The education system and education in general, as we at least knew it until today, has changed. At yesterday's training event, Apple announced three new apps for a second edition of the iBooks, a new way to read textbooks, iTunesU for downloading tutorials and textbooks, and iBooksAuthor, a Mac app that will create interactive books for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch…
Apple's training event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, of course, was accompanied by announcements of a new version of the iBooks, the iBooks Author and the separate iTunesU app.
This event "hits" on the numbers that want 20.000 learning applications and 1.5 million iPads to be available to the education system.
The second edition of the iBooks marks the biggest push of the iPad in the direction of education. Apple has announced new titles, which are already available on iTunes, priced at $ 14.99 and below. The new version of iBooks includes reading ebooks with support for multimedia and interactivity.
The user will be able to navigate through the content and whenever he wants to stop to access videos, translations and other information about what he is reading, without having to leave the page. This tour is done through detailed 3D animated models with information. Roger Rosner, vice president of application development, said: "Certainly no printed book can compete with this." The reader will be able to read either in portrait or in landscape mode, while with the new version he will be able to put the traditional post it in separate pages that interest him, so that he can look back when he wishes.
iBooks Author. A new, free application for Mac (OS X), for easy and fast creation of ebooks. The author has the ability to import images, widgets, etc. and Word files in ebooks with simple drag-and-drop. The application will help more teachers, researchers and generally those who produce writing. Apart from being free, another feature of the application is that it is easy to use due to drag-and-drop on photos, videos and word texts. Every writer will be able to easily put references to any phrase he wants.
In addition, Apple has claimed that any author will be able to publish his work directly. The bad news for this company innovation is that so far it only targets Macs with OS X Lion. IBooks Author gives books only in .ibooks format for iPad and not in ePUB format for other tablet PCs and e-readers.
Separate iTunesU application. The company's senior executive, Eddy Cue, also announced the redesign of iTunes U, the service through which lectures are delivered to University students and has reached 700 million downloads. Complete online courses are available through this in-service service at Duke, Yale and MIT.
ITunesU is also open to schools, not just Universities. Apple introduced a Chemistry class at its event to introduce the new method. In the right column of the application there are options such as Info, Posts, Notes and Materials that allow the teacher to provide what he considers important directly to the students and they can download it directly. This application is available in the App Store, free of charge in 123 countries.
All three applications are available for download and for free.
Source: Proho