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Apple Launches iBooks 2 with Interactive Textbooks
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Oh, how ingenious! I hadn't thought of that. /sarcasm.
... As opposed to actually teaching my lessons, concentrating on my models and lecture, and attending to what I need to do in the front of the classroom. How the hell could I patrol what each kid is doing on his or her iPad without app-locking? This would require me to teach from the back of the classroom without the kids being able to look at me and ask questions. You don't even know what I teach. Not every subject can be taught with the teacher walking up and down aisles the entire time. We have 12 aisles in my largest classroom and by the time I got around to moseying around to aisle 12, the kids in aisle 2 would be to level 10 in Angry Birds.
The person who suggested earlier that teachers be able to lock iPads to the textbook app during class is right on.
Isn't that just a complicated way of saying the classroom is failing at keeping the kids' interest?
Unlikely much meaningful learning is going to happen in such an environment, so why bother with all the trauma and angst, let him play Angry Birds as it really makes no meaningful difference anyway.
You're not being realistic at all about school classrooms, especially in the context of increasing class sizes and decreasing budgets. And the kids who fall behind and are most ambivalent, are often the ones that need the most attention by teachers- unless you are suggesting that we give up on them completely by 2nd or 3rd grade.
No, it's not a way of saying the class is not keeping the kids' interest. It's a way of saying I've got a class of distractible 15 year olds. You don't know me and how I teach. Obviously, you've never taught a class of teenagers at 7:30 in the morning, or anytime for that matter. It doesn't matter what class or who teaches it. I am talking about adolescent human nature. Unless you are talking about gym class, perhaps, kids get distracted constantly. Did you not attend high school yourself? If you are telling me that kids in your high school didn't get distracted even with good teachers, I am not sure what planet you are living on.
"Trauma and angst"? Ha. These comments are getting better and better.
I find that interesting they say that. But, in fact, Wikipedia's content is peer-reviewed. If information is placed on there that does not correlate with conventional knowledge, it is deleted. That said, the traditional textbook is not peer-reviewed. A publishing house with approach an individual within a specific field, asking them to write a book or a chapter. First, this chapter is not critically appraised by their peers and second, it's contents can actually be unilaterally changed by a draconian editor. Now, that's unreliable.
Well, yes and no. Who is to say at the moment the child reads said Wikipedia page on a given topic that someone has not recently edited in false information that the community has not yet had a chance to correct it? Wiki is great to get a general idea on a given topic, but as a reliable and credible source of research, it does not hold water in a true academic setting.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)
Closed ecosystem ebooks are a no-go. This is doubly true for textbooks. At least Kindle, while far from perfect, at least offers ebooks that are readable on basically any device. iBooks is still available ONLY on iDevices (not even Macs!) You think any school district would consider such a system? Not a chance in hell. Instead, the kids who happen to have iDevices might incidentally download the iBooks version of the required text, saving the school district some money.
Closed ecosystem ebooks are a no-go. This is doubly true for textbooks. At least Kindle, while far from perfect, at least offers ebooks that are readable on basically any device. iBooks is still available ONLY on iDevices (not even Macs!) You think any school district would consider such a system? Not a chance in hell. Instead, the kids who happen to have iDevices might incidentally download the iBooks version of the required text, saving the school district some money.
Build the ipads into the desks, lol. Well I'm not totally being flippant, maybe every desk could have an ipad built into it and each student would log into it and a cloud server would hold their information, this would solve the problem of locking down the ipad so the student can only view textbooks and not browse the internet or something.
As for the cost, if the schools owned the ipads I think this would be offset by the lower textbook prices, buying a textbook for $100 that you use for 4 years still sounds more expensive than buying that textbook for $14.99 four times, that's almost half the cost, and that's not including the cost of workbooks, etc that would only be used for one year. The other thing is that since textbooks are indirectly paid by parents taxes possibly the ipad can be made as tax deductible when itemized as a dependent childs education requirement. On top of all of that, I'll bet Apple is considering a low cost ipad just for this use, or possibly they will do a deeper subsidy than their current education subsidy, or both. There are a lot of ways to get around the cost of an ipad, especially when you add up what traditional textbooks cost now.
The only thing that bums me out a bit is Apple's profit driven altruism. I give them a TON of credit for revamping the textbook system like this, but at the same time Apple made sure this stayed within their ecosystem and benefited them greatly. I don't expect Apple to do anything for free at all, but I wish there was a way for Apple to work for this to be some kind of open standard useable on any device or even laptop AND they were able to profit from it.
1. Textbooks are free to kids in public education, so I'm not sure what apple is thinking.
2. As my wife (whom is a teacher) stated, she isn't going to be turned into a iPad cop and worrying if Joe in the back is following along or playing cut the rope. As if kids are distracted enough, now we're going to hand them a device with games on it? Kids are already dumber than a bucket of shrimp, this is only going to make it worse.
3. What happens when the iPad breaks?
2. As my wife (whom is a teacher) stated, she isn't going to be turned into a iPad cop and worrying if Joe in the back is following along or playing cut the rope. As if kids are distracted enough, now we're going to hand them a device with games on it? Kids are already dumber than a bucket of shrimp, this is only going to make it worse.
3. What happens when the iPad breaks?
Actually I have. I've even taught 8-10 year olds and they are more easily distracted than teenagers.
