Okay Geek Farm
Apple launches iBooks 2 for digital textbooks on iPad
Ricardo Trejo
“What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology,” Steve Jobs once said. It’s true that little can be done in tech field to make teachers, their school districts, and parents change the way in which they prepare a proper lesson plan. But they CAN take steps to nudge them in the right direction. Apple has focused on the consumer market for decades now, and with its appropriate household name, it hopes to be one synonymous with education reform and getting kids back on track to want to learn again by giving them, and their teachers, the tools needed to spark their interest.
Apple launches iBooks 2 for iPad, strikes deals with major textbook publishers to offer cheap, interactive, always-up-to date text books for students and teachers:
“The new iBooks 2 app is available today as a free download from the App Store™. With support for great new features including gorgeous, fullscreen books, interactive 3D objects, diagrams, videos and photos, the iBooks 2 app will let students learn about the solar system or the physics of a skyscraper with amazing new interactive textbooks that come to life with just a tap or swipe of the finger. With its fast, fluid navigation, easy highlighting and note-taking, searching and definitions, plus lesson reviews and study cards, the new iBooks 2 app lets students study and learn in more efficient and effective ways than ever before.
iBooks Author is also available today as a free download from the Mac App Store and lets anyone with a Mac create stunning iBooks textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books and more, and publish them to Apple’s iBookstore. Authors and publishers of any size can start creating with Apple-designed templates that feature a wide variety of page layouts. iBooks Author lets you add your own text and images by simply dragging and dropping, and with the Multi-Touch™ widgets you can easily add interactive photo galleries, movies, Keynote® presentations and 3D objects.
Apple today also announced an all-new iTunes® U app giving educators and students everything they need on their iPad, iPhone® and iPod touch® to teach and take entire courses. With the new iTunes U app, students using iPads have access to the world’s largest catalog of free educational content, along with over 20,000 education apps at their fingertips and hundreds of thousands of books in the iBookstore that can be used in their school curriculum, such as novels for English or Social Studies.* The iTunes U app is available today as a free download from the App Store.
*Some content is available only for iPad.”
What Apple hopes to accomplish with iBooks 2
When the iPad was first announced everyone knew that this day would come, and now it’s becoming a reality. I believe that with the announcement of iPad 3 there will come a swift price cut to the iPad 2 that will make it competitive and affordable for any parent looking to get their kid one. Should we say $199 for the base model? It makes sense, especially going up against the Kindle Fire.
As for details on iBooks 2, it was mentioned that high school textbooks would cost as much as $14.99 and lower. And with the newly unveiled iBooks Author, just about anyone could create and sell their own interactive books on the iBooks store.
With the focus of information shifting from physical books to digital media, learning is more convenient than ever. But again, tech cannot be the focus of education… it has to start elsewhere. The late Steve Jobs knew the importance of education, but was keenly aware at what steps were needed to make it relevant:
“When you have kids you think, What exactly do I want them to learn? Most of the stuff they study in school is completely useless. But some incredibly valuable things you don’t learn until you’re older — yet you could learn them when you’re younger. And you start to think, What would I do if I set a curriculum for a school?
God, how exciting that could be! But you can’t do it today. You’d be crazy to work in a school today. You don’t get to do what you want. You don’t get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?
These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn’t it. You’re not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school — none of this is bad. It’s bad only if it lulls us into thinking we’re doing something to solve the problem with education.”
And with that we’ll have to see where this latest breakthrough takes us.
