Keynote: Go Interactive

If you're at all interested in you and your students creating interactive content on iBooks Author (and if you're not, why aren't you?), at some point you're going to have to get your head around the Thing of Wonder that is Keynote.

 And that's not just the newly-minted ADE-to-be promoting Apple products.

As soon as we've finished the fine-tuning, I'll post a link to the WWII Home History book the kids created. It is fabulous, if I do say myself. What we're really excited about is the kids' response to it: their empowerment, and the monumental improvement in their writing on just this one project. But more on that later. I promise.

 Back to Keynote.

While iBA provides some nice interactive widgets, most of the REALLY cool ones you see in books are made on Keynote. I thought it was just presentation software; it had some cool design elements (adding shadows and reflections, etc), but I didn't truly understand what it could with with a little imagination and know how. After I realized that everything I spent hours (and $30) creating on Hype, I could have done on Keynote, I determined to figure this out.

So here's the video of an interactive animation on evaluating historical maps.  You can download the file here, if you want to go in to see how I did it.

Anyway, all of this is a very long lead up to sharing Keynote Classroom a great website I found this morning,  hosted by Mike Sammartano, a science teacher near NYC.  He has some quick, fun tutorials exploring some of the advanced features in Keynote, and showing some cool animations he created. One of them inspired me so much, I have a new project to play with this Saturday afternoon.

UPDATE: Hmm. Blogger really isn't liking that video.  Let me upload it to Youtube, and I'll repost.