Write Now: A School-wide ebook Publishing ProjectA Deployment Guide For SchoolsBy: Mark Marshall

This ebook is meant to be a guide for school administrators interested in implementing a school-wide project for student ebook publishing. This book was created simultaneously during the implementation of this project that contains ideas, reflections and interviews with teachers, students and administrators.

CHAPTER 1

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Introduction

SECTION 1

“Hey Mark and Tricia, can I catch up with you two over morning coffee tomorrow? I wanted to have a quick chat about a small ebook publishing idea.” were the words that our school director, John McBryde said to us as he passed us in the hall. We both eagerly agreed and thought the idea sounded interesting so quickly agreed to the

request. The “small idea” turned into an hour of exciting discussion as we listened wide-eyed to John’s revolutionary vision of how he saw pub-lishing and writing for students in the 21st cen-tury. He shared anecdotal stories about how stu-dents last year created these incredibly engaging ebooks and how it changed both their own per-

• Everything starts with an idea

• There has been a revolution in the way we create and share content

• Writing is at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy

A Grade 1 student begins writing her first ebook.

Why ebooks?

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ceptions and understanding of themselves as authors. One exem-plary students, nine-year old Keily Setiawan, published an ebook that started out as something small and quickly turned into a huge media event as she was the youngest authors to publish an ebook through iTunes. Another high school student, Peter Gunawan, cre-ated an ebook about golf as part of his personal project. He went on to add many updates, videos, and extensive content about golf that attracted a lot of attention. The teary-eyed parents were blown away at the quality and exclaimed that they had never known that their child was such a talented writer and changed their percep-tions about their own child.

! The fact is that there has been a revolution in the approach to writing and publishing. Traditionally, students typically wrote sto-ries in their classrooms that sometimes the only audience for that story is their classroom teacher. Consequently, there was little rea-son to get excited about writing a story or to put in extra work (aside from getting a higher grade) to improve their story. In to-day’s age with the explosion of Web 2.0 technologies, uploading content to the web and getting sometimes hundreds if not some-times millions of viewers for something as simple as a short home-made video. Look no further than YouTube’s most popular “Char-lie Bit My Finger”, “The Evolution of Dance” or the “Hey Jude Kid”. The point is that we now live in a content-driven world where anyone can be a publisher (including me). This has far reach-ing implications for education.

! In my opinion, one of the most difficult skills to teach as an educator is writing. It lies in the very top of the pyramid in terms of language acquisition since it requires that one has developed suf-

ficient oral-speaking, decoding and reading skills in order to mas-ter.

Figure 1. The Writing Expression pyramid (used with permission from The Balanced Literacy Diet)

As you can see from this pyramid, students need a firm grasp of a variety of skills needed in order to write, hence more complex. I truly believe that writing, in any form, helps students to improve all language components under the pyramid by applying these skills. Similarly, students are using high-order thinking skills as seen in Bloom’s Taxonomy in Figure 2 below

Figure 2. Bloom’s Taxonomy (CC license used from Flickr)

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! In addition to simply improving writing skills, publishing e-books provides something more powerful. While talking to John, he shared his rationale to why creating an ebook is so revolution-ary. Traditionally, to become a published author, one has to not only come up with original content, send it to editors from a pub-lishing company where they act as gatekeepers to decide if they can possibly make enough money out of it to invest in publishing it to the masses. The inherent problem with this is that the majority of people do not become published authors. Thus, the very notion of becoming an author (at least an accredited one) is tied to idea of the publishing stage. In today’s model, anyone can become a writer, blogger, video producer simply by publishing their work through an internet medium. Therefore, being classified as an “author” is tied to the idea of readership and audience-powerful motivators for anyone who writes.

! Although hardcopies of writing will always have their place in the world, digital writing is quickly gaining popularity. Sites such as Amazon, iTunes and Kobo provide these mediums for dis-tributing work to a large audience. With the emergence of mobile technologies, people are turning to Kindles and iPads as a more convenient and efficient way to read, both for enjoyment and for business. Digital books are now becoming more engaging and go beyond containing digital text and can incorporate multimedia and interactivity-components missing from traditional text. This pro-vides another advantage for publishing e-books since students can share their ideas through a variety of methods. Many students en-joy reading books that may have audio, images or video embedded into the content.

