Can Apple Technology Save Education?
The education crisis in the United States has made headlines for quite some time. While education underperforms and stays largely behind other industries in its technology uptake, many of us have been looking to the promise of personal digital learning to revolutionize the classroom and education.
Apple has proven a successful disruptive innovation in business and life with its iPhone, iTunes, and iPad technologies. Now, is it ready to disrupt education?
Apple declared its official shift into the education market with the announcement of its partnership with leading publishers, expansion of iTunes U, and launch of the new iBooks 2 and iBooks Author, which is being coined the “Garage Band for textbooks.”
Apple already has a foothold in education, says OnlineEducation.net. It has 1.5 million iPads in classrooms, 20 thousand education apps available for download, and a highly active iTunes U database. Today, Apple made learning cheaper and more accessible to educators and students. Will new learning technologies from Apple help turn the education climate around?
Via: OnlineEducation.net
Mark
I have every product Apple makes but I'm not convinced Apple will save education. This setup assumes all schools will have iPads (iOS only compatible textbooks), and all schools will have Macs to use iBooks Creator ( Mac only program).
Note even close to reality even in schools with Macs, many of which are still old macs running incompatible software.
This will be hailed as a revolution by excitable tech-ed gurus who have access to all the tools available butt will be out of reach of the wider Ed community with the cheap PCs that can't run any of this.
Maybe this is just the start and just like iTunes going windows made the iPod popularity explode, Apple will get all this running on Windows in near future.
But education isn't the same as the consumer industry Apple dominates. A kid can choose Android or iPhone, PC or Mac, iPod or DS. But he can't choose textbook if he doesn't have the product to run it.
Sarah Cargill
Great feedback, Mark. I agree that there's a long way to go before Apple "saves education." Yet, this is a positive shift. If Apple can have nearly the impact in edtech as it has with iTunes and other products in the consumer market, then we're moving in the direction of innovation.
Jay
Sarah and all,
Many of us in our district are in. It is fantastic to see Apples commitment to education. The financial crisis has our district strapped. Because it is our moral responsibility to help our students be College and Career Ready. We will find ways to bring this technology to them. Apple is helping. In the classrooms that have iPads we are seeing the teachers and the students change the way and rate of learning based on Moore's Law.
Sarah Cargill
Thank you for your response, Jay! I appreciate your optimism and hope that this is the beginning of big support from Apple in education as well.
Kathy W
What kind of software did you use to create this infographic? In just a few days! Great work - I'd love to learn and teach this.
Sarah Cargill
Hi Kathy, OnlineEducation.net created and published the infographic. Most of these are made with advanced design software. I'll find out if there's a way you can make a similar design with your students. Off the top of my head, I'd recommend Prezi, Visual.ly, and Visualize.me.
Peter Kim
Hi Kathy, our creative and design team put this infographic together. Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop are the basic programs used to create the graphic, I hope that helps!