Apple's iBook Author & Textbooks

To be sure, you’ve heard about Apple’s education announcement. Do you think it will help end the confusion that schools face over how to or whether or not to, go digital with their texts? Will we be ready for all students to have digital texts in five years as Education Secretary Arne Duncan and President Obama have challenged? Some teachers are already creating their own texts, and with the iBook Author and other authoring systems more teachers will be working on creating the text they believe will work best for their students. Some teachers won’t have the time or interest in doing this, some schools won’t have the funding for digital devices to make use of digitized texts, and some schools won’t have the broadband power to make the transition at this time. A problem that worries school administrators is how to make sure teacher-compiled texts fit the curriculum they want offered in their schools, while parent perception may be that schools can just order etexts and therefore, lighten backpacks. But while novels and some commercial eTexts are available for high school, there are few complete titles for Middle and Elementary Schools. Schools can patch together some of the excellent programs sold by software companies to create coursework, but for the most part, they can’t find in eFormat, the reading, math, science or language arts books they are using now.  The bigger question is, “Do we simply want our current texts in eFormat?” I don’t think so, since it certainly wouldn’t take advantage of the wonderful resources on the Internet, animations, video clips, and interactive media. I, for one, will be experimenting with the iBook Author. I downloaded it a couple of days ago and am anxious to get my book going.

Comments

[Diane Kendall]

Will be interested to hear more about your experiences with the textbook authoring system!