! So taking all these advantages for improving student learning through higher-order thinking skills, creating authentic author-ship, interactivity, and mobile learning, it became an easy decision to adopt this project school-wide. Moreover, this fit in well with our school’s vision of becoming an IT leader of the future. To do so means to take risks, sandbox ideas and grab hold of emerging tech-nologies. Currently, our school is an Apple school and a 1:1 school with approximately 80 iPad devices.

! Finally, the last and potentially most important reason for be-ginning this project was the possibility of community action in lo-cal Indonesian schools. Our school strives to develop student-led service projects in local communities and has a variety of very ac-tive projects that are connected to the PYP, MYP and DP curricu-lum as well as the UN Millennial goals . Many of these projects use the model of working alongside local community members so that their is a joint exchange of ideas and knowledge. One of the ideas was to use ebooks as a way of capturing many of these projects by having students create books in collaboration with local commu-nity members. This helps to raise global awareness of problems that exist in the community and help to give a voice to otherwise disempowered individuals. It is the vision of this project to not only produce digital work from our school but also assist others in producing digital books that may not have a chance to otherwise.

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SECTION 2

Our school started this project with lofty expecta-tions. After our initial meeting with our director, he casually mentioned “wouldn’t it be nice if we were the first school to publish 1000 ebooks to the iTunesU” So with that, we were quickly over-whelmed at the thought of somehow producing that amount of books. Questions quickly came to

the forefront such as how can a small interna-tional school of 600 students publish that many books in one year? How will we organize this? Where do we begin? We felt genuinely over-whelmed, excited and nervous all in the same breath. Soon after our meeting, Tricia tweeted something that will remain in my mind forever.

Highlights

Lofty goals have to start with a bold statement.

To get started you need:• Vision, purpose and goals of

the project• Passionate and interested

teachers and admin• Resources-laptops with

ebooks Author and/or iPads with an ebook publisher app

• Budget-for special events• Time! Planning, creating,

training John McBryde in one of our planning meetings talking about the vision and logo for the project.

Every School Starts Somewhere

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She tweeted, “the journey of 1000 ebooks begins with a single key-stroke.” I thought that was a nice way to think about it. Just like a journey to the top of a mountain starts with one step. If you concen-trate on short-term goals, it makes the eventual end goal seem that much more manageable. So that is exactly what we did. We started making some short-term tangible goals to work towards. I put to-gether a rough plan of the process and shared that with the people involved.

So that is exactly what we did. We began to talk to people about our idea to see what the interest was. At our school, many people jumped on board right away. In fact, there was so many people in-terested, we couldn’t take everyone on board right away as we there simply wasn’t enough resources, time and physical space to accommodate everyone. The culture of the school was already there where many teachers embraced technology as a learning tool and wanted to be part of something special. We did target people informally through casual conversations or used recommendations from principals about good candidates. In retrospect, this was not the most transparent process and we should have allowed for a more fair and equitable way to select early adopters. However, we did not anticipate the interest either. To adapt to this situation, we decided to hold a second-wave of early adopters training in Janu-ary so that other teachers could be included.

! We planned what we termed a “PowerUp PD” session where we invited all early adopter teachers across both campuses and had an afternoon release time (with cheese and wine to make it fun and celebratory) to share information about the project as well as some hands-on training. It went very well and many of the teach-ers were quite enthusiastic about the project. There was a tweet from one teacher hours after after the PD session below:

! This captures the energy of the group. We used the hashtag #wnow1000 to help connect people. I had many other teachers

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We felt it was impor-tant to document the jour-ney

Initial Planning Meetings

Figure 3. Here is the initial plan that we brainstormed.

come up to me the next day ready to start making ebooks and lots of other ideas from other staff not even involved in the project. We had ideas like “oh, we should create an ebook about our staff chilli cook-off next week” or “we should create an ebook new teacher guide for next year’s teachers”. This kind of creative energy was something special that I have experienced in a school for quite

some time.

