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Apple Launches iBooks 2 with Interactive Textbooks
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This is definitely more in my wheelhouse, and the reason why I believe E-ink (even color) has limited usefulness in the modern world. We have been reading still pages, and watching simple videos for years, time to move onto something a bit more interactive.
Unlikely given the price cap they put in place.
Now an education discount on the iPad itself either by increasing the student discount rules to a 5-10% discount on the purchase of a single iPad for any K-12 student, or bulk sales to schools (who could then loan them to students or resell them at cost), I could see that happening
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Not sure where you are getting that number from, especially for high school textbooks that are typically adopted district and even sometimes statewide. You can score 1500 sales of a textbook just in one city in some areas.
If you are lucky. Myself out of 5 years of school (3 undergrad and 2 masters) I was able to sell back exactly 2 books that I had had to buy new because they ran out of used copies. The rest were unable to buy back because of new editions being released and the school was under contract to adopt that new edition. Or the teachers changed the supplemental reads for the next term etc.
Sigh. No love for the iPod touch or the iPhone.
Doesn't Apple know that majority of the high schoolers own an iPod touch or iPhone, and not the iPad.
The reason:
And majority of students would rather take textbook in pocket size edition that is extremely easy to carry around. And thanks to retina display, you can have the same experience and interaction that you get on the iPad with iPod touch or the iPhone.
Me, I'm just waiting till iPad 3, since one thing that keeps me away from iPad is the lack of retina display. After using the iPhone 4, it really hurts my eyes to see pixels on large device as iPad.
Doesn't Apple know that majority of the high schoolers own an iPod touch or iPhone, and not the iPad.
The reason:
- iPad is expensive to buy for teens
- Many of the school owned iPad are for use just in school and not to take home
And majority of students would rather take textbook in pocket size edition that is extremely easy to carry around. And thanks to retina display, you can have the same experience and interaction that you get on the iPad with iPod touch or the iPhone.
Me, I'm just waiting till iPad 3, since one thing that keeps me away from iPad is the lack of retina display. After using the iPhone 4, it really hurts my eyes to see pixels on large device as iPad.
Source?
Not to you but who is to say that your opinion is truth or even a shared opinion.
Actually we can say that yours is not a universal opinion as the three largest publishers of grade school textbooks are already signed on to this endeavor.
In the long run this is a moot point, in 5 years 32GB iPads will seem very quaint.
I think this is great for additional support for university students and especially non-students, but it can't replace real text books for school pupils anytime soon, due to the simple fact that teacher's won't allow iPads in class, plus not everyone is rich enough to own one.
Actually, we kinda need a larger capacity iPad. Many people who owns an iPad actually treat their device as an iPod, as in syncing all their music library on iTunes. And music takes up almost half of the device storage.
This is another issue that has to be addressed before digital textbooks become mandatory.
* what about technical problems with your tablet. Can you afford up to 10 days repair while you are in the middle of semester?
* what about battery charge? will a full charge last the day(14 hours) with these super-interactive textbooks?
No matter what, you have to admit the good old "dead tree" book will never have technical glitches or require charging in the middle of all-night cram session.
As a teacher you should probably be up off your butt walking around and actually monitoring the kids. So issue solved.
Exactly my point. Many students don't have iPads. Hence the reason why Apple should've made textbooks also available on iPhone and iPod touch, since retina display gives you same experience you get on the iPad with smaller device.
Until next month or so when they announce the iPad 3 and a 32 GB is the $499 model. The 'more profitable' status could disappear
As a teacher, you should just shut off the wifi and enable parental controls to shut off Safari and other apps. Problem solved.
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Or at least cut the price of the iPod touch just starting at $99, and lower the price of the iPad 16gb to same price as entry level iPod touch, so it's much more affordable for students and educators. (Also, lower price of iPod nano and shuffle, and axe the classic)
Where did you pull that. Many issues with iPads are software based and are solved with 30 minutes to restore and set back up the iPad. if it a school owned one that set up can be simplified by setting up one iPad for each grade level and backing it up to use as a restore kit something Apple itself does (including blocking out some features like passcode lock).
hardware problems are perhaps 20 minutes in the store for them to swap out the unit.
Certify an IT person at the school as an Apple Tech and they could do the work themselves on school owned units without voiding the warranty. Same if they did for a handful of district employees that could drop off a new unit within a day or two.
