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

If you watch the video of the new iPhone personal assistant Siri, you may barely notice that the woman listening to her message (instead of reading it) and then replying (and Siri putting and sending her spoken words into text) via text message, is blind (she’s reading braille).

Steve and Apple have done so much for me, and for my students who learn differently. We wish the family well.

I occasionally use this software when I’m writing reports, and when I do I’m very satisfied. I’ve been tracking this speech recognition software (turning human speech into text on a screen) for a long time. Dragon is by most accounts the best there is and I’m glad it’s recently become available for Mac OS.

I still don’t recommend it for the under high school aged student unless they’re very good readers with the ability to slow down and enunciate a bit more clearly than most kids speak.

Go ahead and read this review. He teases it apart really well.

[via Richard Wanderman

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.

Fantastic auto-complete writing support. Useful for all sorts of tasks. It will be interesting to see how well it learns over time. I plan to use it for a while.

I wish the autocomplete on iOS worked as well for me.

[via David Clark]

Though there are other computers designed for children with autism, a growing number of experts say that the iPad is better. It’s cheaper, faster, more versatile, more user-friendly, more portable, more engaging, and infinitely cooler for young people. “I just couldn’t imagine not introducing this to a parent of a child who has autism,” says Tammy Mastropietro, a speech pathologist based outside Boston who uses the technology with numerous clients. She sees it as a game changer for those with autism, particularly those most severely affected.

Fantastic. Universal design wins.

Alan Brightman who ran the Disabilities Solutions Group at Apple did a lot of work early on in this particular area.

Reminds me of the presentation and article David Clark, Monika Koethnig and I did a while ago: Digital Independence which we did long before the current social networking craze but in which we discussed all the various ways we thought digital information was making the world more accessible.

This is a great review. It’s not a scientific test but it explores these different methods of getting text into a device in a way that will help anyone think about the future of text encoding on a variety of devices in a broader way.

The only thing missing is voice recognition. The iPhone now has Dragon Naturally Speaking although one has to be connected as the processing is not done locally.

[via Daring Fireball]