Apple's latest announcement of its new application: iBooks Author, will, once again, revolutionize an industry. I am interested to see what this tool means for publishing, for textbooks, for education, for the idea of students as creators...I am (let's admit it) a bit excited and nervous! If you don't have a Mac and cannot download iBooks Author for free, try some of the tools listed below (easy to use and free are the criteria here). If you have more, please share!

1. FlipSnack - Create a flip book by combining PDF documents

2. StoryJumper - If the online version isn't enough, you can even order a hard copy

3. Storybird - Beautiful graphics and the ability to embed

4. Youblisher - The same concept as FlipSnack

5. Page Flip Flap - Upload a range of file types to create your e-book

6. ZooBurst - Create e-books with 3D pop-ups!

This week, while working on putting together a lesson for a classroom of future middle school science teachers, I ran across a few great sites. As we all know, locating and collecting resources can take up a HUGE amount of time. That's why I love my Diigo and bookmark like crazy. Every once in a while, somebody uses a cool tool at a presentation or conference or (and this is REALLY weird), the supermarket and that is when I pull out my handy-dandy smartphone with bookmarking app installed to make sure the tool is saved for future reference. There are bookmarking apps for everything and I encourage you to pick one and install it everywhere. Aside from Diigo, another one I can recommend is Evernote (though not as novice user-friendly as Diigo). Advantage to bookmarking: Easy way to start your personal learning network!

Here are a few sites I just added to my Diigo account:

1. More Ideas Than You'll Ever Use for Book Reports
2. Top 20 (should be Top 1 million!!!) Web 2.0 Must Haves for Every 21st Century Classroom

Finally, I recently posted a research article that compared what parents want from teacher websites to what teachers THINK parents want from teacher websites. Here's a quick and dirty summary of that table:

Obviously there are some issues here. Your parents and teachers, if surveyed, might give you a completely different list. There are also some questions: parents want a forum for class information and news but not a blog - maybe these parents did not truly understand what a blog was. However, these results do point out the importance of communicating with parents and students before spending time designing a website for your classroom or school library. Why put effort into something they will never use or look at while ignoring information they want?