A number of ideas prop to mind when I think of using Bookleteer in education. The part I like most is that it’s not restricted to one age bracket. From younger children to older kids in secondary school an eBook can be used in many ways.

For example, for the younger age group, I have created an alphabet book. This can be customised to the child’s preference, such as using their favourite cartoon characters on each page as a visual stimulant. Of course this is where the older brother or sister or parent come in use, to actually create the book on Bookleteer. Or a blank eBook can be printed and with the guidance of parents, children can help draw and stick each letter onto each page, a fun learning activity all rolled into one!

As for the older kids, Bookleteer can be used as an alternative way of presenting coursework, projects, art projects or even as a revision tool or a diary format to keep track of their revision timetable/schedule.

Using Mandy’s artistic ability, I made a mock up of what the alphabet eBook could look like if it was made.

Log onto Bookleteer to see where it can take you…

To help CCI widen the audience for their work we’ve posted 7 eBooks on our diffusion.org.uk library and will be making others available there as they are created. All are welcome to download and share eBooks from the Library of Traces.

students on their way to school

So, what sort of reaction did the eBook receive? Simply put, its reception, both in Khartoum and in the rural farming village of Dangeil, exceeded expectations. We produced 500 English copies and 500 in Arabic, the local language. We ran out of the latter. In retrospect, we should have produced a greater number of copies in Arabic. Copies were given to the local school and arrangements were made so that every household in the village received a copy.

Unloading eBooks and textbooks at the school

Although our eBook takes the form of a more traditional and perhaps somewhat static publication, its impact cannot be underestimated. The Dangeil villagers, and indeed university students and antiquities staff in Khartoum, viewed the publication as written for them, about them, and in their own language. The eBook has served not only as an educational tool, but has empowered the local community and created a sense of pride and proprietary ownership of the ruins and their history.

Julie Anderson
Assistant Keeper
Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, British Museum

Having walked around the library taking pictures, looking through leaflets and flyers, peeking into learning labs and flicking through some books in their library section, I realised that the Idea Store was definitely the ‘mega library’ of East London. Because the Idea Store has so much going on already, I left feeling slightly overwhelmed and wondered how, if at all, bookleteer would fit in to an already thriving library service. However, after some research, I realised that there were two areas that bookleteer could further help the Idea Store, and this was through advertising and user experience eBooks.

The Idea Store could advertise and promote courses, events, and services through bookleteer by creating mini information eBooks, providing a new and modern way to advertise what’s on offer. Allowing the thousands of people who use the store to create user experience eBooks to map out what they’ve learnt and what they’ll take away from using the Idea Store’s services would help both staff and visitors explore ways of improving services and document their experiences at the same time.

Download my ebook of ideas about using bookleteer in the Idea Store

After I was introduced to some of the teachers, a class of year 5 children quietly walked into the classroom where Giles would talk to them about how bookleteer and eBooks worked, and also how this would tie into their current project, a project based on Antarctica and the effects global warming. The children were curious about who we were and what we had to say, and as Giles began to explain that we were going to help publish their school project by turning them into eBooks, some of the children shouted ‘yay!’ and everyone seemed to became even more interested. After Giles demonstrated how eBooks were made, the children were more than ready to get going and make their own.

We then began to upload the children’s work onto bookleteer, with the children standing close-by, often asking us about how bookleteer worked and what they thought about their Antarctica project. After a few near glitches with the schools computers, we began to finish uploading and naming the year 5 eBooks. Almost immediately after we waved the children goodbye, year 6′s entered the classroom with the same amount of wonder as to why me and Giles were standing at the front of the classroom. This time around, however, uploading the children’s eBooks was much faster and easier to do after having uploaded year 5′s eBooks moments before. Then came the task of printing off and making up the children’s eBooks – (a skill that Giles was clearly much faster than me at!) After proudly handing all 32 eBooks to the children’s teachers, Claudia and Matt, our work at Soho Parish was done for the day.

some of the 32 eBooks created by Years 5 & 6, Soho Parish Primary

Following our work with with the children (and lots of help from the staff!) Giles and I had lunch with the head teacher, Rachel Earnshaw, discussing possible projects and ideas for the new term ahead. After how promising my first day was at the school, I can confidently say that I am looking forward to going back to the school after the Christmas holiday and collaborating on other creative projects with the children – and also exploring bookleteer in a school setting.

