Showing posts with label apple announcement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apple announcement. Show all posts
College Goes Digital With iTunes U App. The result would look a lot like Apple's new iTunes U app, it seems. The new app lets you browse through courses at partner universities, tap to enroll, browse course material, take notes, view the syllabus, and a lot more. --NS
--Updated 11:06 a.m. EST
Apple's got itself a host of new publishing partners. Those on board include: textbook king Pearson, McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Dorling Kindersley (yes--that means dinosaur pictures on the iPad!) --NS
--Updated 10:50 a.m. EST
Apple Launches Free E-Book Creator App. Apple's iBook Author let will anyone with a Mac (and the will) to create their own ebook or e-textbook in what seems like a WYSIWYG, fuss-free way. The app accepts drag and drop gestures for documents and widgets. Code-savvy book authors can create their own custom widgets using Javascript and HTML. The app publishes straight to the Apple app store. --NS
Apple Announces iBooks 2. Apple's first announcement for this morning is a series of interactive e-textbooks that allow mutli-touch gestures to navigate through text, 3D images and videos. iBooks 2 is free to download on the iPad as an app. iBooks 2 is the first of two big announcements Apple's planning at their education event in New York this morning. --NS
Apple Event Today. Stay tuned for updates. --NS
Kodak Files For Bankruptcy. Eastman Kodak filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 early today. --NS
Facebook's Activity Apps Go Live. Facebook and scads of publishing and entertainment companies let loose the promised activity buttons, first announced at f8, at an event thrown by the social network yesterday. The rollout includes 60 new apps including ticketing services, recipe apps, travel apps, and more. --NS
Senators Show anti-SOPA Support. At last count, Ars Technica reports, PIPA has found 18 new opposers. --NS
Lovefilm Links Up With LG. LG is its latest squeeze--owner Amazon has signed a deal with the TV manufacture to have its smart sets stream films and shows from Lovefilm's quickly expanding digital library. --NS
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.
THEY'VE killed off CDs and revolutionised the music industry. Now, if rumours are to be believed, Apple has its eye on the least rock and roll thing you can think of: school text books.
Not as sexy as an iPad 3 but the tech giant's rumoured plan to give anyone the tools to create a text book on their tablet or smartphone has the potential to change more people's lives.
Steve Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson said the late Apple guru had his "sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform.
According to tech site Ars Technica, Apple won't be expanding into text book publishing, rather it will be designing software for ebooks.
Senior instructor at the International Information System Security Certification Consortium Robert Slade told news.com.au that the move by Apple can’t hurt as the "quality of almost all school texts is absolutely appalling”.
However Mr Slade disagreed about the importance of tablet computing in schools.
Dr Shaun Nykvist, Senior Lecturer in ICT Education at the Queensland University of Technology told news.com.au that though he strongly believed in the use of educational tablets, Apple’s efforts would be irrelevant unless equity and access problems were addressed.
“First we had textbooks and then text books for CD- Roms and textbooks with websites and now we’re getting the added benefit of mobile apps where you’re getting many textbooks and multimedia all in one,” said Dr Nykvist.
Minister for School Education Peter Garrett declined to respond to news.com.au’s request for comment.
Apple isn’t the only tech giant developing educational aids for students. Australian tablet designer Evolve III built their Windows 7 “Maestro Black” tablet specifically for educational purposes and will be supplying the tablet directly to schools and educational institutions.
Whenever Apple schedules a press event to announce something new the world stops and takes notice. On Thursday, teachers especially will be paying close attention.
While some are excited about the learning potential of e-textbooks and how Apple(AAPL-Q429.07-0.04-0.01%)could make them mainstream, others are thinking bigger.
Mr. Odette teaches Grade 7 and 8 students at the W. C. Little Elementary School in Barrie, Ont., and for about four years has been a part of the school's e-textbook pilot project.
“The idea is trying to move with the digital age and students are (already) accessing computers for all their information,” Mr. Odette said.