I don't know a single grade school kid that has a 14 hour day even including bus rides and football practice. Certainly not a day that long where they would be using their iPad the whole time.
and who knows what will happen when Apple announces the next iPad. It might have an up to 20 hour battery life and there's your problem solved. Just in time for increased adoption of iPads for Fall 2012
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No wifi is easy to do no matter what. If the school ain't got it then no concern. The controls issue is more difficult if they are student 'owned' units. You have to get the parents agreeing to let the school enable them, you need rules against restoring the iPad on the home computer etc which are harder to get enforced by parents if they paid for the unit. If the school did then you can apply whatever rules you want same as tearing up paper books and such and the parents can't really balk because it's school property.
The what if scenarios don't apply all at the same time to everybody.
So, if 95% goes smoothly (probably more) why complain about the exceptions?
You are taking a chance every morning getting up and what if a plane crashed on your house in the morning and what if what if and and...........
I can think of enough scenarios where your paper book is not the stellar item you want it to be.
Sides ripped out, lost or stolen, outdated info, need to buy a new one, wait for it in the mail etc.
With the digital format you can get the info back from any computer wherever you are.
To those who worry that the ipad doesn't have enough memory to hold all the book GB's:
Ever heard of icloud?
iCloud isn't exactly the solution for this. Not the way you're suggesting since the free account is only 5gb and that's easily a semesters/years worth of text books
It wouldn't hold any of the books (although you can redownload them from your computer or the ibooks store so that's covered so long as you know the apple id and password). If Apple sets it up so that your notions etc are backed up to iCloud the same as how it can sync collections and bookmark data, then you are covered.
Just enforce the rule that only school owned iPads can be used in classroom, and that students are not allowed to bring their own iPad to school (if the student had enough money to buy their own iPad that is, hence the reason why I want textbooks on iPod touch and iPhones as well as pocket edition)
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iCloud is definitely not a solution, since iCloud requires re-downloading the content to device everytime. This creates new problem: Wasting precious bandwidth
Has Apple allowed the student discount for K - 12 students?
My niece recently tried to buy an iPad and Apple store said she was not a student so no student discount. She is 11.
Am I correct i thinking to have her school text book on an iPad it would be $500 for the wifi ipad and $15 for the text book. hmmm.
I hope I am wrong.
My niece recently tried to buy an iPad and Apple store said she was not a student so no student discount. She is 11.
Am I correct i thinking to have her school text book on an iPad it would be $500 for the wifi ipad and $15 for the text book. hmmm.
I hope I am wrong.
If there is a confirmed "district buys in bulk at huge discount" program, I'd love to hear about it.
No individual student discount for iOS devices unfortunately. Discounts on Apple devices requires higher education ID (College) or letter from school and even with that, only applies to Macs.
iOS devices discounts applies to institution (Schools) buying devices in bulk.
One area I can see as helping to have interactive 3D is chemistry. Imagine you're taking introductory chemistry and a 100 different molecules are all present in 3D interactive mode for you to rotate and observe. Imagine how much easier it will be to learn the harder subjects having 3D models instead of the old illustrations which just hinted at 3D.
But there is still one more issue, the iPad's themselves. Public schools couldn't expect everyone to buy and bring their own iPad's to school. They could have an iPad for every student that they borrow for their time at the school, but I could still see problems with theft happening as we are talking about everyone in the school carrying around a $500 device that can easily be taken and sold. Maybe if students had to check them out when they want to take them home and carry some kind of security tag on them.
They could have class sets of iPad's, but again this means that the kids couldn't take them home every night for homework/studying. Also notes taken on the devices would be synced to whoever owned the account on the device, not to mention would be stuck on iPad as there is no Mac version of iBooks and the iPhone/iPod version doesn't support textbooks. So if the kid didn't have an iPad at home it would mean their notes are stuck in the cloud.
Also purchasing books is another issue. It seems it has to be done through an iTunes account, which is fine, but in high school text books are currently provided to students for free, so I don't think most would enjoy paying for them. Maybe schools can buy registration codes to give out to students so they can download them on personal accounts?
For college courses I could see this working a lot better as you can build it into tuition and for the most part college students are at school to learn, where as in public high schools you have kids from all over the spectrum.
Overall though, the textbooks i've tried have been awesome, and I think it would be worth the investment in infrastructure needed to let everyone use an iPad in schools.