Pete Sharma Associates

Tablets are the place to be right now. I am, of course, delighted with my iPad 2 – a constant companion which really has changed the way I work and play (or at least made both much easier). Newest kid on the block – which might just rival the Apple machine and its closest rival, the Samsung Galaxy – is the Nexus 7 from Google. The Nexus looks sleek and appealing, and is more pocketable that some of its competitors with a screen size of 7 inches (17.8 cms) – roughly the same size as the Galaxy or indeed the Amazon Kindle. It runs the latest version of Android (which rejoices in the name of Jelly Bean) and comes with Google Chrome as its standard browser. US, UK, Canada and Australia will be the launch territories for the new tablet in mid-July.

Best of all, it will have a UK price tag of just £159 (8GB version). Much more flexible than the Kindle, I know which I would rather spend money on. In fact I’m already lining it up as possible birthday present material – which I couldn’t financially consider with the iPad (so of course the kids just borrow mine). Check out the full story at the BBC.

Byron

I was just about to teach today when the boyz from the Black Stuff arrived…..they wanted to take the OHP out of the room. Why? Because it’s all digital today ……………and there was a (Dios forbid) data projector in the room.

Wah! Don’t take away my drugstore…:-)

I was all ready with my OHTs and task for students to produce word maps and display them to the group…

Luckily I was with an administrative angel who sent the Men in Black back to the lagoon (aka the IT room) from whence they came and let me KEEP my OHT. Oh, frabjous day…..

I really believe in the co-existence of technologies. I like an IWB in my room, and also a WHITEBOARD. Static, ancient, but a friend indeed.

Definitely, I’d like to teach with state-of-the-art tech and a whole range of fall-back things…like an OHT.

End of rant.

My favourite teaching moment of last year? A Russian girl who had NEVER SEEN an OHP in her LIFE!

Should I begin to feel old? (Don’t answer that!) Nah – it’s called c0-existencia in Spanish – the co-existence of old and new…

whatever is APPROPRIATE, I say……:-)

We all have a book in us, so they say. Some, like Harper Lee, only one. Others, like Dickens, are a tad more prolific. Whatever your ambitions, once you start writing, you only have two options – keep it to yourself or publish and be damned.

In the good old days, the latter option meant that you have to convince a publisher that what you had was worth the considerable financial risk involved. Contrary to public belief, publishers don’t have a licence to print money. By the time they have paid their editors, rights assistants, salespeople, insurance, shipping, warehouses, designers, production, printers etc etc etc  they have to be ABSOLUTELY certain the book is going to sell. Publishers will carry out a return-on-investment (ROI) analysis to check whether the forecast sales will justify the cost involved in bring the book to market.

The first thing of course is deciding exactly what to write, and why.  Say – for example – you want to write a coursebook on English for professional footballers. It’s a brilliant concept, and you have some excellent ideas. You have a great track record and once taught the present continuous to Fabio Capello. You approach A Big ELT Publisher, and having run their ROI (not that you are likely to get that far) they politely inform you they will probably sell 250 copies, as their reps don’t visit football clubs. Assuming a price of £30 per copy, they won’t even begin to cover production costs. Even if they did publish your work, you would be very lucky to make more than a few tens of pounds in royalties, based on a net royalty of 10%. Your bright dream collapses.

But what if you published it as an eBook, yourself?  It’s more work, but more rewarding – in every sense of the word.  In the next couple of blogs we’ll take a quick peek at some of the options.

If you’re happy for your eBook to be available just in electronic format for Apple devices (and, let’s face it, there are a lot around – Apple has 50% of the tablet market, and that’s set to grow) you could do worse than use iBooks Author. This is free software from the app store or the iBooks Author website that allows you to create pretty cool eBooks, replete with photos, graphics and even animations. It was designed with educators in mind, and is template based, so (relatively) easy to use. Only problem is that you can only sell the finished product via the Apple iBookstore, but given Apple’s dominance I don’t think this is a huge deal breaker.

You can either sell just  through iBookstore – which may achieve much lower sales, but  you get to keep a whopping 70% of the sales price.  Or you can maximise your chances of selling your iBook by going through an aggregator, which basically markets iBookstore books through a variety of resellers – note you’re still going through Apple to start with.  An example is Bookwire. They take a cut of course – typically 45% of Apple’s price – but maximise your visibility.

