Apple's Interactive Digital Textbook

A year ago, skeptics were doubting the value of learning through a cell phone. When McGraw-Hill released its “mConnect” open-standard mobile learning platform aimed at emerging markets, some tech pundits, presumably who sit at computers all day, were finding it difficult to think in any way other than sitting in a classroom or staring at a monitor for instructor-led education.

That’s before everyone became addicted to their iPads and education apps started multiplying by the thousands. On January 19, Apple kicked off its education event in New York releasing iBooks 2 and highlighting its iTunes U app, which made the limitations of traditional textbooks – namely that they’re dry enough to be a fire hazard, terribly dated and incredibly one-dimensional – painfully clear.

Textbook traditionalists might not have been like me, spending more time doodling in the margins than reading the copy between them. They might have been able to memorize the dates and formulas they read as printed in chapters. But a decade of working with online students has proven that you have to meet them where they learn best. Active learning is always the best kind of learning.

Even if you’re not ready to fill your professional development training program with iPads, remember the classrooms of 20 years ago were different places than they are now. New learners learn differently and expect to have access to information and quick feedback. As you think about the way you present information to students, be ready to meet their expectations and embrace the innovations that are proven to keep them engaged.

I’m always looking for ways to demonstrate how technology is relevant for our clients. So when I happened across this detailed explanation of how Rabbi D. Nimchinsky brought along his digital camera to snag some videos and upload them to YouTube during an 8th grade field trip to Washington DC, I was delighted.

The good rabbi says:

The results were very gratifying. Each day we received numerous emails from parents, teachers and other students commenting on the trip, the video bloggers, and the students in general. It built up a good deal of enthusiasm and excitement about the trip which the kids were thrilled about when they called their parents or friends in the school.

Look at this detailed how-to on the AVI CHAI Educational Technology blog.

Even small universities can reach large student audiences through online learning programs. Take, for example, the University of Illinois, which has an exemplary online learning program and wants to reach 10,000 new online students by next year, according to a report this week by NPR.

Nowadays, many colleges require students to take at least one course online, so it’s little wonder that U. of Illinois, which has a relatively small on-campus student population, is looking for a new way to break ahead with this new learning.

The students, many of whom are plugged in 24/7 anyway, aren’t the hiccup to adoption. It’s the teachers. Learning the basics of podcasts, blogs and Second Life is a crash course for many of the educators, who are the same ones who teach in-person classes. The U of I puts teachers through a tech-ed bootcamp before turning them loose on the online sector of their students.

This makes me think the market for e-learning-only educators will continue to shrink as everyone becomes an expert in e-learning.

To that end, here are some handy tools that I share with the educators I work with so they can learn more about teaching online:

Illinois Online Network
http://www.ion.illinois.edu/Resources/tutorials/overview/index.asp

Simple Course Planning Worksheet
http://www.talance.com/planning.html

Weblogs, part II: A Swiss Army website?
http://istpub.berkeley.edu:4201/bcc/Winter2002/feat.weblogging2.html

Second Life Education Wiki
http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life_Education_Wiki

Education Podcast Network
http://www.epnweb.org/