More Schools Embrace the iPad as a Learning Tool

NY Times: "ROSLYN, N.Y. — As students returned to class this week, some were carrying brand-new Apple iPads in their backpacks, given not by their parents but by their schools. ... "

Digital-Textbook Design Formula Proves Elusive

NYTimes.com:

"The most complicated form in print media is the textbook,” Josh Koppel of ScrollMotion explained to me. “You have a 1,000-page math text with 10,000 more pages of homework assignments. You’ve got the graphic side, the text side, notation, assessment, remediation. And we need to make this all live well digitally without being subtractive.”

Early this year, a consortium of educational publishers, including McGraw-Hill; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; and Kaplan, signed up with ScrollMotion to produce their products for the iPad. In trying to nail the tablet-computer design, Koppel has papered his office wall with old baseball cards, tears from Montgomery Ward and Sears catalogs (1880s and 1960s), a military edition of Thomas Beer’s “Mauve Decade,” the final issue of Weekly World News — the most inspired text and graphic solutions from years past. He says his fear, as we shift from analog to digital textbooks, is that some content — and with it some culture — will fall by the wayside. “This is what we have to fight: ‘Oh, we lost another thing!’ ” Koppel says. “Pretty soon nobody even knows we’ve lost it." ...

Inkling Lands Venture Funding, Launches Digital Textbook Platform for iPad

Digital Media Wire: "San Francisco - Inkling, the developer of a digital textbook platform, on Friday announced the launch of application for Apple's iPad, and said it raised an undisclosed amount in a first round of venture capital financing. Sequoia Capital led the investment round; Kapor Capital, Sherpalo Ventures and Felicis Ventures also participated. San Francisco-based Inkling's digital textbook platform offers students the ability to collaborate and add multimedia content to texts."

MacNN: "A new developer, Inkling, is bringing a variety of high-profile school textbooks to the iPad. The first four are from McGraw-Hill, and described as best-sellers in biology, economics, marketing and psychology; these should be available today, at an early cost of $3 per chapter or $70 for an entire book. In the near future prices should be hiked to $4 and $85, respectively. In digital form the books have been enhanced with a number of multimedia elements, such as quizzes, video lectures and 3D models."

Nonprofit Tries One-Kindle-Per-Child In Ghana

Nonprofit Tries One-Kindle-Per-Child In Ghana - Digits - WSJ:

In the developing world, where literacy remains a giant challenge, might digital books be able to leapfrog their print counterparts?

That’s what a non-profit called Worldreader is trying to figure out with a series of trials in Ghana that involve giving students Amazon.com Kindles to read in school and at home.

Worldreader was co-founded by David Risher, a 45-year-old former Amazon senior vice president who was responsible for growing the company’s operations beyond books. He left Amazon in 2002 before it created the Kindle, but was taken with the gadget’s ability to offer access to a huge assortment of books in parts of the world where getting a regular book into the hands of students can be a six-month challenge.

“There’s a huge difference between being able to read from a selection of the 10 books that you happen to have — or that somebody donated — versus being able to get your hands on a book that you are really interested in,” says Risher. “When you combine that with very very low distribution costs for additional books and falling technology prices, these are ingredients for doing something really special.”

Risher says he thinks e-books will let the developing world skip the paper stage, in much the same way cell phones have helped countries skip the landline stage ...

Textbooks and the Open-Source Revolution

Those of us with a sense of history can't help but enjoy the irony of Scott McNealy now being a staunch advocate for open-source anything. Nevertheless, this initiative is pretty cool. The hurdle will evidently be curriculum bureaucrats in various governmental departments of education, but what else is new? NYTimes.com:

[Scott] McNealy, the fiery co-founder and former chief executive of Sun Microsystems, shuns basic math textbooks as bloated monstrosities: their price keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same.

“Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,” Mr. McNealy says.

Early this year, Oracle, the database software maker, acquired Sun for $7.4 billion, leaving Mr. McNealy without a job. He has since decided to aim his energy and some money at Curriki, an online hub for free [open-source] textbooks and other course material that he spearheaded six years ago.

“We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks” in the United States, Mr. McNealy says. “It seems to me we could put that all online for free.”...

The nonprofit Curriki fits into an ever-expanding list of organizations that seek to bring the blunt force of Internet economics to bear on the education market. ...

An Argument for eBooks and Wireless in Elementary School Classrooms

Writing in the Washington Post, Brian Levin and J. Erik Garr ask: Why are we still using ink-on-paper textbooks, when digital technology offers a much better way?

Today, Johnny opens his math textbook and reads a chapter. He understands parts of it, but not all. He does the 10-question homework on paper and hands it in. Later, he gets the homework back and sees that he answered seven questions correctly.

Envision this: Johnny pulls up a math chapter on his e-reader. When he doesn't understand something, he clicks a link and watches a video of a great teacher presenting the concept, perhaps using a cool simulation. If Johnny still doesn't understand, he can chat online with a tutor familiar with the material. When Johnny does his homework on his e-reader, he immediately learns what he got wrong and sees an explanation based on his particular mistake. Johnny's parents receive a text or e-mail saying that he finished his math homework. The teacher receives a report that evening outlining what the class found straightforward and which problems puzzled students, along with suggestions on how to address the inadequacies. The school board receives data that lead to constant improvement in the effectiveness of course material. ...

And those improvements are just the beginning. ...