Inkling’s iPad Textbooks

This is an excellent article by Anthony Ha on the 23rd March over at Mobilebeat.

iPad textbook startup Inkling just announced that it has won financial backing from the two biggest names in the textbook business — McGraw-Hill and Pearson.

Founder and chief executive Matt MacInnis said Inkling’s goal involves using the content of an existing textbook as a skeleton, then “casting off the shackles of the book” and adding interactive and multimedia content that could only work on the iPad. We first covered Inkling right after the announcement of the iPad in January of last year. The San Francisco startup has now released 14 textbooks, MacInnis said, and it should be up to more than 100 titles by this fall.

There are other companies building iPad textbooks, MacInnis acknowledged. Competitors include ScrollMotion, and educational tablet-maker Kno is reportedly shifting its efforts from hardware to software. But he argued that everyone else is basically adding limited features to a PDF of the textbook and that these e-books are basically developed by the publishers’ business divisions without much input from the original textbook creators. Inkling, on the other hand, wants to publish apps that feel like they were truly built for the iPad, which usually means working with the books’ authors to create new content.

“It only gets interesting when the content itself changes and begins to respond to your fingertips,” MacInnis said.

You can see an example of an Inkling app in-action in the video below. Thanks to the backing of McGraw-Hill and Pearson, as well as partnerships with John Wiley & Sons, W.W. Norton, and Wolters Kluwer, Inkling now has access to “95 percent of the content universe,” MacInnis said — though the company’s actual production is far behind that amount, since it doesn’t have the resources to convert every title from every publisher. For now, he said, Inkling remains very involved in the digital textbook-creation process, because it wants to ensure that the early apps are high quality. But as time goes on it will move to a more self-service model.

The size of the round was not disclosed, except that it was a “multimillion dollar” financing. Previous investors Sequoia Capital, Felicis Ventures (which also invested in VentureBeat), Kapor Capital, and Sherpalo Ventures also participated in the new funding.

http://www.inkling.com/

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How the iPad 2 Will Revolutionize Education

An interesting piece last Thursday from Gregory Ferenstein at Fast Company highlights some of the benefits of the iPad 2 in the classroom.

New features facilitate remote learning, exploration, and stylish lectures.

The iPad 2's wealth of new features is a boon for tech-hungry classrooms.

Enhanced Facetime will be great for remote lectures or office hours, high-definition video editing will facilitate exploratory learning and reporting, and real-time image mirroring will stylize lectures in science, history, and geography. Additionally, mobile learning is made possible through the iOS 4.3 hotspot update, permitting Internet connectivity for apple phones, tablets, and laptops. This will be especially valuable for recession-hit school districts, such as Detroit, scrambling for ways to solve ballooning class sizes. Skeptical educators can be relieved that the iPad was deemed classroom ready by Reed College, and that remote learning can be just as effective as in-class lecturing.

Mobile Learning

Educators are eager to break students free from of the nap-inducing prison of concrete lecture halls. Universities, such as Abu Dhabi, are integrating classrooms into mobile devices to keep procrastinating students alert on due dates, keep discussions alive after the bell rings, and promote serendipitous idea sharing. Apple’s new front-facing camera will facilitate interaction between students and teachers as they roam campuses and cities.

Education isn’t restricted to just peers within the same school. For language learning,Marquette uses Skype to connect nascent speakers from different countries. Finding a partner school will likely be even easier with Skype’s new online community for teachers.

Public school districts, such as Detroit, could ease the pressure of crammed classrooms by permitting exploratory research in museums, at gardens, or public libraries. With real-time communication, specific class times could still be maintained, so that all students are learning together for at least some period of the day.

Incidentally, the iPad could spell the end of snow-day cancellations. Sorry, kids.

Lectures and Office Hours

In the near future, lectures will become the homework. The Gates and Google funded Khan Academy found that lectures were more effective when students could listen to and replay lectures at their own pace at home. The iPad's video capture feature will allow teachers to join the movement by pre-recording their lectures as homework the day before a new classroom topic. Additionally, teachers could hold virtual office hours from anywhere in the world.

Duke University has been encouraging professors to hold online office hours for years, so that jet-set professors could keep in touch with students while at conferences and also to encourage their faculty to engage with eager learners outside the university.

Mirror Image Lecturing

Despite the hype of mobile learning, traditional lectures will dominate classrooms for the foreseeable future. Why not spice lectures up? Apple reveals how mirror imaging, which projects images from the iPad to a larger screen, would work inside a classroom [image below].

Google’s new Body Browser would be great for anatomy classes (and, is available now). In the near future, we expect a host of interactive textbooks to augment lectures.

These are just a few of the uses that are immediately obvious. However, the wonderful thing about technology is that investigating new applications is educational in it-self. Tech-happy students will be eager to explore new ways of using tablets and sharing their discoveries with the world.

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