Hyperlinking Brains - Part 2

In my last post, I talked about why I decided to write my own textbook for 8th grade as a way of taking advantage of their hyperlink prone minds.  I have now been using the book for one semester, so I cannot yet fully speak to how it is going but I do have a few observations about it.  I also have some advice for anyone out there who would like to try for themselves.

My Observations
1.  On the first day of school, the kids are super impressed.  When your textbook was written by your teacher, you think that person is an expert whether they are or not.  I have tried to tell them that it isn’t like I had to get it published, but they don’t get that. 
2.  All media is in one place (offline).  Our school as a great LMS where I can put videos and other resources; but you have to be online to get to them.  Having them in the book has been great because they don’t have to be online to use it.  This means they can still do their homework on an athletic bus or if the network goes down.
3.  I was able to use the analogies, mnemonic devices, examples, and stories in the book that I think work well with the material.  If you have been teaching longer than two years, you have a favorite analogy for double replacement reactions, an acronym that you love for helping kids remember a list, a great example of iambic pentameter, or the perfect illustration that helps your kids wrap their minds around the meaning of manifest destiny.  These are rarely things you got from your textbook because they have to use pretty bland or generic examples to avoid problems.  If you write your own, you get to include what works for you.
4.  The kids are more likely to read it because they know (and like, hopefully) you. 
5.  It is editable.  Because I was trying to get this done for this year, I didn’t have time to the proofing I would have liked.  As a result, I have found spelling errors and grammatical issues while using the book this year.  I remind the kids that they are the guinea pig group and encourage them to point them out.  I will be able to fix it for next year.  Better than that, I can edit the content for next year.  If I find a video that better illustrates a point than the one I have, I can replace it.  If I go to a national park and see a good analogy that I never thought of before, I can add it to the book.  I can update the book as often as I want to re-issue it.  For me that will be only once a year, but that is still better than the printed textbooks I was using 6 years in a row before replacing them.
6. 


The hyperlinks.  You may remember that this was the reason I started this to begin with.  I wanted to include links for students so that they could explore something if they found it interesting.  These are screen shots of a couple of pages.  Each red word you see is a link.   They mostly lead to wikipedia pages, although I did include a few for How Stuff Works, WebMD, dictionary.com, and the Physics Classroom as well as some other sites I thought might be of interest.  While writing, I learned some interesting things that I wouldn’t have time or space to include in a book, but including a link allows anyone who finds the thought as interesting as I did to explore it.  For example, when researching about the early days of NASA, I found that we built it from an already existing organization called NACA, which had been the governing body for airplane flight.  I don’t have time to teach them this, but if they find it interesting, they can link to the NACA wikipedia page.  I don’t know how many of those the kids have taken advantage of, but it is an option for them.  When I survey my kids at the end of the year, it is something I intend to ask.

Advice
If you’re a teacher with Mac access, let me recommend that you take advantage of iBooks author to make some content of your own.  You don’t necessarily need to write an entire textbook.  Perhaps, there is one unit in your book that you feel is weak.  You could just make your own chapter for that.  Here’s some advice if you are up for the challenge.

1.  Organize your thoughts first.  Remember making outlines for research papers?  It’s still a good idea, but now you can do it in a way that is a little more helpful.  I dedicated a jump drive to the book.  I made a folder for each chapter.  Within that chapter, I made folders for each section.  I put a document or two in each folder.  If you have videos that you use frequently, you might want to include those too.  I already had those separated by chapter on my Mac, so I didn’t use jump drive space for that.
2.  However long you think it is going to take, it will take longer.  This isn’t a weekend project for the weekend before you start the chapter, at least not if you want to do it well.  I made doing the entire book a summer project and got through about two thirds of it.  If I hadn’t had other goals for the summer, I probably could have finished it; but it was more time consuming than I imagined. 
3.  Let the links come to you as you write.  I started making a list of links before I began writing, but as I wrote, I found that it was really easier to let them lead me.  As I was writing an example, I would want to look it up.  I figured if I wanted to look it up, the kids might too and included it.  If I had limited myself to the planned material, I wouldn’t have as much good stuff.

4.  Don’t feel like you have to write in order.  If you are putting your writing in documents and then copying and pasting them into iBooks Author (which I recommend), you don’t need to write it in order.  Start with what you are most comfortable with writing.  It gives you some momentum.  Write the chapter you taught this week this weekend while it is still fresh in your mind.  When I was trying to start with chapter 1, I made little progress.  It was too daunting.  When I started with my favorite chapter, it was much easier to get going.

If your kids have Macs with Mavericks, they have iBooks to read.  If not, you can export to pdf.  The videos won’t work, but everything else will.  Some of my kids parents have asked for it on pdf because they have windows machines at their home and would like a “printed copy.”  I don’t know if they ever print it, but they can if they want to.

Don’t be afraid of this.  It seems scary, but it is really taking what you already know, teach, and do and putting into a lovely and accessible format.