Apple’s education initiative and why it matters to Spongelab
Apple announced yesterday their game-changing plans to “reinvent the textbook” at a special event at the Guggenheim museum in New York City. The museum, a landmark of contemporary style and cultural locus for the arts, was a smart choice of venue as it keenly reflected the event’s hosts - a company that prides itself on existing at the “intersection of the liberal arts and technology”, as Steve Jobs always put it.
The iPad - with 20,000 learning themed apps and 1.5 million tablets deployed in schools - already has a firm grasp on the hearts and minds of the education world, and it’s upon this foundation that Apple is launching their potential revolution of the pedagogical domain.
At the heart of the initiative is a triple-threat of free educational apps: iBooks 2, iBooks Author and iTunes U, aimed primarily at students, textbook publishers and teachers respectively. iBooks 2 diversifies Apple’s eBook offering to provide support for electronic textbooks, including education-specific features like annotations, cue cards and quizzes alongside interactive multimedia capabilities. While publishers like McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Dorling Kindersley now appear to be involved in creating textbooks for the iPad, the new iBooks Author allows anyone with a Mac to make a textbook themselves (or any kind of eBook).
iTunes U - or iTunes University - has been around since 2007 and already has seen 700 million downloads of lectures for college students. Its revamp here opens its audience up to include K-12 students and now also offers full online courses from the likes of MIT and Duke University. Most importantly, it will also provide a way for teachers to direct students through online learning - by posting assignments, syllabus information, materials, etc; all linked to the iBooks’ fancy textbooks.
With iBooks Author, you can insert your own images, videos, HTML and more into your home-made electronic texts. At Spongelab, all images, animations and videos are free and open to be used (with attribution) anywhere you want. This makes our database of amazing science materials the perfect companion for Apple’s new educational initiative.
Say you’re publishing a textbook chapter about the human circulatory system. Grab our unlabeled image of the human heart, throw it into your interactive textbook, then let users swap between it and the labeled version. As an assignment, provide a link to our iPad Build-a-Body App so that they can complete the full circulatory system themselves.
When it comes down to it, all of this is ultimately a smart business move for Apple. They’ve recognized a massive market in younger users - millions of whom asked for iPads for Christmas 2011 - and are capitalizing on the opportunity for the iPad to become a lifelong tool for both learning and entertainment. While the textbooks are remarkably cheap (up to $14.99) and all of the Apps are free, don’t forget that every student will need to somehow get their hands on a $500 iPad, and ensure that it doesn’t break.
In today’s tough economy, educational funding continues to suffer from budget cuts and reduced opportunities for using expensive technologies in schools. To respond to this, Spongelab provides an educational service that is completely free. Just sign up for an account and start using our all-in-one education platform that stitches together an expanding library of educational content with an integrated teaching system and powerful classroom analysis tools.
Spongelab offers all of its multimedia content in the cloud - you don’t have to install anything, which leaves your hard-drive headache-free. Just sign in on any computer and your science learning experience stays the same. By contrast, textbooks on iBooks 2 currently range in download size from 800MB to 2.77GB, taking up a potential ton of space on the standard 16GB capacity iPad.
As Erica Ogg over at Gigaom argues, ”considering Steve Jobs’ passion for the intersection of liberal arts and technology, [the iPad] could do so much more” by being more open to designers and creators in educational contexts. The iPad and Apple’s products historically have suffered from being restrictive for users, with complicated ownership rights for stuff you’ve payed for, limited support for Internet technologies and an ambiguous process for contributing materials to their online stores. By comparison, Spongelab offers a totally open environment where users can submit content, share our stuff anywhere they like, and customize their educational experience - because everyone learns in a different way.
Apple’s new education initiative, with affordable, beautiful electronic textbooks, intuitive publishing tools and a streamlined content delivery system, seems poised to spur big changes in teaching and learning with technology. Spongelab’s database of science media will be a great companion to Apple’s iBooks Author. But several shortcomings mean that Apple might not provide the perfect education solution for everyone.
