When people are learning to make iBooks with iBooks Author they often want to have cool widgets for their students to interact with. As I’ve shown in previous posts, you can create some pretty easily with Keynote. I really like showing teachers how to use Keynote to do this because if they use a Mac they already have it. When you couple this with a free image editor, Gimp, you can do some really cool stuff.
The example here is not one I’ve used to teach my students, but one I used at last year’s iBookHack. From a teaching standpoint it might not be very good, I’m not really sure since I don’t teach social studies. It’s just an example of how you might create an interactive map to use with your students. The first video below walks you through using Gimp to create your maps. The second shows you how to use Keynote to bring them together as an interactive widget you can drop into an iBook.
Excellent resource, Steve. Nice step-by-step presentation. Easy to follow. Easy to do. Thanks for sharing.
It is nice, although i have noticed that keynote exports only up to 1024×768 or 1920×1080. In the first case it is impossible to convert to Retina resolution, with a resulting pixelation of images, in the second case, the format is too wide for iPads aspect ratio.