Animate Your Lessons with Hype

Wow.  Sorry for the dearth of blogging. Between apartment hunting, dealing with my shipping, and trying to get my head around the myriad activities, meetings, and general goings-on at the new school, Bib 2.0 has been pretty low on my list of "Things I Have To Do!"

But I hope to start blogging more regularly (grin--well, as regularly as I ever blog!) in a couple weeks.

In the meantime, as you may or may not remember, I'm working on putting my lessons into digital format, and awhile ago I posted a link to the iBooks version of my lesson on primary sources. I wasn't completely happy with it, but I was a) doing it for a class and just needed to finish it and b) trying to figure out all the ins, outs, and widgets of the iBooks Author app.

I started revising it yesterday.  Basically, I wanted it to have more meaningful interactive elements, and I needed widgets not available in the iBA app itself.  While digging around online trying to find them, I ran across an incredibly awesome app:  Tumult's Hype.

Hype let's you create animated, interactive HTML5 widgets to add to websites or iBooks Author.  If you're familiar with the iWorks suite interface, you'll feel at home with Hype.  It does take a while to figure out the organizational structure for creating  a widget (it's based on keyframes), but there are two video tutorials to give you the basics.

The site also has a page of professional looking examples that you can both view AND download, which lets you open up the file and see how they put it all together.  VERY helpful!

Here's my own brief demo of the first part of my interactive lesson on working with cartoons, to give you an idea of what Hype can do.  Not bad for $49.99!