Having visited the Museum of Childhood regularly during my time in school, it was interesting to revisit this popular Museum as an adult and after refurbishment. Roaming around for only a short amount of time, I quickly remembered why I enjoyed going to the Museum so much as a child. The open space filled with different toys, displays, galleries, colours, materials, shapes, and images, inspired me to think about how we could collaborate on an education project with the Museum using bookleteer. This led me to research into what teaching projects the Museum ran and how this could be incorporated with our software to help aid and promote diverse, new and interesting ways of learning.

After identifying education projects that the Museum are currently running, I have created an eBook that describes how bookleteer can make a difference in the Museum’s education programme. Given that bookleteer makes a range of different kinds of shareable literature, I identified project notebooks and eBooks as good ways to support the Museums ongoing education projects, allowing students to document their work as they go along and then create an eBook of their experiences of that project – children will be able to use new software to write, self publish, and be encouraged to learn in new ways with the help of bookleteer.

Though this is my first education based eBook, I’m sure it will be a good one!

CCI uses the eBook in all sorts of ways with all sorts of people. You can find a number of examples of their designs as part of their Recent Publications on their website. The following is a brief outline of some of the work she is currently doing with the eBook.

Sample project: Trail of Imagination and Curiosity

One example of how CCI has used the eBooks is the project titled Trail of Imagination and Curiosity that took in the spring of 2009 in Mill Road Cemetery, Cambridge.

CCI was commissioned by the Cambridge Folk Museum to explore how the people living and working around the Mill Road Cemetery, particularly the families of children attending St Matthew’s Primary School, Brunswick Nursery and ACE Nursery, could find ways to engage with the space in a more meaningful way.

The project was initially developed using the metaphor of a “trail”. The eBook was redesigned to function as a sort of scrapbook of ideas to help visitors to play in the cemetery and to provide potential visitors with traces of how others had used the site. Two creative facilitators who worked with CCI, Deb Wilenski and Filipa Pereira-Stubbs, organised a series of workshops in the Cemetery with different family groups linked to the local organisations. CCI brought the families in and played with them, listened to their stories about the area and tried to notice how they engaged with the space. This part of the project was reflected in a design by Susanne Jasilek along the top of the eBook available for download. The other half of the eBook was designed so that families who would also like to use the eBook as a part of their visit to the cemetery and trace their own play and discoveries. The key objective of the project as defined by Ruth was to provide the families with a way to begin to find their own way through the cemetery.

For Ruth, this project was a great example of how to gather and publish information as part of CCI’s activities while avoiding dull and formulaic resources such as A4 worksheets. The eBooks could easily be made available as a free, downloadable resource for the potential visitors.

One thing that Ruth would have liked to do with this project, had there been more resources available, was to find a way for families who use the eBooks to exchange their ideas and work with the eBooks over the website, to maintain a dialogue between the families.

Why the eBook?

Ruth’s first encounter with the eBooks was on the Diffusion website where she had a look at a number of Proboscis’ projects. Although she had tinkered around with the material online, she felt the only way she could determine whether or not these tools would be useful as part of her work was to attend one of the free Pitch-up-and-Publish sessions in Proboscis’ studio in London in the autumn of 2009. Although she didn’t know most of the people attending, she was able to get fairly familiar with the eBooks thanks to the presentations there.

Ruth was initially interested in finding new ways of documenting ideas and events within CCI’s workshops so as to make them visible to the participants in the workshops so that they could see the value in what they had done even after the workshop was over:

“If what you value is the process, how do you make that visible? [...] It’s a way of trying to make learning visible and special: through our eyes, but using their voices and as much as possible”

CCI now uses the eBooks and StoryCubes as a way to record what goes on in every session they run. They then offer this documentation back to the participants after the session. Ruth attributes part of CCI’s success in using the eBook as part of their workshops it being an open-ended and low-tech tool rather than something more “threatening”. She explains:

“It’s not big. You know, you can write two or three things, or some people wrote essays. Some people wrote just one word. It feels that you can come at it any way that you want to [...] It had a scope for people to respond to it in a way that they liked.”

