Apple’s Entrance into Digital Textbooks: revolutionary?

Apple announced its entrance into digital textbooks, now selling through its iTunes and iBooks online. Though this has been somewhat expected, it’s exciting news.

Believe me, this is not even the tip of the iceberg. I’ve already downloaded samples of the 8 textbooks listed in the iBooks store. While I think these books will become significantly more interactive and creative in design, much like some of the early digital magazines, they’re already way more interesting than standard textbooks.

Imagine how much students backs and shoulders will love when they can carry five 300 page textbooks inside their iPad.

Way less expensive too!

From Good.is

The average community college student in Washington spends about $1,200 per year on textbooks.

I know that as a society we’re probably in the infancy of this movement to digitize textbooks and in a variety of ways, bring down the costs of textbooks to students. I don’t understand how they deal with fees to the writers of textbooks, but Washington State has created a way to access collections of textbooks as well as other educational materials- mostly for free.  Apparently the most a school can charge for these is $30 per student.

They’ve begun with eighty-one of the state’s most popular general education and pre-college classes taken.  These are open licenses, which means that they’re available to other colleges and universities and anyone else who wants to give them a try.

I’ve already been on the site and looked at some US History text. It’s a pretty easy sign-in process and once I was looking over a chapter, and since I was using my Safari browser, it was easy to highlight, right-click and have my computer read it to me (if I was tired or dyslexic or had another learning disability).

I’ve heard of this before and can’t quite make up my mind about it. This article in Scientific American describes a typographic font created by a graphic designer from the Netherlands, that supposedly makes reading print easier for some people with dyslexia. I suppose if it’s helpful to some then more power to it. I’ve tried it on a few kids I work with and they don’t see or feel any impact yet.

I’d love to hear from others, particularly if you have dyslexia.

I’ve recently begun working with a 10 year old boy who has dyslexia. That’s not unusual for me. It’s an important part of what I do in my educational consulting practice, and I’ve been doing it for years.

What’s new is that the young boy and his family live about four and a half hours away by car. So, on our respective Macintosh Computers, we have our language-training intensive tutorial sessions, four days per week, via Apple’s FaceTime, their video calling software. And so far, it’s working great.

I know this isn’t necessarily breakthrough stuff; Skype’s been around for awhile for example. But, for me, and for this particular family, it’s a thing of beauty. FaceTime gives them access to me, a trained dyslexia specialist, without leaving their somewhat rural home. It allows me to stay connected to a wonderful kid and his family.

One of the things I wondered about was whether the screen/virtual connection would somehow miss too much of the intuitive, non-verbal aspects of communication that I depend on. In my work, I’m not simply transmitting information. There’s an exchange that goes well beyond that. Pleasantly, I’ve found that I can be nearly or exactly as perceptive to subtle cues and input from my student as I can in person. The fact that we began our relationship in person and that we have that as a base of knowing one another, is, I imagine, very helpful.

There is an aspect of any therapeutic relationship that happens right-brain to right-brain, intuitive self to intuitive self, and I wasn’t sure how that would translate in a computer environment. It’s working very very well.

Another aspect of a teaching/remedial/mentoring relationship that I wondered about concerns motivation and attention. Would the video-phone environment diminish my ability to capture and hold his attention? Would he be able to sustain his attention? Let’s face it, even in the same room, teaching someone who’s dyslexic all about spelling patterns for example, generating and holding attention is important and not a foregone conclusion (smile).

As it’s turned out thus far, he’s had a higher level of concentration because of the technology and novelty of the interface. Because of the demands of computer-computer interface, we’re working more than ever with word processing, and besides improving his reading and spelling, he’s also having to learn how to cut and paste, how to use links, how to get more out of his browser, and how to select and use extensions. He’s loving it!

So, expanding our concepts even for elementary-aged students, of what the teaching environment, interface, and delivery should look like, is good thing.

Having the right tools helps. On my end I’m working on a brand new iMac with a large enough screen and a fast enough processor, and high speed internet connection, that I think helps FaceTime works like a charm. FaceTime software on a large enough screen allows my student to hold up his paper and work to show me, and unlike previous versions of Photo Booth for example, the letters and words appear correctly and not in mirror image.

There’s nothing in what I’m using, that is “adaptive” or “assistive technology.” This is simply the basics of what’s out there for anyone.

Next, I’m trying to figure out how I can screen share easily through new and improved features inherent in Lion OS 10.7.2

Published by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner, on the Web site of Science Magazine, and written about in the International Business Times, this study says in part, that when people rely on the internet and expect to have future access to information, they have “lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.”

I can’t argue with the findings, I’m just not so sure that’s a bad thing. For one, specific memorization and recall of facts and other bits of information erode at least somewhat over time anyway. The aging process takes care of that, as now in my 50′s, I’m finding out. However even when I had a with a robust 30 year-old brain, I always thought that knowing where and how to find information was a better skill than being reliant on just memorization.

This reminds me of the use of spell checking and word processing in general for people with and without learning disabilities. When your brain is freed from some of the more mechanical memory-based functions of writing (spelling, for example), you can focus on the expressing your ideas, the crafting of written expression.

Granted, it’s nice when you are good at both.

Hmm, I can’t remember if this study’s been replicated.

I guess I’ll Google that.

Of course, you have to have a print disability of some type, such as dyslexia, in order to access the textbooks.

Now students won’t have to use those clunky (to them) Walkmen clones that one used to need to play the CD’s on.

AppleInsider reports on Apple experimenting with a fantastic approach to deliver individualized accommodations, with regards to how information looks and feels to students, to their computer screens.  This would take “Differentiated Instruction” an oft-used educational buzz word to very cool heights.  It would enable one host computer to deliver large font with color to one screen and another with synthesized voice or even braille, depending upon need.  Great stuff.

Matt Richtel at The New York Times documents student use of technology at Woodside High School in silicon valley (Redwood City, California).

On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”

What can we say, the generation of Cliffs Notes.

Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.

Watch the video: Fast Times at Woodside High.

Ghotit is releasing a new Facebook Spell Checker application. This is the first and only Facebook application directly targeting Facebook users with dyslexia.

[via Sanford Shapiro]

SpeakerText providers a service to transcribe videos and link those transcripts to the customer’s video player through a drop-down menu. Once a video has been indexed, SpeakerText hosts the transcript in the cloud and automatically attaches a time-coded link of the transcript to the video, so that users can click on a section of the transcript and be taken to that portion of the video.

Wow, fantastic.

David Pogue reviews the new Dragon dictation program for Mac OS X. He gives it high marks.

This software will be useful for many people who have a hard time with writing for a variety of reasons.