Planning was very important for a project this scale. We had sev-eral meetings talking about the logistics, agenda, publishing guide-lines and the vision and scope of the project. This allowed us to iron out a lot of the wrinkles and before presenting it to the staff. We developed a blog site, supporting google docs, publishing infra-structure along with ensuring that all the software was installed on the iPads and computers ahead of time. Here was the agenda for the day:

Activity

Introductory Video and Welcome

Vision, Rationale and Background

Sharing of Published Work-preloaded on to iPads

Outline of Project and Key dates

Writing tools (ebooks Author, Book Creator App and Keynote) Overview

Publishing Infrastructure

Professional Learning Community (Twitter, Blog, Website and discussion forums)

Hands-on Workshop Component

Wrap-up-Drinks and Social time

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Wine always fosters creativity!

Gallery 1.1 Photos from the PD Power Up Session for Early Adopters

The “PowerUp” training provided the momentum to get the pro-ject started. There was considerable interest and enthusiasm from the early adopters and that had a ripple effect across the school. We wanted to leverage that energy into action immediately so we had early adopter teachers begin creating ebooks across the school. Within a few weeks we had over 250 books published or in pro-gress ranging from teacher resource books to multilingual books in Chinese, Indonesian and English. We started a google doc to keep track of our progress and after a month, here is a snapshot of some of the books published:

Shortly after our PowerUp session, we worked on getting the WriteNow 1000 Blog up and running and added all Early Adopters as authors to the blog so that they can start highlighting some of the work that they were doing. We also started experimenting with publishing protocols, finding ebook readers, and trying to get our bookstore up and running.

! It wasn’t long before we started running into roadblocks and small problems to solve. One of the biggest challenges was finding an efficient way to publish books to our bookstore. For example, once students or teachers finished their books, we needed a way to transfer those ebooks from a shared iPad device and upload them to our bookstore. Here were some of the options we tried and the result:

1. Email-at first, this seemed like the obvious and simplest choice. However, with a shared iPad device, this would require each

teacher to setup that ipad with their school email. Not only was this a lot of work, we were presented with privacy and security is-sues as well. We explored having a school ebook publishing email account and although this might have worked, it wasn’t optimal.

2. Dropbox-Using a cloud-based option made a lot of sense at first and we trialled this out. However, this really only worked effi-ciently for small files (less than 2 MB) as anything bigger, took a lot of time to upload. Also, if files were not named appropriately, it was difficult to find out who uploaded them. This option was aban-doned shortly after.

3. Send to iTunes-This turned out to be the best option for a vari-ety of reasons. Firstly, it was fast. In Book Creator, you have the op-tion to send the file to iTunes as an ebook while being plugged in.

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Interactive 1.1 Snapshot of Google Docs in progress

Because it wasn’t being shared wirelessly, this was much faster. Sec-ondly, it didn’t require any accounts or signing into 3rd parties. Once on a computer, a teacher could then upload that ebook di-rectly to our Bookstore. The teacher would be in charge of naming the files properly and then uploading it to the store which reduced the workflow of the whole process. Here’s a link to the process.

Why upload to your own site instead of to the ebookstore?

We decided for several reasons to host the majority of our books locally rather than to iTunes.

1. It was faster-to upload the number of ebooks we were publish-ing to iTunes would have taken weeks to accomplish. We could upload a book to our site within minutes since everything was hosted locally on our servers

2. It was simple-Again, uploading to the ebookstore within iTunes, didn’t require any extra software or accounts. We found that up-loading to iTunes took a long time as there were errors and books were sent back as they were not formatted correctly. For the average teacher, they do not have time to deal with this. An-other reason is that to open up an iTunes connect account, you need a credit card linked to the account; even if the books were free!

3. Empowered teachers and students- Instead of one person being the “gatekeeper”, we had multiple users uploading their books. This put the power in the hands of teachers and students.

4. Ownership- Because it was our site, we could configure it the way we wanted it. This created a sense of community and own-ership for the ebooks.

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SECTION 3

Celebrating Success EarlyThe saying “praise effort, not talent” rings especially true here. In learning anything new, it is important to have early success, praise and recognition. Otherwise, people will inevitably become frustrated, disenchanted or feel isolated. This goes for both teachers and students. There are many ways that this

can be done. We made an effort to praise efforts by teachers and students who did take risks and finish ebooks. We did this through tweets, posters, emails, blog posts, publicly or personally. We also celebrated our 100th ebook, 300th ebook (and hopefully, our 1000th ebook) through coffee mornings and even a 300th ebook cake (see below)!

