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Apple Unveils Software To Reinvent the Textbook
redletterdave writes "At the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Apple announced on Thursday it would update its iBooks platform to include textbook capabilities and also added a new platform called iBooks Author, which lets anyone easily create and publish their own e-books. Apple's senior VP of marketing, Phil Schiller, introduced iBooks 2, which has a new textbook experience for the iPad. The books themselves display larger images, and searching content is made significantly easier: all users need to do is tap on a word and they are taken straight to an appropriate glossary or index section in the back of the book. Navigating pages and searching is also easy and fluid, and at the end of each chapter is a full review with questions and pictures. If you want the answers to the questions, all you need to do is tap the question to get instant feedback. Apple also launched the iBooks Author app, which lets anyone easily create any kind of textbook and publish it to the iBookstore, and the new iTunes U platform, which helps teachers and students communicate better, and even send each other materials and notes created with iBooks Author. All of the apps are free, and available for any and all students, from K-12 to major universities."
Why exactly do we need iPads in the classroom? What the hell does an iPad do that cheaper full fledged computers haven't been able to do for ages? Why are we spending $500+support etc costs per student to get them iPads? The reason we use notebooks and books in the classroom isn't some luddite obsession, it's because if I had an iPad to play with in class in school, I don't think much learning would have happened.
The iPad is an awful device for reading. It would be greeat fun in a classroom, to hold the iPad and oyurself at just the right angle to avoid all the lights being reflected spectacularly on it - has anyone actually tried to read for long on an iPad? And that lovely blocky low res screen? The iPad doesn't even offer a quarter of the resolution of a real book, and about a quarter of the amount of material visible on a large textbook open with two pages visible. Who in their sane mind is going to replace that with a crummy highly reflective low resolution tiny 10 inch screen that you pay half a grand for?
you want textbooks, make a better Kindle DX and give that to the kids. No touchscreen. Lets you read books and carry thousands of books around. The browser is ok for wikipedia etc, not so good for Facebook. That has some potential of being a textbook platform. but an iPad, seriously?
I am not arguing it won't be successful, because wonderfully the people who decide on technology matters for schools have no clue what they are doing, they'll swallow the buzzword talk easily. And come on, it's Apple and we all know Apple can do no wrong.