of war. It's a complex, difficult subject.  Don't fool yourself into thinking your kids will fail to ask the tough questions if you simply ignore them. Here's a great PDF that overviews the scriptural data (link will open a PDF): Some Introductory Notes on the Biblical Ethics of War
   
• Though you may be struck by the violence in the story, remember that children and teens are the bloody victims of violence like this in our world -- the child soldiers of Somalia, the brutal stoning of women accused of adultery in Islamic countries, the civilian casualties of car bombs and IUDs in Iraq. The Hunger Games are supposed to be disturbing. 
   
• Do some reading on the aftermath of our own wars and the personal effect on our troops.  I'll offer some links below to get you started, but Google will dredge up plenty.
   
• If you know someone who came home from Iraq or Afghanistan, find out if they'd be willing to share with your family their own experiences. Talk with your kids beforehand about being sensitive when asking questions and not prying into personal affairs. Your local VFW can probably point you to veterans who are willing to speak about their experiences. Vietnam vets too.

Some Useful Reading on Veterans' Issues in our current wars

Coalition for Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans

Invisible Wounds

The Private Scars of War

From Battlefield to Ivy League, on the G.I. Bill

War Memorials with Neatly Made Beds

Currently The Hunger Games Trilogy Boxed Set By Suzanne Collins see related

A great book: The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel. A journalist spends a year embedded in the young Army platoon who had to secure one of the worst slums in Baghdad a few years ago. The stories are raw, honest, humbling. Great for adults or mature teens.

Whoa-- long time, no see.

Computer (desktop at home) gave up its ghost in November sometime. It was a crappy week -- the car started making a weird noise (kinda got that fixed), the washer made a horrific racket (got that fixed but now it has a new melody of mechanical dysfunction), our WiFi went nuts (bought a new cable modem; not sure if that was the problem, but it's definitely fixed now), and the desktop's hard drive died.

Actually, I don't think the hard drive is damaged; I think there was some kind of short in the computer itself, which was rampaging about, knocking off certain vital elements.  One day the data hard drive was gone (we had a C: and D: drive setup with most of our files on D:); the next time I started the desktop, its networking card was gone but the D: drive was back.  I took it apart and blew out about a pound of dust bunnies, and things smelled a bit.... hot.  So perhaps we had a cooling fan failure.   I dunno. *shrugs*   I had backed up about 95% of our valuable files in September (the weekly backups stopped working for a reason I could never figure out) and I don't think we lost anything at all.  In fact, we gained a Mac mini and a new monitor (to replace the Jurassic CRT monitor which had perched on our computer desk since 1999).

All that to say -- it's good to be back.  The iPad is awesome (really), but it's not a device that I want to use for long stretches of typing for the sake of my wrists.  Now when Coart is gone to UGA for those long weeknight classes, I'll have some means to actually interact with the world.  

Looks like 2012 will start off with a burst of activity. I was offered a position playing second keyboard (is that better or worse than second fiddle? lol) for a friend's musical at Project Challenge Playhouse. I don't know anything about the musical (need to fix that), but Jamie is a fun fellow and strikes me as a talented theater teacher, so I'm expecting a good experience.  Will chuck that paycheck into the Europe fund, for I still have my fingers crossed that the Spain/Italy 2012 trip will come to pass. 

So as the new year gets rolling, I have some stuff on my mind that I'd like to unpack with words. Immigration, libertarianism, the biblical ethics of political positions -- they're all on the back burner. 

Happy New Year!

I figure the Mayans just got tired of listing dates on their calendar wheel and stopped with 2012. "Oh, screw it," they said. "Surely by 2012 somebody will have worked out a better calendar system!" lol

Favorite quote from class recently:

Teaching Brit Lit and reading Macbeth. Introducing the play and discussing Shakespearean theater, including the laws barring women from the stage in his time, which I think contributed to a general lack of outstanding female roles in many of Shakespeare's plays. 

One of my students countered, "Yeah, but what about -- uh, what's her name? The one who went bat-crap crazy in Hamlet?"

I think "bat-crap crazy" is now my favorite descriptor. 

