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Saturday 21 January 2012
Apple Reinvents Textbooks with iBooks 2 for iPad & New iTunes U
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Today was like Christmas morning all over again as geeks across the globe tuned in to see just what Apple had up their sleeves to announce at their much anticipated January event. As promised, the educational theme was front and center with Apple promising to reinvent textbooks.
Senior Apple executives Eddy Cue, Philip Schiller and Roger Rosner took the stage this morning to engage the audience in a series of announcements designed to demonstrate how Apple intends to “help teachers reinvent the curriculum.”
iTunes U iPad App
Looking an awful lot like iBooks with the signature mahogany bookshelf, iTunes U has emerged as a native iPad app designed to empower educators to customize topics, provide students with office hours, post messages to the class and give assignments. The app supports real-time streaming as well as the ability to download content for later consumption.
iBooks 2
As we speculated last week, this upgrade to iBooks adds a category specifically for textbooks, but doesn’t stop there. With features like interactive Q&A content available at the end of chapters, highlighting and note taking tools as well as the ability to turn the notes taken into study cards, iBooks has evolved into an interactive educational experience beyond just being a way to deliver and read print materials.
Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing described the upgrade in combination with the iPad 2 as giving students “a more dynamic, engaging and truly interactive way to read and learn, using the device they already love.”
iBooks Author
Using a series of templates and a WYSIWYG-editor that closely resembles Pages (allowing for the addition of photos, movies, text and multi-touch widgets), iBooks Author will enable authors of all shapes and sizes to create their own publications. Best of all, it is available free for the Mac!
One of the more exciting features of iBooks Author is full support for the Apple Keynote format. Drop your presentation into your eBook and watch it instantly become an interactive widget.
Once completed, your project can easily be exported to the iBookstore or iTunes U with the option to provide your new materials for free or associated with a specified cost.
All of these announcements are punctuated with the news that Apple has secured relationships with major publishers Pearson, McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and DK Publishing. These arrangements mean textbooks are readily and easily available with many starting at just USD $14.99!
Revolutionary? I’m not sure yet, I need to see more. But Apple is certainly making a commitment to education with these announcements, and that is never a bad thing.
How do you feel about today’s Apple event? I suspect it goes without saying that we were all hoping for a Steve Jobs style ‘One More Thing’ that hit us with the iPad 3 or some other hardware goody, but those of us who are parents or educators are smiling on the inside with the potential we saw this morning.
This post was written by: Irfan Jam
Irfan Jam is a professional blogger, web designer and front end web developer. Follow him on Facebook
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