The class of 2016 was challenged to do something creative with their acceptance packages. One student decided to launch hers 91,000 feet straight up.
On Tuesday, Obama hosted the second White House Science Fair, an exhibit of more than 30 student projects that ranged from a system to detect nuclear threats to a prosthetic hand to portable disaster shelters. For nearly an hour, Obama toured the displays and visited with students, pressing them for details and admiring their work.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski on Wednesday challenged schools and companies to get digital textbooks in students’ hands within five years. The Obama administration’s push comes two weeks after Apple Inc. announced it would start to sell electronic versions of a few standard high-school books for use on its iPad tablet.
I should know better than to look at a new Apple creation and call it an outright failure. The company’s batting average is too high lately. There’s not a lot of room for nay-saying. Still, I think a dose of skepticism doesn’t hurt with Apple’s latest announcement of iBooks Textbooks, a platform for publishing interactive, digital textbooks on the iPad.
Apple debuted the holy grail of textbooks on Thursday in New York City. The books are undeniably cool: they will integrate videos, photos and interactive graphics, make taking notes a breeze and be easy to navigate — all features that will undoubtedly make Apple’s textbooks more enjoyable and engaging to students than the current dead tree versions. But the problem Apple ignored in their announcement is how to actually get their reinvented textbooks into the hands of students.
Apple held an event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York today. The company’s number one initiative: “Reinventing the textbook,” said SVP of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller.
Join us at 10am Eastern for live coverage of Apple’s education event being held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York!
If the rumors are true, Apple’s foray into textbooks might look very similar to how it currently sells apps, music, movies and regular e-books – let other people create the content, and then take a cut of what’s sold from inside Apple’s marketplace. Quick and easy creation of that content is the tricky part, though, and it’s what Apple’s expected to address at the announcement.
We’ll be there (and live-blogging) at Apple’s “education event” this Thursday, Jan. 19 at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, but the scuttlebutt going in has Cupertino announcing a platform to — wait for it — “digitally destroy” textbooks.
The pain points of traditional print edition textbooks are obvious: For starters they’re heavy, with the average physics textbook weighing in at a burdensome 3.6 pounds. They’re also expensive, especially when you factor in the average college student’s limited budget, typically costing hundreds of dollars every semester.
The first computer I ever used in a classroom was the Apple II. My first grade teacher, Mrs. Hogan, would line us all up against a wall before walking the class over to the computer lab, a rusty bungalow tucked away in a dark corner of the school.
