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Today Apple held its 'Educational Event' in New York City at the Guggenheim Museum and showed the world how it thinks the future of education textbooks should be managed. Obviously since this is Apple it is no surprise that the iPad features heavily in these plans.

Apple commenced by stating the problems with the old system of the printed books. They are heavy, they are expensive, they wear out, they are not searchable, they are not up-dateable and yet their content is amazing in that they impart knowledge.

A few years ago there was no obvious alternative to even think about changing the way textbooks were made available, fortunately we are no longer living a few years in the past, for today we have the iPad. A piece of technology that apparently was the number one item on kids wish list this past holiday season (I assume they meant Christmas).

It was only a matter of time before these two fields converged and today was that day.

Firstly with the introduction of iBook2. iBooks 2 allows publishers to present highly interactive, colourful and engaging text books that I could have only dreamed of as a school kid. Suddenly kids will be able to explore their subject matters with interactive diagrams, zoomable pictures, video and various other features.

Students will be able to easily add notes too which I always recall my teachers telling me specifically not to do in our books or doodle in them in anyway, shape or form. I always thought this was a little ironic (I assumed I knew what ironic meant back then) as the pages were invariably already adorned with many intricate drawings are various bodily parts or the suspected sexuality of many of the school teachers (as you can tell I went to a top notch London school).

Of course all these new flashy books have to be created and anyone who has had to deal with desktop publishing will know what a pain this can be. Having to reformat text and resize pictures. Well Apple thinks it has solved this problem with it's new app, iBooks Author.

iBooks Author is primarily focused on textbooks but it is reported you could make any kind of book with it. Simply open the app, choose a template and start dragging your content right into the book. Add text, photos, video and Word files that will automagically create sections and headers based on the content. Decide to add more pictures afterwards and the words will simply flow around the image dynamically.

You can also add widgets such as an image gallery to add a little interaction into your creation. The ability to import a Keynote is also included simply by dragging and dropping. However, for the more gifted programers out there they can also write their own widgets using Javascript and HMTL.

Once your book is created you can publish it to your iPad to check the layout and proof your creative masterpiece. Apparently you will also be able to send it off to iBooks to be published but I am presently not sure how that approval process will work.

With the introduction of iBooks Author many teachers and writers will have at their hands a very powerful way of easily creating an ebook, but what is the cost of this rather powerful piece of software? Free….Totally free.

To show Apple means business they have partnered with a number of important publishers in the textbook world for this launch. Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have all produced textbooks that are available today all for under $15.

To further the educational aspect of todays event Apple also released the iTunes U App for the iPad. Now students (or anyone else) can subscribe to the many free courses available through iTunes U and have them all neatly organised in one app.

Once subscribed to a courses you can get full details of the teacher, the syllabus and option things like office hours and credits available. The teacher can post notes to subscribed students including assignments and to-do lists. These assignments can link you to the relevant book in your iBooks section. The teacher can also make videos available also accessable through the app. Once again notes can be easily taken and stored for later reference. A Materials tab makes it a breeze to link out to any required or suggested books, videos, documents are other material required for the course.

So that wraps up pretty much everything from the Apple Educational event. Already I have heard a few rumours that people have been disappointed with the presentation and the tools offered but in all honesty I cannot understand why? Apple made it clear that this was to be an educational event and that is what they delivered. The iBooks Author app alone I can see as having the potential to being a major game changer. If the production of books becomes a simple case of drag and drop I can see far more authors dabbling with self publishing than ever before.

There are times when I am so jealous of the kids of today. They have grown up with with technology around them and to them it is all second nature. I have no idea if the existence of the modern internet would have helped me out when I was at school but I am pretty sure, judging by the way kids love to engage with the iPad, that its inclusion within any educational field will sure to be an viewed as an added bonus….well, until the kid wants a quick game of angry birds at least.

Karl Madden
@claw0101 

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Ewen Rankin

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