After reading my post below, please read the email that sparked this reaction.
RESPONSE TO ANTI-INNOVATION EMAIL REGARDING iBOOKS 2 –
Textbooks are becoming effete. The online world transforms by maximizing the breadth of knowledge available to teachers and students. This transformation occurs at the speed of light bringing today’s information from “The Cloud” as knowledge sculpted into the hands of teachers as they help students learn how to learn while imparting the didactic and pragmatic rudiments of curriculum to students.
Great teachers innovate, integrate, and stimulate the student’s insatiable appetite for learning. Regardless of the derivation of information the teacher, ultimately, is responsible to teach the student how to think.
Technology makes things happen more quickly…Why not apply this logic to our children
– Jody Resnick, President and CEO, Trighton Interactive
You can follow me on Twitter – @jodyresnick1
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– Mr. Edelman writes — “Dear Teachers,
I’m always a little skeptical when a company claims they are going to disrupt and transform education. This past week, Apple made a hype-filled splash with its iBooks 2, iBooks Author and iTunes U announcement to the news media. What makes it especially difficult for Apple to live up to the hype is that their effort revolves around, um, textbooks.
On my new Twitter account (hint, hint… you can follow me) I tweeted, “Every time teachers try to get away from textbooks, they pull us back in!” playing off the famous Godfather 3 line. I mean, haven’t we been moving away from textbook teaching and learning for a long time now? No one wants to be that teacher who sticks to the text, even one with fancy 3D images you can pinch and twist. In the end, it’s still just content. It’s what a teacher does with content that really counts!
The other problem with Apple’s claim of transformation is that they have created a closed ecosystem. I don’t mind this when it comes to my music or my apps, but in education, it’s different:open is better than closed. In Apple’s world every student will have an iPad. Yet iPads are really expensive! In Apple’s world schools will pay $15 per year/per student for each textbook they download. In fact, that’s about the same amount of money schools spend today on textbooks (they buy one school set and then typically use them for 5 years with hundreds of students). So other than having more engaging content that can be updated much more quickly (and there is a lot to be said for both of these benefits, that is, if everyone has an iPad), this will end up being more rather than less expensive. And it still doesn’t change very much.
In the end, technology can’t transform education, it can only be used as a tool by great teachers to enhance it. Steve Jobs himself once said, “I’m absolutely convinced that [technology] is by no means the most important thing. The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can.” And that’s the way it will always be with or without digitized textbooks.
Teach and be well,
Paul Edelman
Founder, TeachersPayTeachers
