Context
Abibooks is a project that lists over a hundred interactive ebooks and a collection of almost twenty interactive ebooks created by school partners with the aim of combining the pleasure of reading with that of learning.
As part of the Salon du livre et de la presse jeunesse de Seine Saint Denis 2023, Les Apprimeurs hosted a webinar on the role of interactive digital books in learning, with a presentation of the Abibooks project.
Speakers
- Julie Guilleminot – President of L’Apprimerie
- Karine Duperret – General Manager, L’Apprimerie
- Vincent Rosier – Illustrator at L’Apprimerie
- Simona Carini – Primary school teacher (Italy)
- Fabiana Dionigi – Kindergarten teacher (Italy)
- Alexandru Maniu – Primary school English teacher (Romania)
Transcription
(Julie Guilleminot) Hello everyone. My name is Julie Guilleminot, and I’m the director of the publishing house L’Apprimerie. L’Apprimerie is a print and digital publisher of illustrated children’s books that has been in existence for ten years. Since the company was founded, we’ve been working on the creation of digital books, enriched with primacy. So we’re working to make enhanced digital books more widely available to a wide range of audiences, including book professionals, associations and schools.
Professionals are trained not only in its use, but also in its creation. And this is where the ABIBooks project comes in. In this webinar, I’m going to give you a brief overview of the ABIBooks project’s approach, objectives and available resources. Karine Duperret, my associate, will then present the interactive book catalog and ebook collection created with the partners during the project.
Vincent Rosier, who has illustrated a number of titles in the collection, will also be presenting his work. Finally, we’ll close this webinar with the testimonies of three kindergarten and elementary school teachers, who have been able to experiment with books from the ABIBooks collection in the classroom. They will highlight the pedagogical benefits they have seen.
This webinar is an opportunity for us to present the results of the European ABIBooks project around digital books as a medium for learning basic skills. This European partnership lasted two years, starting in January 2021 and ending in December 2023. It’s a project funded by the European Union as part of the Erasmus Plus program, an educational partnership.
It brings together three school organizations in Greece, Romania and Italy. We also had a Belgian partner specializing in learning disabilities and a Polish partner specializing in cultural and educational mediation. Over a two-year period, we put together a whole range of resources that are freely accessible on the project’s website.
We have therefore built up a catalogue of several dozen interactive digital books in the languages of the partnership, with different accessibility functions and on different themes. The partners have also created a freely accessible collection of enhanced digital books, following on from a training module also available on the website for creating and using your own interactive digital books.
You’ll also find various guides to help you implement the project at school or at home. The aim of this project is to use digital books to help students acquire basic skills in reading, arithmetic, general culture and foreign languages.
00;03;56;09 – 00;04;26;15
(Karine Duperret) My name is Karine Duperret, and I work for L’Apprimerie as part of the Abibooks project. The idea was really to design a set of resources for parents and teachers around the digital book. As part of this project, I was responsible more specifically for selecting the library resources and designing the ebooks, which I’ll be presenting to you shortly in the project resources section.
This library is important because at the start of this European project, we realised that some of the countries involved in the partnership had a lower level of digital book use than France. And we wanted to offer a library of digital books in different languages, to provide a European overview of digital books currently dedicated to education.
You can find this library directly on the project website. It has different selection criteria and lists just over 100 digital books. There is a lot of resources. That’s why we prefer to keep sorting systems. You’ll find different subjects, from ebooks dedicated to art, to ebooks dedicated to learning a foreign language, to ebooks dedicated to mathematics, to ebooks dedicated to health.
So we’re going to have different types of resources. And these ebooks have also been sorted according to two age categories. A first age category for the very young, 3-5 year olds, and then a second for 6-8 year olds, with generally a little more text, a little more vocabulary and possibly a slightly higher level of difficulty for each of these books.
Certain accessibility criteria have also been identified, as some of these books have audio. The text can be read on some of these books without the use of a font suitable for students or children with learning disabilities. Occasionally, some of them show videos in sign language. We really wanted to take stock of different elements in order to provide clearer access for teachers and parents.
For example, if you select this book called Fast Woman, you’ll come to an ebook file. So it’s more than an ebook, but in any case in a project that’s published by NASA that’s available in english and spanish. And here you’ll find a brief description of the different elements, how to obtain them… And from these different links, you’ll be able to access all these resources. There are various categories. The price, of course, whether the ebooks are distributed free of charge or for a fee. The publisher, illustrators and authors of the various books. In any case, different criteria to access these different contents to know exactly where to find digital books and how to access them, which was the main criterion for this library.
Following the creation of this library with our various partners, we really wanted to encourage them to create their own resources. The advantage of digital books is that you can actually self-publish. We can create our own books with all the students, and sometimes even with them, involving them in a creative process and a publishing practice.
And in fact, that was the whole idea behind the collection. So the collection is best accessed through resources. They have been sorted separately. And this AbiBooks collection will eventually feature 17 interactive digital books produced by the various partners and then translated into the different partner languages.
00;08;09;14 – 00;08;43;14
I wanted to show you more specifically this one called “Déguisons-nous” It’s a book for the little ones, for 3-5 year-olds. It’s a book for the little ones, for 3-5 year-olds. The themes covered in this ebook are learning a foreign language, orality and literacy. It’s in ePub format, available on smartphones, tablets and computers, and of course it’s available free of charge on the project’s website.
