iBooks Hackathon

I’ve already written a bit about iBooks Author and how awesome it is for creating resources to share with your students. I know some of you are probably rolling your eyes about now and thinking something along the lines of, “More iPads in education… When will this fad die?” Whether or not iPads in the classroom are a fad or not is really immaterial at this point. Like it or not, many schools are already or will be going one to one with them. So we should probably find the best way to use this technology to support our students.

Last year Dan Spencer put me in contact with Tony DiLaura. Tony is an educator from Zeeland Michigan. He is also excited about the potential impact of teacher created textbooks using iBooks Author. His goal is to bring educators together to collaboratively create resources that can be used to make the creation of these books easier. After some discussion the idea of the iBooks Hackathon was born.

We will officially kickoff the Hackathon at this year’s MACUL conference. Then in June we will have two workshops, one on the east side of Michigan and the other on the west side. At these workshops we hope to bring educators together into groups and begin working on cool resources. Throughout the summer these groups will continue to work and in August we will take what has been created to that point and have the official launch of what will hopefully be a large collection of resources for other educators to use.

if you are interested in participating you can check out our Google+ Community as well as our page in the MI-Learning section of MACUL’s website.