[Year 12 SofDev] ePub development

[Travis Parker]

Dear All,

 

We are ending Term 1, which for our school has seen a rollout of iPads
across both campuses from Years 5-11 (About 2800 devices). It has had
less teething issues that you would have thought, moreso with the staff
coming to terms with them than our tech-savvy students.

 

The main issue for staff has been content creation. We still have dual
devices so I have recently tried using Adobe InDesign CS5.5 (After
getting ridiculously frustrated with the limitations of the app
"Creative Book Builder" as it doesn't let you control enough settings!).
I spent a lot of time researching, looking for materials online and
trial and error and have attached one that I made on mobilEcho, which
our school is using for network access. I haven't released it to staff
yet (Note to self: Change the front cover to avoid copyright issues
before giving it to staff!) but would love some feedback on what should
and should not be included, and what more you think needs to be done.

 

I did have videos added, however when I do a final edit (Using Sigil) of
the XHTML (As InDesign doesn't add in line breaks or anything and it
ends up all cluttered) it removes all of the videos as they aren't
actually part of the ePub standard (Videos only work in the modified
ePub standard that iBooks uses). I decided that formatting was more
important that videos, so although I have a version with videos, I
preferred to make the videos in mp4 format (So they could easily be
viewed on the iPad even without AVPlayerHD) and store them separately.

 

In another question - For those schools that have moved to iPads and
other tablet devices, what do you use for content creation?

 

Cheers and have a good break!

 

Trav

P.S. When creating the documents and exporting to ePub, rather than port
them to the iPad every time to see how they look, I have downloaded
"Adobe Digital Editions" which is free and a decent epub viewer.

 

Travis Parker

Head of ICT and E-Learning

Beaconhills College

( 1300 002 225 ext 3016

or Direct Dial (03) 5945 3016

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.edulists.com.au/pipermail/sofdev/attachments/20120330/0f772cec/attachment-0001.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 17052 bytes
Desc: image001.jpg
Url : http://www.edulists.com.au/pipermail/sofdev/attachments/20120330/0f772cec/attachment-0001.jpe 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: MobilEcho tutorial.epub
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 2321055 bytes
Desc: MobilEcho tutorial.epub
Url : http://www.edulists.com.au/pipermail/sofdev/attachments/20120330/0f772cec/MobilEchotutorial-0001.epub