“Parents were a little hesitant at first but once they saw the results — (student marks) are averaging eight to 10 per cent higher with the digital textbooks — and how engaged and motivated the students became the parents were very receptive to say, ‘What more can we do?’ ”
The school gets its texts from Pearson Canada, which says demand for digital learning tools is not new.
“This has been going on for more than the last year,” said Sandra Nagy, Pearson Canada's director of digital learning.
Students can also digitally mark up the e-textbook as much as they'd like with notes and highlights. The e-textbooks work on computers, iPads and there are plans to expand to other platforms, including Google Android devices.
While Nagy said the digital texts have been less popular with the earlier grades, Odette believes tablets will be a great teaching tool for young kids.
“Kids are hands-on learners, that's one of our main learning styles in elementary school, especially with younger students,” he said.
As we wait to hear the unveiling of Apple’s major announcement scheduled for today, several other industry professionals are already weighing in on the aspects of technological applications for education that the industry can provide. Data Conversion Laboratory CEO Mark Gross made some interesting points on these applications.
Some of that technology is already well in place, such as tablet PC, enhanced ebooks for textbooks, and dedicated e-readers. Many schools are already using distance learning through various communication platforms like Skype and FaceTime to offer courses that would be unavailable to students, even at the elementary school level.
“We’re working with a number of major educational publishers to transform their content for epub and kindle, and other devices,” continued Gross, “and it sure seems that all major publishers, as well as smaller [ones], have projects in the wings for at least moving some content over. “The missing link is better technology to support the complexities of education publishing, which is much more complex than epublishing a novel. Ebook standards are not quite up to supporting all the complexities, and what’s also needed is technology to better support how people actually use these products to learn.
TORONTO- Apple's announcement on Thursday about a series of new educational-themed experiences might make many wish they were students again.
As speculated, Apple did get into the digital textbook game, and more.
With more than 1.5 million iPads in use in educational programs, the revamped book-stand now includes education-specific features.
Apple's partnered with textbook makers Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, as the trio are responsible for 90 per cent of all textbooks sold.
Apple then announced a new app for creating free books: iBooks Author OS X. It's an application for making textbooks and while it's focused on educators, anyone can publish a book with the app. Users can drop Word files in on a chapter and automatically create sections and headers. The app lays out pages automatically and publishes right to bookstore.
The app is free and available on the Mac App Store. Now, Apple intends to create full online courses where teachers can send updates to students through a Tab section. Assignments can pop right into a user's iBooks and students can even rate and sign up for classes.
“The bill is not an effective tool for combating online intellectual property theft. Kodak files for bankruptcy: Eastman Kodak Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Wednesday, after weeks of rumors about the company’s dire financial situation. Facebook adds more partners: Facebook added support for over 60 new apps on Wednesday with partners including Foodily, Ticketmaster, Pinterest and others, giving interested users the chance to share more about their daily activities. That system of sharing has drawn criticism from privacy advocates who believe the new sharing system might violate the company’s privacy policies.
Piracy whistleblowers: The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) won a D.C. appeals court decision that affirms its right to protect an informant in a software piracy case against Solers Inc. Solers, a Virginia-based technology company, accused an anonymous informant of defamation and served the SIIA with a subpoena to discover that person’s identity. The Washington Post filed an amicus brief supporting the organization.
TORONTO - Whenever Apple schedules a press event to announce something new the world stops and takes notice. On Thursday, teachers especially will be paying close attention.
While some are excited about the learning potential of e-textbooks and how Apple could make them mainstream, others are thinking bigger.
"I hope they have something more up their sleeves," said Rhonda McEwen, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto who has studied how non-verbal autistic children can learn with the iPad and iPod Touch.
"In the world Apple plays in, which is a new media and digital kind of environment, there's so much more scope to do more interesting things."
She's hoping that Apple might announce some deals with universities or other educational groups to partner in researching some truly innovative approaches to digital learning.
But teacher Kris Odette will be excited even if Apple is just announcing deals to further expand the use of digital textbooks.
Odette teaches Grade 7 and 8 students at the W. C. Little Elementary School in Barrie, Ont., and for about four years has been a part of the school's e-textbook pilot project.
