Apple unveils interactive textbooks, revamped iTunes U

The iBooks 2 app is available for free.

Apple might make the heavy backpack an endangered species.

There won’t be much students can’t do with a few taps and swipes of their Apple iPads after the tech giant’s introduction of iBooks 2–a book store that now includes interactive textbooks–and an iTunes University app that could create a comprehensive school experience inside the popular computer tablet.

Apple officials confirmed Jan. 19 weeklong speculation that the company would jump into the textbook market during a press event at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, where Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, introduced the next iteration of the iBooks app, which for the first time will offer textbooks that start at $14.99 or less for high school students.…Read More

Higher education’s best mobile technology programs

The University of Missouri last fall required all incoming journalism students to have an iPhone or iPod Touch.
The University of Missouri last fall required all incoming journalism students to have an iPhone or iPod Touch.

With small private campuses and large research universities alike teeming with iPhones, iPod Touches, BlackBerries, and other mobile devices, a college counseling company has highlighted five institutions in particular as the best landing spots for students attached to their gadgets.

IvyWise, a New York-based counseling company that released a list of the most environmentally friendly colleges in April, recently unveiled another list to help college applicants, this time focusing on schools that leverage the power of mobile devices to store and deliver recorded lectures, syllabi, homework, tests, and a host of other information that can be accessed any time, anywhere on campus.

The list, compiled by IvyWise counselors and released May 12, includes Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pa., Stanford University, the University of Maryland’s College Park campus, Ohio State University, and the University of Missouri.…Read More

Can the iPhone save higher education?

What happens when you give about 2,000 college students and their teachers Apple iPhones and iPod Touches and tell them “Go mobile, go digital?” No one knows. But that’s what Abilene Christian University is trying to find out with its Mobile Learning project, Network World reports. What ACU is trying to explore isn’t whether the iPhone itself will transform teaching and learning, but whether always-on, always connected, personal digital devices and social networks can. Higher-education computing programs now often mandate or provide wireless laptops, but many of these are ad-hoc efforts, with more or less no funding. By contrast, when ACU first gave 650 entering freshmen in 2008 a choice of iPhone or iPod Touch, it was already putting in place a funded program to equip and encourage faculty to begin exploiting the handsets in the classroom, and a framework to evaluate the results. The goal, in effect, was eventually to turn the entire campus into a laboratory for mobile learning research, experimentation, and analysis. “Based on the feedback we’re getting, we’re convinced it’s working,” says CTO Kevin Roberts…

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College newspaper warms up its digital iPad press

The student newspaper at Abilene Christian University (ACU) isn’t waiting for iPads to hit the shelves before seizing on the opportunity the device holds for print publications, reports MacNewsWorld:  Instead, the Optimist has developed its own app for the new platform. “We can’t wait until [the iPad] is adopted by a critical mass of people,” Professor Kenneth Pybus said. “We want to be up and running and there when they’re ready for us.” ACU will be among the first colleges to offer editions of its student newspaper designed specifically for the new hardware platform. Adding an iPad edition of the newspaper was a natural move for the publication. It’s already offered in print, on the web, and on the iPhone and iPod Touch, which are issued to students at ACU the way laptops are allocated at other universities. “Making our students comfortable with mobile news delivery just makes good sense academically,” Journalism Department Chair Cheryl Bacon said. “They’re going to be going into work environments where they have to adapt very quickly to technological change, and they have to understand how mobile delivery differs from other types of news delivery.”

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Students use iPods, iPhones to grade Obama’s address

Abilene Christian students answered 50 questions on their iPhones and iPods during Obama's address.
Abilene Christian students answered 50 questions on their iPhones and iPods during Obama's address.

It’s the stuff that makes political pollsters salivate: 30 Abilene Christian University students used iPhones and iPod Touches to respond to President Obama’s Jan. 27 State of the Union address in real time, and a campus technology official said the exercise offered insight into boosting student participation.

Abilene Christian was among the country’s first campuses to bring iPhones to students when the school gave the devices to incoming freshmen last school year. Freshmen and sophomores now have university-issued iPhones and iPod Touches, and professors from the political science and journalism programs assembled 30 students to gauge their reaction during Obama’s first State of the Union speech.

“It was a helpful exercise because … we were able to see if an interactive environment helped students engage in politics differently,” said Dennis Marquardt, Abilene Christian’s educational technology manager, who helped oversee the project.…Read More