NZ teachers and students in iBook competition

Winners will be announced shortly for New Zealand’s first national competition in which school teachers and students have competed for $20,000 in cash prizes for designing Apple iPad touch-screen iBooks using Apple iBooks Author software.

Separate competitions were held for primary, intermediate and secondary teachers and lecturers from tertiary institutions. Three additional prizes were awarded for students across all categories.

One of the two judges, Auckland author Gordon Dryden (left) says the winning entries and place-getters were outstanding.   “Equally important,” he adds, “they show the incredible difference between the interactive, multimedia impact of iBooks Author productions and one-dimensional digital books, such as novels transferred to Amazon’s Kindle and similar digital ‘readers’.”

Apple’s iBooks Author comes free to all owners of Mac computers or iPads.  So does iMovie software for video-editing, GarageBand for music-composing, I Can Animate for animation, plus an additional music and voiced commentaries.  Creative work done on each application can be incorporated into iBooks Author iPad pages, along with videos from the Web.  Multimedia slides from Microsoft Powerpoint and Apple Keynote can also be selected and, then dragged and placed on any iPad page, and then, at the touch of thumb and one finger, enlarged or reduced to any size required.  Other “imported” effects can be “stored” under digital photos or effects, each with their own icons. To switch from text to video, for example, readers (or teachers using the iPad resource on an interactive digital whiteboard or other screen), simply touch the icon and the video automatically runs.

“This is not only the textbook of the future,” says Dryden, “but it is a creative tool in which students, in particular, can explore any subject and then summarize it in multimedia ways.  Put simply, yesterday’s schools still exist around the world: Chalk, lecture, listen.  But today’s education is different: Explore, discover, create — and use the world as your classroom.  Both by exploring it yourself with a camcorder, editing and producing your own video, and downloading other video-clips from YouTube.”

For the competition, teachers and students’ entries had to be linked to the New Zealand curriculum.

“So, for example, one was based on the high school geography curriculum, reporting on a natural event and its impact on the country’s economy.  The example selected was the 19th-century Mt Tarawera eruption and the resulting destruction of what were then New Zealand’s biggest tourist attraction, the Pink and White Terraces.  The entry not only depicted the eruption and destruction, but explored the resulting Government decisions to develop nearby Rotorua as an alternative series of tourist attractions.  Three-dimensional graphics then explored plate tectonics, the layers of planet earth and the resulting “Ring of Fire” around the Asian-Pacific Rim and its impact on earthquakes and eruptions in New Zealand.

“Another explored the 1964 British troops’ invasion of Maori land in the Waikato and the eventual historic siege of Rewi Maniapoto’s pa at Orakou.”

The competition was sponsored by Cyclone Computers, which holds the contract to supply Apple equipment to government departments and public schools.