Steve Denning wrote an interesting piece in Forbes magazine a few weeks ago about why big companies 'die" and whether the American economic machine is in such decline that our economy might be in for a long-term hurt. I don't know enough about business or economics to debate his thesis.  However, the quote from Steve Jobs about business decline (which prompted the Forbes article) really caught my eye.

Denning quotes Peggy Noonan (famous White House speechwriter) who in turn quotes Jobs:

“The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.” So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.”

Denning suggests that firms are too scared to go out and risk what it takes to create new "value" -- exactly the opposite of Apple's game plan, which found the company pursuing new and innovative products like the iPad even as the iPod destroyed every other mp3 player that tried to enter the market. Steve Jobs is quoted as saying that Apple tried to purse a novel vision, one in which a company dedicated itself to creating new value again and again, trusting that customers would flock to new products rather than just buying old ones.

Hm.

The "business" of education in America is truly an enormous segment of the economy. Whether public or private (or home school), Americans invest a ton of money into educating kids.  

Could it be that the wrong people are at the center of the corporate structure?

Teachers -- the good ones -- form the core of innovation at a school. The smaller and more nimble the organizational structure (if it's responsive to faculty suggestions), the more powerful the innovation that can come from educators working in a profession they love, surrounded and supported by a staff of like-minded teachers. 

Great teachers innovate, they create, they adapt and add new value to old methods. Educators are often the first to implement new technologies into the classroom or experiment with how to do something better. Because good teachers know their "product" is a human being rather than a widget, they passionately drive forward into new territory on behalf of their students.

But when organizational fossilization begins to value student (or funding) retention above innovation, creativity, and independent experimentation, they remove teachers from the "white-hot center of the [school's] daily life."  Formerly creative faculty find themselves trudging uphill against a mountain of negativity.  "We can't do that -- it's too [expensive / risky / controversial]."

The statistic floating around right now is that 30% of new teachers quit within 3 years, and perhaps 50% leave the profession after five. The causes are legion -- there's even a new book out on the subject (Why Great Teachers Quit) which I haven't read but this reviewer gives a good overview.  

I'm not suggesting that schools should run like businesses. In fact, I think education is such a subset of "ministry" that a business model may be nearly impossible. (What business would invest huge resources into "that kid" who seems like he'd be a failure anyway? But a good teacher goes out and finds the one lost sheep while also making sure the other 99 do their homework, improve study skills, and get ready for the next year of school.)

I do think that schools who fail to set up an organizational structure that values teachers as central to the success and mission of the school -- more than anything else -- will fail as schools.  

Because you can't codify good teaching.  

You can try to codify curriculum (as if an inanimate object could replace a human being -- ha!).  You can write books and set up mentoring programs and elicit feedback from the school on teacher performance.

But in the end, good teaching is a scientific art that thrives in hard places-- IF the teacher has the support and respect necessary to do the job without being smashed under the weight of it all. 

Overall, Les Mis was a very satisfying experience.

Not that everything went perfect. Lots of gremlins in the sound equipment and a show of this size is just hard to coordinate. People can be difficult--sometimes the difficult one is me--and working wit kids can be downright infuriating. But that's all par for the course.

I loved that we got to tell such an incredible story of redemption night after night to our community. That our students worked in a "real" theater with real lights and props and special effects. Several students tonight thanked Mary for reawakening their love of music and theater and performance.

I'm glad that homeschoolers got to work with two other schools to make this show happen, not as third wheels but as integral members of the experience. And I'm thrilled that two private schools chose to work together rather than compete. I wish we'd partner for more learning experiences in other fields.

As a teacher, I know that most of the best learning experiences I can deliver won't be appreciated fully until a student reaches adulthood and begins to piece together what it means to be "fully complete in Christ." I'm not always thankful that my job is so focused on the future, but it's definitely a great aspect of working with young people.

...I wonder how long it'll take me to stop hearing Les Mis music every hour of the day

Les Mis plot diagram for the program.
I'm pretty proud of this.  

 I think all theater audience members would benefit from having a visual guide to the plot rather than a written summary.  I usually don't take this much time to make one, but I thought Les Mis was too complex to be relegated to paragraphs.

