Sometimes sentences are just dull; and finding the inspiration to make them interesting isn’t easy. So what do you do?
Well, worry no more. In six easy steps you can make a dull sentence a far more elaborate beast. See the attached worksheet and powerpoint…
Introducing A Storm of Kings to a class is an exciting time. You’ll need to know what your pupils know about medieval life and introduce them to several concepts, not least the idea of a fictional land filled with an endless variety of landscapes.
We’ve put together several different introductory approaches and we’ll be posting them over the next few days.
Let’s start with an old fashioned powerpoint for introducing things…
We’ve used a lot of images in our book and we managed to pick them mainly from the enormous amount of fan art that is available for George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books. But in using iBooks to distribute our work it’s important that we credit those artists we’ve used. So, over the next two weeks we hope to hear back from all of the artists (yes, we’ve attempted to contact every single one!) and put out an update for our book with all the credit and links to the original art that we can muster.
As soon as we get the sheet of responses it will go into the book. We hope we’ll have good news about this soon.
It Lives!
Tonight, at 7.05 GMT, our book became available on the iBooks store.
Get your (UK) copy here… https://t.co/FIVGdxbmnC
This is tremendously exciting and we hope as many people as possible can download it and even use it in the classroom (or out of it, we’re not too prescriptive).
We need to hear from you on loads of points: which parts of the book work, which need a bit of improvement or added clarity? Have we made any grammatical errors, any typos? We want feedback regardless of what format it takes. We might not be doing an edit for a month or two but we need to log as many errors as possible.
Lastly, and probably most importantly, we want examples of work. This blog is intended to be a celebration of work created by students, showing the limitless possibilities and entertaining ideas that they can generate. Obviously in the internet age we don’t want any student details, just a picture of the work and an initial will do fine.
Enjoy!
Whilst Apple deliberate over the finer points of my grammar and poor quality photoshop skills I thought I’d share with you the screenshots that I’ve sent for the iBook storefront. They give a reasonable impression of what the book will look like…
There’s obviously tonnes to look at there but you get the basics of our lush backgrounds and lesson plan possibilities as well as a variety of the widgets you can click like support shields, whiteboards and YouTube links.
More to follow as we get news.
We’ll even be doing some tutorials.
Enjoy!
Last night we received an e-mail from Apple that suggested our book was nearly over the line to being published on the iBooks store. We just had to iron out a few small wrinkles (which we think we’ve managed to do!) and in the process we tried to jazz up the cover and add some screenshots to get people interested. Apple have very kindly sent us a few badges too, so we can pop them on our website when the book finally goes live.
So, whilst we await approval we’re pretty happy to share our new front cover, we hope you really like it. Photoshop and Illustrator do not come naturally to a pair of writers like us…
Storm of Kings iBook testing went swimmingly well today. So much so that the book is now live and downloadable on your idevice via the following QR code.
But, due to a couple of minor teething issues with certain aspects of hosting (and other such hi-tech hijinks), we can’t quite offer it to people outside of our school. So, pupils of Oakwood, get stuck in and download the book. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait another week or two. My apologies.
There’s more to follow but here’s our download QR…
We’re adding the finishing touches to the Storm of Kings iBook. No prizes for guessing our influences. We’re just getting some embedded literacy tasks in there. We’ll be having a full set of road tests this week before it goes live after our half term. Just thought I’d share a taste of what’s to come with an early draft of our launch poster (don’t bother with the QR code yet it’s not live)…
Welcome to the first post on the Storm of Kings blog.
This is a blog for pieces of work related to the Storm of Kings iBook.
In the next few weeks we really hope that you’ll enjoy seeing some fantastic pieces of work stemming from our exciting new project. Soon we’ll put up a link to the book, connect our Twitter account and start posting exciting pieces of work from the growing families of Northerland!
A Storm of Kings 