Apple’s Education event is kicking off in a few minutes and Geek.com will be tracking it minute-by-minute. We’ve heard that Apple plans to majorly disrupt the textbook market, though various leaks and commentary over the past few days have questioned just how major of an announcement this will be. Education, he says, is in the dark ages.
The iPad, it turns out, is a great tool for learning. It has over 20,000 education apps built just for it and there are over 1.5 million iPads in use in education today.
Number one: reinventing the textbook. Textbooks aren’t portable, they aren’t durable, they aren’t searchable, and their not interactive. iBooks 2 is “the next textbook experience for the iPad”.
The first demo is of a biology textbook. It’s vibrant, interactive, multitouch-friendly, and interactive. There are image galleries and large, beautiful pictures. The iBook store will have a textbook category. iBooks will update soon and everyone will have access to a free sample. iBooks 2 will work on the iPad or iPhone, it’s free, and it will be available today. But how do you create a textbook? you used a Mac application called iBooks Author. Books are built the way you’d work with something like Pages, using drag-and-drop layouts, a WYSIWYG editor, and so forth. Advanced functions can be handled through HTML5 or Javascript. Functions like the glossary are built right in so they don’t have to be formatted manually. iBooks Author is free.
High school textbooks will be $15 or less. Books can be updated continuously. Major partners include Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw Hill, each of whom will make 90% of their texts available. Some of the texts from McGraw include Algebra I, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. DK Publishing will offer Dinosaurs, Insects, Mammals, and My Fist ABC.
As noted above the EO Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, lead by Harvard biologist EO Wilson is on board as well. Their book will be Life On Earth, and it’s an iBook store exclusive. The first two chapters will be free. (Also, it looks like a Apple Schiller a nice shout out to EO Wilson, who has done some extremely important work in biology, specially in the study of ants. His book “The Ants” written with Bert Holldobler is legendary in the field.)
So that was all just the first part of today’s event. Over 1000 universities use iTunes U. It’s a top free education tool with over 700 million downloads total, mostly of lectures. It’ll be just like iBooks, but for lectures and other iTunes U content. There will also be classroom tie-ins, like offering professor off hours schedules, posting assignments, send out messages to the class, and so on. Lectures can be downloaded or streamed.
The iTunes U app is available today and it’s free.
Thanks for reading along.
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