March 17th We Knew Everything Would Be All Right: a coronavirus collaboration book project

Every year on 9/11 Mrs. Beth Laible, 2nd grade teacher at West Holt Elementary in Atkinson, Nebraska, reads to her students a was inspired by a story called “September 12th We Knew Everything Would Be All Right.” It was authored and illustrated by a first grade class from an elementary school in Missouri.

Inspired, she wrote "March 17th We Knew Everything Would Be All Right" for her second grade class during the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic and subsequent school closures. She read her version aloud to her students in one of her Facebook posts during their first week of remote learning. Then she asked her students to collaborate with her to help illustrate the pages. Her students created the illustrations for the story during their remote learning experiences at home and sent back with their weekly work to Mrs. Laible. 

Beth reached out to Katie Morrow from ESU 8 for help in printing copies of the book to give to her students as a keepsake from their 2nd grade year, cut short by the pandemic. 

In addition to printing on blurb.com, Katie created a digital version of their book. Using Keynote and iBooks Author, she enhanced the pages with digital animations to bring the story to life. Mrs. Laible recorded the audio narration in Voice Memos on her iPhone and sent to Katie to add to the pages. The digital version of the book is now published on Apple Books. 

Now, anyone with an iPhone, iPad or Mac and an Apple ID can download for free and read this beautiful story for themselves!

http://books.apple.com/us/book/id1507696114

*Note: The book is best viewed in Apple Books on iPad in portrait orientation. Tap the first page thumbnail and then swipe to each subsequent page for the media to auto-play. Enjoy this story and important message!

If not able to view on an Apple device, you can watch a screen recording of the book on my iPhone here:

West Holt English class publishes book in iBooks Store

Students from Mrs. Dohrman's sophomore English classes are published authors!

The West Holt High School English 10 classes recently achieved status as published authors in the iBooks Store.  Following a study of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the students partnered up to create chapters in a companion guide to the novel.  Tackling tough issues from the time period and themes from the story gave them the perfect backdrop for their Multi-Touch book. 

Each pair of students authored their chapters in iBooks Author on their Macs.  Using built-in widgets from iBooks Author, sound recordings from GarageBand, copyright-friendly images for photo galleries, and additional widgets from bookry.com, they made their writing come to life on the digital pages. Mrs. Dohrman along with Mrs. Morrow from ESU 8 compiled the student chapters into two book projects - one for each period of sophomores. 

Creating a Link with To Kill a Mockingbird

The first of the two books just recently passed the approval process and was released live in Apple's iTunes digital bookstore. Anyone with the free iBooks app can download this student project and view the interactive pages on their Mac, iPad, or iPhone. And look for the second edition by West Holt students to be released very soon. 

Creating Classroom Content with iBooks Author

The following resources are from a workshop with teachers on creating classroom content for iBooks with iBooks Author.  Explore the resources and don't hesitate to inquire more about these exciting possibilities for your classroom.

Digital handout for Creating Classroom Content with iBooks Author

Also, specific projects are pointed out on this blog post:
http://teach42morrow.blogspot.com/2015/09/ibooks-authoring-in-schools.html