Hours ago, the Apple conference on education ended, and it is considered the first Apple conference in the field of education. It seems that Apple was invaded by the world of music players in 2001 with the iPod, then the world of smartphones in 2007 with the iPhone, then the world of tablets with the iPad in 2010, here it is Apple decides to invade the world of education in 2012 and announces its plans for a revolutionary change in the world of education and how to deal with books, as it presented a new and wonderful innovation from interactive books that will change the face of education, at least in countries interested in developing education.

 

Before the conference, although everyone knows very well that there will be no new iPad or any new device, but Apple came back to everyone with surprises, so everyone was waiting for the conference and dozens of sites followed it immediately and quickly, because when Apple announces a conference or technological event, it always announces things New and important and not traditional, especially since it is the first Apple conference in this field until three o'clock GMT and the conference began.

Apple started the conference by talking about education and its importance and that the number of graduates in the United States is approximately 70% of the number of people, and in some remote areas the percentage drops to 60%. Therefore, Apple decided to contribute to this field and is proud of the education service Apple has thought about how to help students and found that there are a million and a half Americans who use the iPad in the field of education and at various stages, there are applications of interest to children and adults, but with thinking I found that high school, high school and university students do not serve them adequately because they mainly depend on textbooks Big, huge and heavy.

These books do not provide flexibility or a distinctive interface, and you cannot search in books and they change continuously and perish from frequent use. They are also not available anywhere and at any time easily, and you should search for them. But it provides huge and wonderful content that cannot be rivaled in this area by anyone, despite its many previous flaws.

Then Apple thought about the iPad and found that it provides extremely high flexibility, attractive shape, and small size, and you can easily search in its content, and it is also available with you everywhere for easy portability, but what about the large content point that is available in traditional books?

Therefore, Apple decided to introduce a new concept, TextBooks, which is a new concept for electronic books that has never been seen before and best called interactive books (it is called a character, not from Apple) and decided to update the Books application to the second version to deal with this new concept of books.

Well, what is this new concept of books? Well, let's imagine together that you are reading a book that explains to you the history of the World War, for example, and in a part of the book there were maps of the progress of Rommel's armies in North Africa, and I found that instead of static pictures you see a video inside the application ... Alice This is wonderful? Or an animation, i.e. you see a picture of the map, then arrows for the movement of forces, or even a PowerPoint explanation (Key Note for Apple). Wouldn't the explanation be more clear and wonderful?

What also if the pictures are more solid or even 3D so that you can see them much better. You shade a specific part like you would in any traditional book (with a phosphorescent pen) or even add notes to the book.

Have you ever read a book, whether it was a textbook or another book, and you found that some things are important and others are not and do shade only the important parts as we explained above, but sometimes you would like it to become a separate book, you can actually do this with the new application. I shade it up to see it in sequence (as if you had cut the pages) to only read it as a summary of the book. Education will not be better this way and review before the exam.

The new books also provide interactive questions that enable you to answer them from within the application, so that you can answer the questions, then delete the answer and try again as we do with traditional books.

Among the defects of the traditional paper books is that they are not updated, for example in Egypt we sometimes have the Ministry of Education to make updates to the curriculum after the beginning of the school year and the traditional solution is to distribute an additional supplement to the students, but with this new concept, you can simply update the book as we do with any traditional application . This matter also enables book authors to update their books after their publication, so instead of seeing the phrase (a new revised version) that we see at the beginning of some books, the writer adds a new chapter and you find yourself buying this book to read the new chapter or to correct the errors of the version that you have. Now updating the book will be free.

Updating the iBooks application is now available in the application store, as we can see in the picture, and you can access it from here:

Apple books
Developer
Download

This update to the iBooks application contains the ability to download interactive books, but these books can only be downloaded via the iPad, and this means if you are an iPhone or iPod owner, you will not be able to download the Textbooks, and these are the new features of the second version of the iBooks application

The new features are:

  • New improved Textbooks support
  • Improved iPad multi-touch features
  • The possibility of adding more interactive content, whether video, pictures, graphs, etc.
  • Define texts with your hands and then mark them with a number of colors
  • Converting selected notes and texts into study cards to facilitate memorization
  • The ability to display the meanings of the words without leaving the page

iBooks Author

Well, how do we write these kinds of books? It is not a traditional PDF book that we can create from any application we have. Apple did not forget this matter and launched a new application called iBooks Author, which works only on Mac version 10.7.2, and enables the user or publisher to write interactive books very easily and without prior experience

When you open the application for the first time, it asks you to specify the field of the book that you want to compose, like the following image:

When you open the application, you will be surprised by how easy it is to use it, as it works in a drag and drop method. Just drag and drop pictures and drag the video and other means available on the pages to make you have an interactive book ready for publication in the Apple Store. If you have previous experience with KeyNote, this app is exactly the same in use.

The application is wonderful and easy to use, as we mentioned, and Apple did not put any conditions on it and made it free. Anyone can download it from the Mac store and as Apple said at the conference, it is an application that allows anyone to create amazing interactive books and this is really real and try yourself if you own a Mac.

This app is no longer available on the App Store. :-(
Open in store Search for it on Google

Unfortunately, if you want to publish the book in the Apple store, this is only available to American citizens. Even if you try to log in with an iTunes account in the US store, you will see this message telling you that you must enter a valid visa number, and if you have a visa, you must enter the tax number ...

But we think that it will not be difficult for agencies and institutions to place interactive books in the Apple Book Store, after researching it became clear that even if you are outside America, you can add interactive books to the store, but you need to obtain an American tax number for foreigners and there is an explanation from Apple regarding that.

At the present time, books can be made and shared with your friends through the iTunes program, as for the support of the Arabic language, we have not done experiments on that yet and in theory this will be easily available, especially since interactive books are different from traditional books and the direction of the book does not need to be reversed from right to left. We will test this and try to make a simple interactive book for the experience soon, God willing.

iTunes U

The iTunes U section in the iTunes program is devoted to university lectures, and iTunes U is the acronym for iTunes Universality or iTunes University, as this environment provides a very easy way for universities to publish lectures and the new update is that iTunes U has a dedicated application for the iPhone and iPad instead of being old we are looking for lessons For universities and we see them under the classification of films, now they have a classification available for them separately.

To know a little about this field, iTunes U is a department devoted to university education that has obtained more than 700 million downloads of the educational materials currently available in it and is used by more than a thousand universities around the world and Apple has cooperated with a large number of universities such as Duke, Stanford, Yale and other giant universities It enables universities to broadcast educational materials directly on iTunes, as the teacher can interact with students and send questions to them and specify the students' assignments through it in an interactive manner.

From this application, the student can see all the lectures for this semester and all the previous and next lectures also in the next semester.

This app is no longer available on the App Store. :-(
Open in store Search for it on Google

Conclusion of the conference

Apple's announcement of a new type of interactive books Features:

  1. Watch the videos.
  2. Animated and stereoscopic graphics
  3. Add notes, index and word meanings.
  4. New interactive questions
  5. The possibility of shading some parts and their assembly
Apple announces a new update for iBooks to come to version 2
Apple advertises for the iBooks Author application, which is free to enable you to create interactive books.
Apple announced a separate application for iTunes U.

It seems that Apple intends to invade the field of education in a big way, so all that was announced is only the beginning of Apple's entry into this field, so what do you think of this beginning of Apple? Do you think that Apple can change the concept of education as it did before in every field of its intervention?

you can now Watch the Apple conference here, or Download it from here

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