"The idea is trying to move with the digital age and students are (already) accessing computers for all their information," Odette said.
"Parents were a little hesitant at first but once they saw the results — (student marks) are averaging eight to 10 per cent higher with the digital textbooks — and how engaged and motivated the students became the parents were very receptive to say, 'What more can we do?'"
The school gets its texts from Pearson Canada, which says demand for digital learning tools is not new.
"This has been going on for more than the last year," said Sandra Nagy, Pearson Canada's director of digital learning.
Pearson's eText products — which can be updated with new information — include digital features like embedded video and audio, the ability to search the book by keywords, and links that go to external websites for more information. Students can also digitally mark up the e-textbook as much as they'd like with notes and highlights. The e-textbooks work on computers, iPads and there are plans to expand to other platforms, including Google Android devices.
While Nagy said the digital texts have been less popular with the earlier grades, Odette believes tablets will be a great teaching tool for young kids.
"Kids are hands-on learners, that's one of our main learning styles in elementary school, especially with younger students," he said.
On the eve of Apple’s highly anticipated foray into digital textbooks, the e-textbook wars are heating up.
Chegg, best known for selling and renting physical textbooks through the mail, will on Wednesday announce a new way for students to buy and rent textbooks to read online.
Its Web-based tool is a little less glitzy than other app-based digital textbook offerings. Those, from companies like Inkling or Kno, often offer features like the ability to circle a passage with your finger and to create flash cards and rich diagrams.
In contrast, books in Chegg’s online reader look more like regular books. “Sure, there are some flashy features that work on a very small number of books,” says Brent Tworetzky, director of product management at Chegg, referring to competitors. “But it isn’t that useful for students.”
Tworetzky says Chegg has about 40,000 digital textbooks now and has signed contracts with all the top publishers. Prices range from $20 to $120– 30% to 40% off the price of a new textbook.
Competitor Kno says it offers around 150,000 titles from around $5 to $100 per book, with rentals costing less. This week the company, co-founded by Osman Rashid, a former co-founder of Chegg, announced new interactive flash cards and a dashboard for students to better track their study habits. In addition to its iPad app, the company also offers a more basic online reader.
Inkling, which takes a different approach of rebuilding titles specifically for iPads, has around 110 books available today with many priced at around $100 per book, with individual chapters from $1.99. Its books boast bells and whistles like “interactive assessments” that provide feedback as students progress and 3D molecule models. Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig says the company will eventually open up the new digital textbook service to others besides professional publishers. He adds that he believes Chegg’s other offerings, such as its rental business and site for helping kids with their homework, will help drive adoption.
“We want to offer textbooks in whatever format students want and at multiple price-points,” he says.
One thing we hear louder than all else and where we can help is in student engagement,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s marketing chief, at an announcement at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Schiller and his Apple colleagues showed off two new applications to take the information in textbooks and put it, in interactive form, on iPads and computers. One is called iBooks 2, a free download for iPads, available from Apple’s app store starting today. The other, iBooks Author, is a tool he said authors and publishers — as well as students and others with an interest in education — can use on a computer to create interactive iPad lessons.
“The textbook is not always the ideal learning tool,” said Schiller. The new interactive books would cost $14.99, far less than most of today’s paper textbooks. They could be updated continually, said Apple. Students will be able to “mark up” their iPad books electronically, creating the digital equivalent of note cards as they go through lessons, said Apple. Schiller said Apple was forming partnerships with three of the biggest publishers of school texts: Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which are responsible for 90 percent of the textbooks used in the U.S. today. DK Publishing, which publishes vividly-colored books for younger kids, is joining in as well. “With the iPad, we’re making textbooks so much more engaging,” said Roger Rosner, the Apple executive who has led the project.
Gene Munster, a senior technology analyst for Piper Jaffray, said his firm surveyed school officials and found the major barrier to new technology was not the cost of new hardware such as iPads. Instead, he said in a phone interview with ABC News, it was control over where students went online when using school computers. If students are taking school iPads home instead of books, the schools worried that they may wander around online.
Apple’s initiative would broaden the number of people who can create online lessons, and some school systems may be wary.
