Tag Archives: sketches

London Unfurled iPad app – beautiful example of creative options

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YblAELwZ9k&feature=player_embedded]

Here’s a wonderful example of the creative potential of iPad apps. Matteo Pericoli has created a guide to London through pen and ink sketches.

In 2009 Matteo Pericoli (author of the bestselling iconic book Manhattan Unfurled) made an intensive twenty-mile journey along the River Thames, from Hammersmith Bridge to the Millennium Dome and back again. Over two years later, he finished the most astonishing document of his journey, London Unfurled: two thirty-seven-foot-long freehand pen-and-ink drawings. (Read more here.)

I love the option to select a section of the illustration and send it as a postcard. Of course the interactivity is always a winner; students will be more engaged navigating their iPad app, zooming in to what interests them, tapping on something to find more information. Much more engaging than just listening or reading a print book.

Who said the iPad is just for consumption? I can imagine students creating their own apps, can’t you? This is the kind of project which highlights possibilities for individual interpretation which I’m excited about. It’s the direction I’m interested in pursuing with students and teachers once we introduce iPads to the school (very soon I hope!) I’m interested in how students and teachers can use apps in a transformative way, not just using technology to do things in the same way we did them before.

(Read another review here.)