My turtle book talk made with the Explain Everything app

Did you know there is a way to do a screen capture on your iPad? The Explain Everything app records what you do inside it such as drawing on an image, using a virtual laser pointer, and rotating/enlarging/shrinking an image as well as your narration. Here is an example:
 
Here is how I made the video:

1) The box turtle photo was on my desktop computer, so I emailed it to myself, saved the image to the iPad camera roll, and cropped it using the free Adobe Photoshop Express app.

2) I opened my picture book Tracks in the Sand in the iBooks app, and took a screenshot of the spread I wanted. You can take an iPad screenshot by briefly pressing the round Home button and the Lock button at the same time. The resulting image ends up on the Camera roll in the Photos app. I cropped it a little bit to get rid of the iPad info bar on top because it was unnecessary as well as confusing.

3) The third image is a jpeg of the iBooks cover of Tracks. It’s a reasonably big image so it won’t get blurry when it’s enlarged.

4) In the Explain Everything app, I imported the three images and arranged them in starting position: the box turtle was on top, the sea turtle was underneath, and the book cover was shrunk down in the lower right corner.

5) Making sure the laser pointer button was selected, I pressed Record. When I was finished with the box turtle photo, I deselected the laser pointer button, used a “pinch” to shrink the photo, then moved it to the lower left corner, revealing the sea turtle illustration.

6) After selecting the laser pointer again, I proceeded with the rest of the talk.

7) Exporting the movie to YouTube took about 30 minutes total because the file was first compressed then uploaded automatically.

I heard about the Explain Everything app (and other iPad screen capture options) on Langwitches Blog, which is dedicated to 21st century skills and technologies. The hardest thing about making this video (besides figuring out what to say and not flubbing it) was creating a quiet place to make the recording. The refrigerator was rumbling, the cat was meowing, the birds were chirping…I even had to chase away a pair of squirrels who were scolding the cat through the patio screen. And then there were the lawn mowers(!) The best place turned out to be in our closet where the clothing helped to muffle outside sounds.

I hope this info has been useful…have a productive week!

Sea turtle resource roundup

From Tour de Turtles site

To help celebrate the new digital edition of Tracks in the Sand, I dug around online for some resources to help primary kids learn about our flippered friends. :

• Tour de Turtles shows actual migration tracks of individual turtles, downloadable Flash presentations, and much more.

• SEE Turtles classroom resources include species fact sheets, food webs, and threats that turtles face.
• The Ocean Conservancy Sea Turtle coloring book has 34 pages with many nice images plus a text in both English and Spanish. Click here to start download of the PDF.
• Save the Turtles has interactive online games, plus many other resources. 

• Seaturtles.org has a fun activity on this page about making a loggerhead from a paper plate.
• Deep Space Sparkle has a foil collage art project featuring turtles, including a step-by-step drawing.

•  A sea turtle painting can be found on Art Projects for Kids.

• This coloring page is adapted from the artwork in Tracks:

Click image to download PDF

• Click for the preview page and a free sample of Tracks in the Sand (the sample has to be downloaded via the iBooks app.)

•  The original edition of Tracks is out of print but is still widely available in libraries.

Hope this list is helpful. If you know of other good resources, please leave a link or other info in the comments.

Tracks in the Sand now on the #iBookstore!

After being stuck in my flat files for too long, my sea turtle picture book is back in the swim of things again.

Here is the iBooks preview page …if you’re using an iPad to read this blog post you can download a free sample right away.

Or, later on you can open your iBooks app, click on the Store button and search on Tracks in the Sand. Eventually I’d like to make this book available on other tablets/formats, but this is a start.

Also, this page on my web site has a coloring page to download.

So now the question is, what will my next digital project be…?

Toodleloo for now!

Loreen