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This morning, Apple announced iBooks 2. Those following the rumors were expecting interactive textbooks in the typical flashy Apple style (great coverage at Macrumors and Macworld). What I didn’t expect to hear about was iBooks Author. This free app allows you to create your own interactive textbooks. Here are my initial thoughts on iBooks Author, and the application to the classroom.

As an ed tech teacher, I try to deliver content to my students in interesting, meaningful ways. I’ve struggled with ways to share large amounts of information with students. I have created an ePub using Pages, but the workflow is tedious for me and my students. So far, creating a website with pages, links, and videos is the best solution I’ve found. iBooks Author hopes to give educators an easy way to create and distribute content as an iBook.

To get started, download iBooks Author for free from the App Store. 165 MB later, iBooks Author opens, and lets you choose a template. This isn’t the type of thing that you create in an hour–expect to spend some time writing and organizing information. After all, this is a textbook that is being created. The great thing, however, is that your textbook doesn’t have to be 200 pages. You can make a textbook for every unit, every week, or every day.

As a teacher, this is huge. With Apple’s typical drag-and-drop interface, I can quickly and easily create an interactive document for my students. It is simple to create a Review (interactive multiple-choice questions. It is simple to add a Keynote presentation that I already have. It is simple to create an HTML link/embed to content I already have online. It is simple to add an interactive image with various views and descriptions. Again, this entails a considerable amount of work, but the opportunities for my classroom are huge.

My favorite part of iBooks Author so far is the preview. Previously, you had to create a document in Pages, export it as an ePub, add it to iTunes, sync your iPad, and open iBooks on your iPad. Now, connect your iPad to your computer, and you have a preview in seconds. I stopped creating ePubs for my students because the workflow was terrible. With this workflow, I will be creating many iBooks for my class.

Apple makes is fairly easy to distribute your content. You can export it as a .ibooks document, and add it to your website or email students. You can publish it to the iBooks store. This takes more effort, and involves signing up for and downloading iTunes Producer. However, you can sell (or give away) the book through the Store in iBooks. It seems like we, as teachers, finally have a way to create and distribute large amounts of content.

Typically, I blog about educational technology that the average teacher can understand. This, however, is some heavy lifting.

Here is an advanced trick for WordPress users. This is how I removed the sidebar from one specific page (titled forum) on my wordpress site. After much searching, I found that I needed to implement conditional formatting using php.

Here’s my problem:
I wanted one single wordpress page to not have a sidebar. I wanted it to take up the entire width of the page. Makes sense for a forum, right? Not so easy…

Solution:
In the wordpress dashboard, navigate to Appearance > Editor > page.php.
On page.php, I changed:

<?php get_sidebar();; ?>

to:

<?php if(!is_page('Forum')) get_sidebar();; ?>

Here’s what that means:
Typically, wp displays the sidebar. That’s what we usually want. In this case, the exclamation point means “if it is not”. So, the php translation is, “If it’s not the Forum page, then show the sidebar.”

Perfect, so far. However, there was a blank space where the sidebar used to be. Another problem. The forum should be wider. This won’t happen, though, because my stylesheet says the page can only be 510 pixels wide.

So, I went to my stylesheet and created a div titled #widecolumn with a width of 100%.

Back on page.php, I changed the original div titled #contentleft to:

<?php if(!is_page('Forum')) { ?>
<div id="contentleft">
<?php } else { ?>
<div id="widecolumn">
<?php } ?>

Again, with the php translation: “If it’s not the Forum page, use the div #contentleft (with a width of 510 px). If it is the Forum page, use the #widecolumn div that you just made (with a width of 100%).

Yay!