I didn't stand in front of the class all the time. I didn't feel the need to have the kids looking at my face every second like some kind of ego trip. I walked around, I talked to kids directly. Hell I asked them to talk and didn't just ramble on for 45 minutes. And none of the kids ever doodled, tried to text under the desk, pass notes etc. They were involved in their learning and they loved it. Many of them were mad when my unit was over and they went back to being taught by their regular boring teacher.
My parents have both being teaching for 25 years and are beloved by their students (who are high school kids) for the same way of teaching. Kids fight to get into my father's classes even though he is considered one of the hardest teachers in the school because you can't slack off in Mr Scott's class. And it's not just the GT kids, the average ones want in as well.
So sorry but "It doesn't matter how you teach" is just wrong. How you teach is the key to the game. But you know what, you are so certain that you are right and we are stupid so you go on with your luddite front of the class lectures and pat yourself on the back that your students can pass the standardized tests and recite their facts and refuse to use anything but paper and pen. I'm sure they can handle one teacher that can't get with the times and it won't traumatize them for life.
So if you are such a grand teacher, why are you spending so much time on Macrumors and not preparing for your next class?
The schools could still potentially buy the textbooks. Either off of some institution apple id that allows one copy to go on hundreds of devices or a voucher system where at the start of the year each student is given a download code that they put into their ID (or their parents) and the appropriate texts are retrieved.
If you and your wife believe that you have no business having kids or teaching them.
Same thing that happens when a book is lost, dropped in a puddle etc. It gets replaced. Sometimes at the child's cost depending on what happened to the book.
Pretty much every homeowner's and renters insurance will cover such items at least partially and you can bet that they will announce Apple Care + for the iPad when the 3 comes out just like they did for the iPhone. It won't totally cover the cost but replacement at $100-150 is better than $500 or up
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So if you are such a grand teacher, why are you spending so much time on Macrumors and not preparing for your next class?
Because I'm not a full time teacher. I'm a cinematographer. I happen to teach film making units for a handful of schools where teachers I know work.
Also keep in mind that losing an iPad or if it breaks is no problem as everything is uploaded to the iCloud.... except that one time when I was doing my homework and there was no WiFI to sync my latest stuff to the iCloud... then I dropped the iPad and my homework is lost forever... OOPS!
In my area, we have an overcrowded High School and not enough resources for books for children to take home for homework. This innovation can essentially cut huge costs. Now for the REAL announcement thatwants to capitalize off of, the post-secondary education (college) market. This is a billion, if not trillion dollar industry when you consider new, used, and rentals. Saves trees too. Awesome innovation!
You can't afford a book that can be handed to next year, but iPads are no problem?
I'm ok with that. People here keep claiming we need to have factories in the USA and stop farming them out to China, etc. Those not paying attention are the people that will work there.
You are lying through your teeth throughout your entire response and making things up as you go along to back up your unrealistic points while throwing in insults at me and how I teach even though you have no idea what I teach or how I teach it. All of this over the fact that I happen to have an opinion that Apple should give the option to lock iPads used in class to the textbook app so kids aren't distracted.
It is a lot cheaper to replace a textbook than it is a smashed iPad, no? How do you suppose you prevent kids from stealing other kids iPads and hocking them on eBay. From an economic standpoint, it will turn into a nightmare. Schools complain of a lack of funding, now we're gonna start providing each kid with a $500 iPad? My property taxes continue to go up on a yearly basis. If apple wants to donate them, so be it. But if you give me an option, as a tax payer, I'm going to say hand them a text book, they worked fine for me all the way through my doctorate.
Kids today don't care, have no respect for authority, their parents are less involved and yes, they are getting dumber by the year. Go look at the world rankings, we're behind Poland, Iceland, and even Estonia ranks higher than the US. We coddle kids to much, we make them all think they should all be going to college, there are no winners and losers anymore (my son just played in a baseball league were they didn't record wins and losses). Even the depressed sociopath who is likely plotting to shoot up you and the school is suppose to made to feel "special". I would bring back the ruler before I stuck a iPad in a kids hand.
You seem to forget the simple answer as to why iPad instead of iPhone/iPod. the size makes reading practical. you couldn't read a textbook on an iPhone.
one more thing...
I may have missed it, but in which school system do all students have iPads?
That adds a bit of cost to the ecosystem, doesn't it?
Not saying it's a bad thing, but until all students have one available, this doesn't work, does it?
(sorry for all the smilies...)
I may have missed it, but in which school system do all students have iPads?
That adds a bit of cost to the ecosystem, doesn't it?
Not saying it's a bad thing, but until all students have one available, this doesn't work, does it?
(sorry for all the smilies...)
Yes, that would help those who do have an iPod Touch or iPhone. But still, what about those who don't have any of these devices? You can't expect 10 students to use their iDevices while the other 20 in class just use the old text books, that just won't work. It's either all or nothing, and I really can't see how every single student in a given class would have an iDevice, let alone an iPad. I also don't see why the kids wouldn't start playing games in class while they're at it, that what we used to do at school on our graphing calculators whenever we had a chance, which is why we were only aloud to use them in certain classes where it was really necessary.
Yeah but don't forget that iDevices go obsolete after about 2-3 years. My 2nd gen iPod Touch is pretty unusable now, and it's 3 years old. No student would be able to do anything with such a slow device, so I'd say it has a useful life of 2 years. An iPad maybe more, but it's still much shorter than textbooks, which each student buys and sells each year, costing almost nothing.