"Next time" I need to find a better way to visually represent the relationships among characters. My little brown box was a last-minute last resort.

Just wrapped up the 5 teaching/activity days for a fully-integrated unit on poverty in SC for our 7th-12th graders at NCS.  I think it went pretty well.  There are some elements I'd change, if I could go back, but overall I think we accomplished our educational goals and I appreciated the change of pace.

I tried to keep up a regular stream of blog posts over at Teaching Redemptively as the week went on.  You can find the story there:

Overview

Kickoff

Food Costs: A Real Project

Teaching Time

SPENT

CHC Tour

Greenville Work Day:  From God to You ministries

CHC Workday

Wrapup

My main regret is simply this:  We did this unit in place of the weeklong big-city (or mission) field trips that we normally take in the Fall.  I really missed having the break that comes with being in a different place doing very different things.  I also missed the development of class comraderie that comes with going on an adventure together. And I just plain love traveling.  Maybe next year we can do both a trip and a problem-based unit ....  I think the kids would benefit greatly from both kinds of "alternate school."

Every weekday morning I tumble out of bed (not literally; that would hurt) and stutter into the warm glow of the bathroom for a shower. 

Every morning for the past several weeks, a spider sits in the bathtub/shower and stares me down.

It's been a Darwinian epic.

A word about the arachnids in our house: the late-summer around here has been unusually "buggy." I feel like someone built an international insect speedway through my bathroom. I've seen mostly fire ants (boo! hiss! Die!) and spiders (creepy, but whatever). Since the spiders eat the fire ants, I can't complain too much.... my loathing for fire ants now surpasses all other bug forms save roaches. Truly. If every fire ant were destroyed and sent to the hell from whence he came, I would dance happily. In the yard. Because I can't dance in the yard as things stand right now; I'd end up dancing on a fire ant mound and then those infernal bugs from the dark place of evil would bite me and give me welts that ooze. Apparently, my body impervious to poison ivy and most allergies finds fire ant venom to be its Waterloo.

So the spiders live ... as long as I can't see them. If I catch a spider chillin' inside, it's him or me. Well, it's him or Coart. I hate smashing the things so I make Coart do the deed.

But in the mornings, as I stumble and tumble from the warm cocoon of sleep into the harsh light of another workday, I have been confronted with the interesting problem of a spider in the shower/tub.

I *could* smoosh it in a wad of toilet paper and continue my sanitation routine, but that seems so... unfair.  And gross. I don't like seeing spider legs sticking out of wadded up toilet paper. And cruel somehow. The spider didn't do anything wrong; he's just living in my shower.

I decided to make the spiders a deal:  They get a chance.  I go about my normal shower routine, splashing away and trying to coax some organization out of a sleep-muddled head. ("What exactly am I supposed to be teaching today? ... oh yeah: Greek mythology / Robin Hood / Egyptian mythology / Beowulf / Latin preposition uses / journalism and writing skills / enunciation .... Right.")

Each morning the spider gets a chance to live or die. If it's smart enough to clamber up into some safe barricade behind a bottle of bath salts, he can live.

Most of the time, in a continuing reminder of natural selection, the spider runs in the absolute wrong direction and succumbs to the artificial rain.  Then I have to toe-nudge the spider legs into the drain, but it's not so bad.

The spiders died, day after day. Running up the spout doesn't work. Running down the side really doesn't work. Running toward my washcloth is an instant red card. I began to see the bathtub as a spider Colosseum.  Except I was the only audience, and other than a momentary flash of regret that a creature with more limbs and lenses than I could be so unlucky, I wasn't really watching.

But yesterday -- one lived.

She perched herself on a sturdy bit of web and glared a spider-glare at impending doom. She careened around the corner and back up the wall, diving away from  splashes and shampoo suds. I always turn my back to the shower-head, so I missed most of the show. But as the last water and suds slid down the drain, the spider bounced.

It was gone this morning. Perhaps somewhere outside in a spider colony she's teaching other spiders how to survive the maw.  Or maybe she crawled down the drain in a flash of sudden stupidity. *shrugs*

So now it's Bathtub 20, Spiders 1.

I'll keep you posted....