Category: Education

Apple Japan is trying to get the students on board as they get ready to start school in April.  Japan is one of the few countries where the students start school in April instead of September.   From 14 February until 22 May, students and educators can get a Mac App Store card with the purchase of a machine.  The card with a face value of ¥10,000 JPY is in addition to the normal academic discount.  According to Apple’s website, it…

Everyone one knows that Steve Jobs had several industries that he wanted to revamp and change for the better.  Education was one of those industries.  Apple made huge headway into fulfilling Steve Jobs’ dream on 19 January with the introduction of iBooks 2.0, Ibooks Author, iTunes U and of course, the text books section of the iTunes Book Store. Now it appears, that the US government is also getting on the band wagon with some announcements of their own.  The…

iBooks Author, the app which allows educators to produce their own textbooks, has pushed over 600,000 downloads in 5 days.  It was previously thought that this number was under 90,000, however Apple announce in this morning’s conference call that this plus a total of 3 million iTunes U downloads is pushing the education initiative along mightily. The fact that iBooks Author only runs on Mac OS X Lion should also drive future Mac OS X sales or even machine sales…

Apple has finally created a support website for the iTunes U.  Introduced along with Apple’s Education Initiative last week in New York City, iTunes U is intended to give students of all ages materials which are downloadable to their iPads as well as instructurs the tools with which to reach the student easily and interactively. Lack of a real support structure has been hindering usage of the facility so far, however Apple eliminated that issue yesterday.   You can check out…

In the 5 days since the launch of the Textbooks section of the Apple Book Store, they have sold approximately 350,000 books according to Global Equities Research.  They also apparently gave away 90,000 plus copies of the iBooks Author software for textbook production.  If these numbers and trends continue, Apple could well have the largest book store sales in the world within a matter of weeks instead of the normal years that it took Amazon to get to the top….

This week, Apple shook up the education and textbook world with the introduction of iBooks 2.0, iTunesU for k-12 and of course their now ever so popular iBooks Author.  Many educators we have talked to seemed enthusiastic about the possibilities presented with the new application, however, Apple has a caveat in the End User Licensing Agreement which prevents users of iBooks Author from selling books created with the package anywhere else other than Apple’s iBook Store.  While PDF’s exported from…

This morning, Apple announced their new initiative to make education one of their highest priorities.  This announcement has not really changed their stance on the subject of education, but the way in which they did it deserves merit. The first thing that Apple did is to eliminate the physical books and the cutting down of trees to print those books.  This alone will save Billions of dollars each year and definitely help save the forests that are so important to…

The Video from this mornings Apple Event in New York City is now available in the Apple iTunes Store.  The event was held at 10am and was primarily focused on Apple’s push for education, introducing iBooks 2.0, iBooks Author, and the iTunesU App,  You can download the latest video or any of the previous events from the iTunes store at: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/apple-keynotes/id275834665

Apple held an event this morning in New York to announce a slew of education related items.  The first thing off the blocks was the introduction of the update to the iBooks franchise with a version 2.0.  This new version includes a ton of rich media capabilities and allows the introduction of school textbooks, which was one more thing Apple did this morning. As we so rightly predicted last week, Apple also introduced a publishing tool, iBooks Author for those…