Part 1 of a 4-part series looking at how the popular educational apps Book Creator and Explain Everything can be used together.
Other posts from this series:
Part 2: From Explain Everything to Book Creator to iTunes UPart 3: Create a comic in Book Creator and animate it in Explain EverythingPart 4: Hand-drawn animations in Explain Everything – published with Book Creator
We’re teaming up with the Book Creator team to explore ways in which their app can be used with Explain Everything by teachers and students. This is the first post in a series of four articles looking at combining the features of the two apps for various scenarios.
Today, with the help of Dan Kemp, Community Manager at Red Jumper, we’re looking at how to export a book made in Book Creator as a PDF so it can be opened in Explain Everything.
The scenario: taking a book and annotating it during a presentation to your students/classmates
Imagine you have started creating a book in Book Creator and then realize it would be really cool to use what you have made to do a live presentation to students. You have used Book Creator to take advantage of the wide range of fonts and simple text editing, but now you want to take it a step further.
The project is a simple diagram showing the position and behavior of the Sun, Earth and Moon.
Watch the video below to see how this can be done or follow the steps below.
Creating the book in Book Creator
- Add the background elements by tapping the + and choosing Photos. You’ll need to make sure the images are already in your iPad’s Photo Library. Resize the objects so they are sized relative to each other.
- Tap the + again and choose Text, and add captions to the objects.
- You can tap the Inspector to change colours, fonts, sizes and more. The Open Dyslexic typeface is a good choice in the classroom.
Add a caption below the diagram and choose an appropriate background for the text so it’s readable.
Exporting the book as a PDF and opening in Explain Everything
- In Book Creator, go to the My Books screen and tap the export icon beneath your book (the one on the right).
- Choose ‘Export as PDF’ and then choose ‘Single pages’ (not that it matters – there’s only one page anyway).
- From the options presented, first tap the ‘Open in…’ icon and then you’ll choose Explain Everything.
Annotating the diagram in Explain Everything
Now we’re going to imagine presenting this to a class and demonstrating the paths of orbit and the ways in which they rotate. We’ll record this so we can export it as a video and use it again in future.
At this point you may want to screencast your iPad onto a bigger screen – you could use AirPlay with Apple TV to do this or simply connect your iPad with a cable to a computer and hook it up to a projector.
- Press record (in the bottom toolbar) to start recording the screencast.
- Choose the Pen tool, select a colour and start annotating.
- Use different colours for different parts of the diagram, and explain what you’re doing (e.g. it takes 365 days for the Earth to go round the Sun).
Stop the recording.
As a bonus, you can now export the slide as a video, for referencing later – tap the Export icon in the bottom right and choose the video format, and the app you wish to save it in.
About Book Creator
Book Creator is the no.1 book app in iTunes in 80 countries, and a very popular educational app responsible for the creation of over 15 million ebooks so far.
Book Creator is available on iPad, Android tablets and Windows devices. Find out more at bookcreator.com.