'My Story' - Bookmaker for Kids (IPad)

'My Story' Apple App for IPads

I had mentioned to my group that as part of the lesson plan we could use or recommend an App to teachers for creating the class cookbook. 'My Story' was an application that my classroom teacher had used last year with a year 3/4 class to create an Ebook. I remembered that this had been a great success with the students and 
had been used for assessment of the students. I didn't know much about Apps and Ipads myself, so wanted to get a better insight into how it all works.

I was fortunate enough that this weekend that I was able to loan an Ipad from my school. I spent some time looking at the application 'My story' and went about creating an example-open with IBooks of how students can use the program, to be included in our lesson plan.

A little information about My story:  My story is a simple story maker and book creator for children available from the Apple App store. Children can draw, use photos, record voice, type and send their books to friends and family. 

I thought this app allowed some good features that would be simple for the students to create their recipes and produce a cookbook. I was excited to be able to share this with my group members who when I had previously mentioned the idea, were confused. It was difficult to explain what I had meant and how we were going to use it. By sending them the link to 'My Story'  they were be able to watch the fantastic overview video that demonstrates clearer how we could use 'My Story' on an Ipad and what its features it has.  http://mystoryapp.org/.

I was really enjoying our group task and found I was getting immersed with the authenticity of the project. I put myself in the students perspective by creating a recipe with instructions, ingredients, demonstrating the app, drawing and recording features. This later would be used as a sample resources for teachers on our wiki. However, this was where the problems started.... I had made this great sample, and I was eager share it with my group. I stupidly had assumed that I have a Mac so would simply be able to save it from the IPad onto my computer as a document and share it with the rest of my group members. I was wrong!

I tried multiple different ways....

-saving it as a PDF
-syncing the IPad to my computer 
-uploading to Dropbox
- emailing it to myself 

each experiencing further issues....

When trying to upload to dropbox I had realised that it had been sent to my ex-classroom teachers personal dropbox which I could not access. I decided that I would give her a ring to seek some advice, she had used this program before. Unfortunately, she could not remember how she had got the students work off the Ipads and could access it through dropbox her suggestion was a Google Search to figure it out, this is what she would have usually done. Far too hard... there must be a simpler solution, I kept on searching.

Next I tried emailing it as a PDF document to myself. But how do I create an email account? I had managed to connect up to my WiFi at home, but the assigned email account was my ex-teachers. I needed to somehow change this. I went into the mail and account settings, here I found the option to change this but for some reason hotmail or my outlook account were not working. A third and finally attempt with a gmail account... it worked! 

Next problem... when I opened the attachment in the email, it was opening on my computer in a program called Adobe Editions, the layout appeared distorted. How do I get Ibooks for Mac. I noticed their were a few people on Skype at the time including our Tutor Jenni, I posted a question to see if any of my peers had any suggestions.

Nicole very kindly said that she would have a look, she owns an Ipad. It opened fine on hers in IBooks. Like myself she was under the impression that you should be able to get Ibooks for Macs but I discovered after doing some further research on the web it turns out that Apple have only made Ibooks available for Ipads and Ipods at this stage.Very disappointing! I looked into other options such as Kindle readers for Mac but these only allowed you to view purchased books not read an ebook that you had created yourself.

If we are to use this as a sample for the teacher resource page we will have to include a note to say that it would require opening in Ibooks to view.