Strategies for success

• Celebrating and recognizing success

• Keeping students involved• Audience is key• Expand program to others• Support and training

Sustaining Momentum

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Keeping Students InvolvedStudents need to be at the heart of all of this. They need to be em-powered, celebrated and given ownership for their work. After all, the goal is to improve reading and writing for all students. We at-tempted to get students involved in ebook publishing from Early Years up to Grade 12 and across a variety of subjects. We also used

the model of “train the trainer” in classrooms. We often taught a few students some tips and tricks for publishing and then had them teach other students how to do it. This strategy worked ex-tremely well in classes. Students like to feel like they are experts and this shifted the knowledge from teachers to students. In the fu-ture, we plan to have more formal workshops led by students for students.

Audience is keyWe firmly believe that for any writing (or any product), there needs to be an authentic audience. Otherwise, there is no motiva-tion. Audience provides a way for feedback to improve and rein-forces what the author did well. We had comments for each ebook where anyone could leave a comment for the author.

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John McBryde recognizing MS ebook authors during Literacy Week

Gallery 1.2 Ways we celebrated ebook publishing

Expanding the ProjectThis can be done in a variety of ways but we made a conscious de-cision to expand the pilot from early adopter teachers to anyone that wanted to take part. We officially launched the project in early March to our whole community and invited others to participate in our goal and begin publishing ebooks. We had a lot of other teach-ers very interested in doing so. It was important to clarify that this was not an expectation but an invitation to participate. We also began to expand the project to other schools and several other schools around Asia decided to contribute their books to the site. After awhile, the project begins to take a life of its own.

Support and TrainingAlthough this is the final section, it is one of the most important ar-eas for sustaining any type of IT initiative. There needs to be regu-lar and differentiated support and training for staff and students. After our initial training for early adopters, we continually sup-ported those teachers. We also held optional weekly after-school workshops on ebook publishing for staff and parents. We ensured that there were a variety of levels of training as well (beginner, in-termediate, advanced). In addition, we had online help videos and tutorials which teachers could access at any time. Some IT coaches provided mini-lessons in class for students as well. One challenge we faced was with software and updates for ebooks Author. We had several macbooks that were older so could not run the most recent version of OSX. Consequently, we could update ebooks Author to the most recent one (2.0). This created problems as the older version did not have the same templates, widgets and other features. For example, movie files needed to be converted to m4v files before inserting into ebooks author files. There was also con-siderable technical support needed for synching and updating iPads, downloading apps and transferring completed files.

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A collaborative ebook publishing project with students from BeiDa Primary School in Beijing, China.

SECTION 4

Here are my 5 tips for starting ebooks Tip #1- Start Small

“1000 ebooks starts with a single keystroke” Tri-cia Friedman (tweet)

The biggest advice I could possibly give any teacher for creating ebooks is to start small...very small. I remember in my early 20s, I used to lead summer camps and take students on hikes up a mountain in Alberta called Mt. Baldy. Most kids upon looking at the long path would say to me “how in the world are we ever going to get to the

5 Tips for Creating eBooks

• Start small• Show examples of ebooks• Get the content done first• Let students become the

experts• Manage your resources

carefully

Practical Ideas for Creating ebooks

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top?” I would always respond, getting to the top of Mt. Baldy starts with one step at a time. The same analogy could be made for our project. In the classroom, I would recommend starting simple (like using Book Creator on the iPad) and in small groups or part-ners. Otherwise, teachers will be overwhelmed with solving techni-cal problems and managing the digital content. Like anything new, your first set of ebooks will most likely not be the best work. I think this is okay and this allows for teachable moments to im-prove future books.

Tip #2- Show Examples of eBooks

This is especially true for students that have no idea what an ebook is (even if they think they do). Download some examples and just have them explore first. This will create excitement and fuel motiva-tion for their own books as well as give them some ideas.

Tip#3-Get the Content done first

Whether you are using an iPad or iBooks Author, it really helps to have the students plan and write their content first before working on design. Once the content is revised and edited, then they can start adding widgets, multimedia and playing around with colors and fonts.

Tip#4-Let Students become the Experts

As mentioned before, allowing students to become experts takes the pressure off the teacher in having to learn everything. Students love to learn from each other and empowering them is a great way to instill leadership, self-confidence and communication skills. You can even have students create video screencasts and put them up on a website or blog. In a Grade 11 class, one teacher simply showed them a site that had video tutorials on YouTube and di-rected them here. They quickly learned advanced widgets and taught each other (and the teacher). Here is a link to those tutorials.

