Apple posts iBooks 2, Textbooks-centric education video
Fresh from the Apple Education event, Apple has posted the video they showed off highlighting iBooks 2 and their new Textbooks initiative. It starts off with teachers and educators railing against everything wrong about traditional textbooks -- they're expensive, heavy, immediately outdated. Then they go into full iPad sell mode. Fast and fluid navigation, beautiful graphics, and better, easier note taking.
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Truly an amazing company. No doubt at all they are in fact changing the world. All the more amazing when you realize it is happening merely as a side effect of their primary effort ... which is to make their shareholders billions and billions of dollars. Remarkable.
wasn't sure what to expect with the education event, but this is really good for schools. it does basically ruin the game for some of those tablets like the kno, but now those guys have an app for ipads too.
should be interesting to see if colleges and grad schools jump onto this trend as well.
spirit of competition - http://tcrn.ch/yrt89c. Kno is ready to fight Apple. :)
Kudos to Apple and textbook publishers for this initiative. I know that they aren't the cutting edge of this change initiative- Inkling has been creating digital textbooks for quite some time- but Apple does have the clout to bring the digital textbook revolution to school systems everywhere. And better yet, they learned from the negatives that arose from their creation of iTunes without the full buy-in of the music industry and brought the textbook publishers along for the ride.
The new realm of digital learning that these textbooks will bring about is exciting to think about and makes me wish I were a school age child today. To think that instead of simply describing FDR's fireside chats or Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech, they can include a recording/video of the event right there along with the text so that the child is engaged to the point where they can experience it first hand and not just read about it in a static text is astounding.
These textbooks open up new avenues of learning that will engage many more children and, hopefully, make learning fun again.
Sorry FLSkydiver you have it backwards. Steve Jobs always said Apple's mission was to build great products. He said if they did that, the stock price and brand value would take care of itself. Oh, and he was right about that.