00;08;43;17 – 00;09;10;18
Here’s a brief description of the project. And finally, on how to get hold of this book, two solutions. You can download the Hub file, i.e. archive the file for offline viewing. This was a real demand from teachers. Some schools in Europe are perfectly connected, with high enough bandwidth to enable online reading. But other schools can’t or don’t want to activate this type of Wi-Fi connection on their premises. This is the case, for example, with younger pupils, in which case the teacher can download the content beforehand and distribute it to the pupils on a board, such as an interactive digital board, with all the children present in the classroom.
If I select online reading, for example in this demonstration, I’m taken directly to an online reader of this book, where various interactive elements appear, such as the pies or the ability to choose cookies. We’ll be able to discover new vocabulary, click on the buttons, and decide with the teacher or parent what Noah’s costume will be for Halloween: is he a wizard or does he prefer to dress up as a robot? The idea is really to see new vocabulary, but above all to be able to print the visual side with the learning side. In other words, it’s assumed that the memorization of these new vocabulary words will be more effective if they are associated with an active gesture.
We can see that teachers test these books when they are on interactive boards: students stand up, participate and can click on the word “robot” themselves. So they can hand over the keys. They can copy it with their finger if they wish. And then the image is displayed with the disguise, allowing them to visually associate the illustration with the words that have just been rehearsed, and possibly to create.
So it’s more or less all these skills that we wanted….in any case, that’s the feedback we got from the different schools and the tests of the different teachers we worked with to design these ebooks.
00;11;33;25 – 00;12;08;26
Finally, one of the project’s last resources is the e-learning modules. It’s a video series that, this time, will enable teachers or parents to create their own resources. In this tutorial, you’ll find a series of videos and practical information sheets to help you, step by step, to create your own resources, make the software your own and define the stories you want to tell and create.
And then, of course, at the end of the day, what are the best ways to share this content, either by sending it out, or directly by putting it on a website to share with parents or other teachers and have co-creation.
So that’s what a presentation of these different resources and this library is all about. I hope many of you will check out his books, or at least seek out resources from this library.
We also wanted to highlight the creations being made in countries other than France, and the beautiful digital creations that also exist in other European countries. And it’s this diversity that we wanted to highlight with this collection.
00;13;03;14 – 00;13;30;18
(Vincent Rosier) I’m Vincent Rosier, graphic designer and illustrator for children. I work at Les Apprimeurs. As part of the AbiBooks project, I was in charge of producing three of the ebooks: Letter, Temperature and Times. First of all, how did I integrate ebook interactivity into my creative process? I simply took into account this system of right and wrong answers.
The aim was to make the selected answer immediately visible, so that it would be directly in the eye of the reader, facilitating comprehension and the user experience. This was achieved by using a range of colors for both the illustrations, particularly for the ebook Letter, and for the answer choice buttons. What’s more, I had to think about the layout beforehand to take into account certain elements that appear after each answer, whether textual or illustrative.
Let’s take the example of the Temperature ebook: on each page, we can see that there’s a text which is the narrative framework of a story. And below this text are two buttons with answers inside. As a result, it is possible to select one of the two buttons. For example, here I’ll select “-20°C”. When I select the button, an illustration already appears and the button changes color.
I can also go back and select other answer elements. For example, if I click on “-10°C”, another illustration appears and the button I selected changes color. And so on throughout the different pages of the ebook.
What I enjoyed most about this project was simply bringing the stories I was in charge of to life graphically, seeing the story take shape, giving a face to the various characters and this interactive dimension to my work in general. In particular, it’s great to be able to integrate interactivity at the heart of these ebooks, to offer a playful and attractive experience, as well as a story and cartoon.
00;15;57;09 – 00;16;33;19
(Simona Carini) You have a story that you can read as is. The interactive book also lets you change the ending of the story or the characters. Now I choose my character, a 4-year-old child. It’s a girl. Her name is Sarah. And then my book allows me to say, “Okay, now he’s 8, he’s a boy and his name is Tom,” and the story changes.
00;16;33;21 – 00;17;20;22
(Fabiana Dionigi) I teach children aged 3 to 5, and until now I’d had no contact with interactive digital books, apart from hearing about them from colleagues in elementary school. I didn’t know about Abibooks and I think interactive books are useful for letting children express their autonomy, fostering their creativity and their use of problem-solving. Whereas with paper books, readers are passive in reading the stories. With interactive books, they become the authors, choosing the plot. Children can also learn mathematical concepts by, for example, having to make choices to arrive at the solution to the problem. In kindergarten, using interactive books would be useful for promoting and supporting language and logical-mathematical skills. Of course, children will need help to interpret the images and situations proposed through examples inherent to reality and their lives.
00;17;20;22 – 00;18;19;24
(Alexandru Maniu) I think mainly of the vocabulary part when teaching English as I am an English teacher. And I think that using interaction with words and images helps to build a better vocabulary and train their vocabulary more. Of course, there are other integrated skills, but I’d say that vocabulary and then, based on this story, speaking and discussing the text are probably the main skills when it comes to this type of medium.