So – rather than dreaming of 250 dead-tree books at £30, of which you receive about £1 a copy, you might actually sell ten times as many eBooks to footballers with international aspirations worldwide, bringing you a good deal more (though not quite in Fabio Capello’s ballpark).

Check out iBooks Author, then come back next week for a look at publishing for the Kindle.

Byron

Nice to see the first app to win an ELTon!

I’m pleased to say that my review of Sounds has just been published in the ELTJ.

So, if you are interested in reading it, please visit the following site:

ELTJ Review

Enjoy!

Conversation with Pete Sharma – Educator, Trainer and Author

Meet me aka. guest Pete Sharma on WizIQ at 11:30 AM (GMT) on 22nd Friday, June, when he talks about his life with Dr. Nellie Deutsch: listen , interact and ask questions as well.

To join us, please click here: http://www.wiziq.com/class/info.aspx?detail=879893-conversation-with-pete-sharma-educator-trainer-and-author&utm_source=wiziq&utm_medium=email&utm_content=conversation&utm_campaign=pete-sharma

Wow – what a FANTASTIC weekend…… Paris in June……

It was great to catch up with folk and a huge THANKS to everyone who came to my session on Apps on Saturday morning. Also to the fabulous BESIG online team and to Chia Suan for her phabby foto (left) of proceedings.

Here is the PowerPoint Paris as a .pdf

Here is the CORRECT link to The Round for a free sample of our forthcoming e-book!

I will need some time to prepare the Handout of suggested Apps – thanks to everyone who gave me a suggestion on a piece of paper or to the global audience for typing in ideas to the chat-box – I’ll get onto typing them up while watching England’s progress in Euro. Will aim to post the Handout later this week

Wishing you all ‘appiness…………..(look, i resisted saying that in Paris!!)

During what must be the worst “summer” (ha ha rofl) in living memory our three hens have been floundering about in the muddy quagmire that used to be our garden, but are still producing eggs at the rate of one per day. However, read on … I aim to improve on their egg-laying capabilities via a mobile device….

The story – as reported in the Telegraph – concerns a lonely hen called Maia, whose best mate was gobbled up by a fox. The hen, traumatised and bereft of companionship, stopped laying. Instead of consigning the chicken to the stock-pot of history, her charitable owner decided to try to re-train her, using an iPad and appropriate videos. And I don’t mean Chicken Run – movies of real chickens running around, laying eggs, doing normal chicken stuff. Clearly there are people who film such things.

The results were frankly astounding. After just a few days Maia was back to full capacity (five eggs a week) and is keeping up with her tablet TV. Won’t be long before she gets a comfy beanbag and a few cans of lager in….sorry, she’s a hen, not a cockerel.

So there you have it. We now have conclusive proof that even a chicken can use an iPad (so what are you waiting for?) and that tablets, when used for self-access, can dramatically improve learning outcomes. See the pictures for yourself here.

There is of course a very serious side to this. As the prices of tablets come down, we’re going to see them everywhere. They are light enough for a child to carry, and robust enough to withstand the odd knock. Sales are predicted to top 60m units this year – just for the iPad. Overall tablet sales should reach 120m units – and that’s just in 2012. They are starting to overtake laptop sales.  Leading universities and schools such as EF are experimenting with giving them to classes.  I’m putting together some stats and will post these in the next week or two.

Next week – back to the serious stuff. There’ll be more on Lulu and the start of a short how-to series on publishing yourself.

Byron

We are DELIGHTED to say that our latest e-book – Apptivities for Business English – has just gone into labs. To click through, please click on:

http://the-round.com/labs/apptivities-for-business-english/

We hope you will be as App-y as wot we are

We are delighted that our next book (Pete & Barney) is shortly going to be in Labs. It was a great day today as Lindsay Clandfield mailled over a pic of the cover (left). I sent my PPT for the unveiling in BESIG Paris (16th June) to Carl Dowse, who has checked it works OK in Adobe platform. Exciting times……

Who is this e-book for?

This e-book is for business English teachers. It contains ideas for using apps with your student or students in-class in the classroom.  The e-book also contains ideas for your business English students to do between classes, on the move.

Plus: free Student’s e-book

All the ideas for students to use alone are available in a free e-book for students. Now, you can’t say fairer than that…..