Sometimes, it’s just cool to play around and that’s what I did yesterday. When I was done, I had produced something that was kind of neat and I could see using it as a summary activity to show off some blogging work.
One of the really attractive things about the iPad is the way that it manipulates documents and Flipboard for iPad does a very nice job of it. I asked myself the question – could this be done on the screen inside a browser easily? It turns out that you can with the help of the website, PDF to Flash Page Flip.
Now, what to flip. The site takes a PDF file as input and creates a Flash object that you can manipulate as output. Hmmmm.
Then, I remembered my old friend BlogBooker. BlogBooker will take any WordPress, Blogger, or LiveJournal blog and make a PDF file from it. It’s a great way to back up your blog. So, I wondered, could I make myself a flipable version of my blog. Is flipable a word? Probably not, but that’s what I want to do.
So, I went to my WordPress site and configured an export of the content. Details about the procedure were originally posted here.
BlogBooker was still great and quickly created a PDF file of my blog. It was long overdue anyway. The resulting file was huge and so for the purposes of this experiment, I went back in and chose just a couple of entries from the blog as a proof of concept.
Next, it was off to the PDF to Flash Page Flip page and I did a quick check of the configuration and uploaded the PDF file.
In a couple of seconds, I was done. The result was a ZIP file that I opened. The site had bundled up the whole thing as a webpage that I could flip my way through. Check it out by clicking here. Use the arrows to flip forward and backward and zoom in to read the content.
It’s a pretty cool interaction that is created with my own content.
Where would you use it? Admittedly, it’s a makework type of project but I’m thinking that it would be a nice final activity for a blogging project. Sure, the students have their original blog but the ability to back up and then flip their way through it just adds a nice little touch to the whole activity.
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