Challenges, recommendations and suggestions

One of the resources that Ruth feels makes the eBooks particularly easy to use are the videos available online such as “How to make: Book Portrait Diffusion eBook”. CCI now provides a link to this video whenever they post one of their eBooks. This is a great resource for people who are unfamiliar with how to make the eBooks from scratch. Ruth also recommends using a bone folder for making the books.

After examining my own eBook, the eBookObserver, she cautioned me against using the sketchbook format if I was planning to use it without a flat surface to write on because in such cases, you rarely end-up using both sides of the pages.

Some of the artists she has worked with have also wondered whether it would be possible to generate an online eBook template that would enable the person printing out the eBook to choose the order of the pages before printing.

Writing yesterday about the importance of the tangible paper form of bookleteer reminded me of the ‘A Little Something About Me‘ project by Bev Carter carried out in 2007 – 2009 as part of Proboscis’ Generator Case Studies Residency Programme.

Bev wanted to make connections between her local school in England and the schoolchildren in Umulogho village, Imo state, Nigeria and the eBooks provided her with a way to do this.

The first eBook of the project, ‘A Little Something About Me‘, contained paintings, pictures and information by the students of the local school in Umulogho. The children were asked to write ‘a little something about me’ describing what learning meant to them, their hopes, fears, likes, dislikes etc. These eBooks were brought back to the UK and taken into Bev’s local school where the British children read and responded to the Umulogho eBooks helping to devise the questions for a second eBook called ‘Kedu? How Are You?‘ which was made online then printed out and sent out to Umologho early in 2008.

From Kedu? How Are You? eBook: Questions about Umulogho by British schoolchildren illustrated with pictures by students in Umulogho from the A Little Something About Me eBooks

The ‘Kedu? How Are You?‘ eBook (Kedu means ‘How are you? in Igbo, the main language spoken in Umulogho Village) was designed as a notebook to be completed by the children in Umulogho, responding to questions asked about them and their lives by British schoolchildren. Filling in the eBook also enabled the children of Umulogho to ask questions of the children in Watford such as ‘what seasons do you have in England?’ and ‘what religions do you have?’

Response to the Kedu? How Are You? eBook by students in Umulogho

In October 2008 the completed Kedu eBooks were taken back to the school in Watford that had asked the original questions. The students were delighted to see the answers to their questions, such as ‘are there any crocodiles in the village stream?’ (some Umulogho students had seen some and others hadn’t) and got the students talking about the differences between the everyday lives of the Umulogho children and their own – for example, what time they wake up in the morning and what they do before school as most students in Umulogho were awake by 5.30 am and had gone to the village stream and back to collect water before going to school.

Response to the Kedu? How Are You? eBook by students in Umulogho

Even though the school in Umulogho doesn’t yet have a computer or internet access, it was still possible to send and receive paper copies of the eBooks, and by scanning in the completed eBooks the results could be shared online. In this way a conversation was able to be held across continents, cultures and technological formats.

Read more about the project and download the Umulogho eBooks at diffusion.org.uk

My name is J.-Thomas Maillioux, and I’ve been working as the librarian for the collège Evariste Galois middle school since 2005. I’ve recently started to use the bookleteers to create “adventure books” for our first-year pupils’ library orientation program in a format both convenient and original. The flexibility of the Bookleteer publishing platform has also allowed me to quickly and easily implement the modifications suggested by my own observations, or advice from the students and teachers involved in the orientation program.

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 486Kb

I’ve also been able to sit down with small group of students to discuss what they would do with the Bookleteers : they suggested uses both for school (custom booklets for note taking on school trips, tutorials or HOWTOs for specific activities in sciences and technology classes, reminders while giving presentations in front of a class) and home (grocery shopping, tasks listing, books and stories writing or games) that make me think that, with the correct amount of support from their teachers in acquiring and supporting the necessary skills, they should be able to make the Bookleteers and the publishing platform their own relatively quickly : a good way to reconcile them not only with the printed word, but also with their printed word – that what they write, too, can be and deserves being made into a book with very little hassle.

We’d love to hear more testimonials of how bookleteer, the eBooks and StoryCubes are being used – please send your feedback to us at bookleteer at proboscis.org.uk