Some may think Apple is ready to sabotage the textbook realm, when actually their much talked about “Educational Event” happening now in New York City, is proposing quite the opposite.
And thanks to none other than the Verge, who are blogging live from the event right now, they’ve exposed us to the live discussion that is highlighting how education is in “the dark ages,” how kids are having trouble learning; the process has evolved into a more difficult one with the distractions of external factors and increasingly heavy-use and exposure to influential devices, causing our youth to be disinterested from classic educational methods.
They also mentioned a surprising statistic, that as a high school freshman, you only have a 70% chance of graduating; engagement levels are reportedly low, and students are having trouble reading and writing—this event was designed to advocate Apple’s position in helping solve this problem by proposing iPad classroom integration and Apple’s latest iBooks 2, a huge part of this announcement.
iBooks 2 will bring a “brand new textbook experience for the iPad,” and emphasizes the portability of having all of your information ready at your fingertips, instead of dragging along 8 different books. Along with iBooks 2, comes iTunes U – an interactive portal for colleges to buy books and find specific class-related content; schools have already partnered with Apple in utilizing this setup.
The only thing: the reality of how unaffordable this idea of having iPads in the classroom is, seeing that iPads go for $500 a pop. While these propositions seem ideal, the reality is budgets, budgets, budgets—we are in a recession; there’s no extra dollars to be spending on some iPads for the entire class.
But the overall aim is good: the system is definitely jeopardized and if nothing has shown to directly improve the educational crisis so to speak, reinventing the textbook would most definitely heighten engagement—for who doesn’t want to learn from an iPad?
Will Apple save education? Is this one step closer to the demise of textbooks, or will companies like McGraw Hill work with Apple to recreate our younger generations’ future? Or will this be an unrealistically idealistic solution to the posed disengagement of education?
(via Verge; photo via Experts Exchange)
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