Tip#5-Manage your resources carefully

It is very easy to quickly lose track of digital files, delete or not name files properly. This can really slow down work as teachers are spending time trying to find files instead of spending time teaching and learning. Come up with a naming convention for each ebook and put them in a properly name folder on your com-puter (don’t forget to backup!). Also, if you are using shared iPads, have a table to keep track of which iPad students used. Things can go missing easily!

Important tip! If you are using iBooks Author, when you save a file, it is saved as an .iba file which can only be opened on the com-puter (not iPad). When the ebook is finished, export it as an ibooks file (.ibooks) and save both files. Why? Because if you only have the ibooks file, you will not be able to open this on your computer, only your iPad.

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Copyright issuesThis is a relatively new and increasingly complex issue. It is one that we discussed and debated about but is an important considera-tion when publishing any content online.

The rules is that you may not use any image/movie/audio file without expressed permission from the owner. Therefore, any Goo-gle image found is not necessarily free to be used in any type of on-line publication (including blogs). There are increasing numbers of lawsuits being made against individuals who violate this issue. Schools are not immune!

To combat this issue, we strongly encourage students to create their own media. In other words, have students draw their own art-work, take their own images or videos. In the cases where that isn’t possible, we direct them to http://search.creativecommons.org/ and ensure that your cite them properly. More on how to do this in my blog post here

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SECTION 5

It seems ironic that I begin this section telling you not to publish to iTunes, meanwhile publish-ing this very book there. iTunes is made for indi-viduals to create and share content but makes it extremely difficult for schools outside of United States to easily share content as an organization. Of course there is iTunesU but at the time of writ-

ing, our school was unable to acquire an iTunesU account unless it was a recognized university/college within the US. To make matters worse, you needed a US credit card tied to a US address. Finally, the other reason that we didn’t go down this track is it needs to be tied to one user’s ac-count and password. So it made it difficult for

Highlights

• Publishing to iTunes is difficult and time consuming

• Consider hosting locally• 3rd Party Sites

Publishing and Sharing Content

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hundreds of students and teachers to use this one account. Origi-nally, we did have one teacher who would publish all her students’ books through her individual account but this brings up complica-tions of privacy, copyright and ownership issues. There are some other options though.

Build your own Site!After many meetings, we decided that this would be the easiest and most cost effective way to manage content. By creating our own site, we could easily upload and manage content. The down-side was that we had to upload and manage content! Looking back, it worked but I am not sure I would necessarily recommend it unless you have dedicated personnel to manage the content. I was, for the most part, in charge of uploading many of the ebooks originally. However, this became very tedious and time-consuming. To make matters worse, I would make errors in stu-dent names or descriptions. Eventually, we started having teacher contributors who were trained on the process and would upload ebooks from their own students. This of course empowered them and ensured accuracy. For teachers outside of our school, I had them use Dropbox to put all the files (make sure they are named with the title and student) and had them fill out a spreadsheet with things like, students’ first name, class, book description, genre, etc.

We hosted a version of a Wordpress site in which we tweaked with a number of plugins. Here is the site here for your reference. Here are some of the advantages of hosting your own site:• Low cost• Control over design and functionality components

• Hosted locally so fast upload/download speeds• Able to customize

Disadvantages:• Time consuming• Need expertise in web design/hosting• Difficult for outside members to access• Could possibly drain bandwidth

Using 3rd Party SitesWe never got to this stage but it was certainly one that we dis-cussed. We came across a number of sites that were willing to host out ebooks but charged a fee. At the time, we didn’t have the budget for it but talked about moving the project to a 3rd party site eventually. Another option would be a hybrid model and to host locally and then once the project has some momentum, move the site to an external 3rd party site.

ConclusionOverall, it was an exciting project to be a part of and many teachers and students got on board. It gave a real and authentic purpose for writing for students who were as young as Kindergarten all the way up to Grade 12 students who used it for their personal pro-jects. It certainly was a lot of work but anything meaningful is. If you have any questions about the project or ideas on how to col-laborate, please email me at markmarshall6@gmail.com I would appreciate any comments or feedback!

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