iClassroom

Yesterday, Apple announced a further commitment to investing its products in education. Apple would like to get a cut out of the multi-million dollar textbook industry.  Its vision is to make textbooks more interactive, easier to create and more accessible to teachers and students. The three big changes are that they have created a new free app called iBooks Author, revamped iTunes U along with updating iBooks to iBooks2.

Educators who use iPads in the classroom have been collectively holding their breath for an announcement like this as there have been a share of frustrations using iPads in the classroom.  Firstly, there is no easy way to download and manage apps on a large number of devices. Although Apple is slowly changing the volume purchasing program, it only seems to be rolled out in the US, leaving many international schools hanging out to dry.  It has also been frustrating for synching updates and managing large number of apps. The problem is that the iPad is made to be a personal content device rather than a shared device which is how many schools use them.

So with the news that Apple does want to commit to helping education, this is certainly a step in the right direction. So what does this mean for educators?

1. iBooks 2-This is really just an update to iBooks rather than a separate app. The idea behind is that textbooks can be downloaded for subjects which has movies, images and interactive content. This is great as an educator as content needs to be engaging to students in order to be effective in today’s age. You can download Life on Earth for free to see what it looks like.

2. iTunes U-Now educators can now customize content for students so that they have assignments and videos related to the course they are taking. I have yet to see this in practice but it sounds great.

3. iBooks Author- This is probably one of the most exciting changes for me. This app allows for students to actually create their own interactive book and create content rather than just consume content. Although this was technically possible before using the share e-pub feature in Pages, this app does it all for you. Keep in mind that this is an app from the Mac App store and not a mobile app.

I am going to begin exploring these features and see how well they actually work practically. What are your thoughts on these new changes? Please share you comments.

Games are nothing new for technology.  We’ve always had a variety of types of games from action-adventure that started in Atari and Nintendo to more strategy-based games such as Warcraft and Command and Conquer.  For the most part, educational games have been developed but often lack the depth or complexity of games intended for entertainment.  There are plenty of flash type games online that educators usually use for low-level thinking skills such as math computation and spelling and vocabulary type games.  Although these certainly have some educational value but as a teacher, I’ve usually don’t allocate too much time to these in the same way that I don’t spend too much time on drill and kill skill worksheets. However, games are coming increasingly complex and realistic and a more recent genre of games has emerged including simulation and 3D virtual games such as Second Life, Sim City and most recently, Minecraft.

These games have captured my attention. I must confess that I am a bit of a gamer myself and really enjoy strategy type games or simulation type games such as Civilization or Myst. I love the challenge and the thinking skills involved with these games.  I also see the educational value of these games as well.  The Horizon Report (a publication that discusses emerging technology in education) predicts that it will play a significant role in education over the next 2-3 years. For an excellent read on this topic, read Marc Prensky’s article “What Kids Learn that’s POSITIVE from video games” .  To sum up he points out that kids learn the following real-life lessons from video games:

• Cause and Effect
• Long term Winning vs Short-term Gain
• Order from Seeming Chaos
• Second-order Consequences
• Complex systems behaviors
• Counter Intuitive results
• Using obstacles as motivation
• The Value of Persistence

My current plan is to start using it with 3rd Graders to create a Math project in which they designed a garden with limited resources and calculated the area and perimeter. I am also starting an After School Activity with some students 3-5 in which we are going to design the new campus for our school in collaboration with some High School students.