What’s more, several of the fired teachers had created the iPad program in the first place their absence is going to make the new program a far less effective teaching tool. The Sweetwater Union High School District is days away from issuing iPads to all 7th grade students, while at the same time this school district just sacked 200 teachers due to budget cuts. Most school districts are in the same situation as the tale of the San Diego area school I linked to this morning. Okay, there are more programs than the 2 types mentioned above, but the school districts that can afford to launch a 1:1 program on their own are few and far between. Frankly, the money doesn’t exist at the federal level to issue iPads to any more than a tiny fraction of students. And as we all know, there’s a finite amount of federal funds. Most iPad programs that I read about fell into one of 2 categories they’re either at a private school (with an excess of funds) or the iPad program is a pilot program in a public school that used federal funds to buy the hardware. I’ve been watching for stories about iPads used in schools and I’ve noticed 2 common themes. “With Apple supporting them, it could really be a game-changer.” But with the small numbers, the growth potential is exponential and you have publishers who are really trying to capitalize on this opportunity,” said Kelly Gallagher, VP of publishing services at Bowker Market Research. Second, these textbooks were developed with the knowledge that the market was quite tiny. That’s not a sign of the brightest brains being in charge over there. But I’m still going to keep my eye on them.įirst, these textbooks represent a major investment into a tiny market – one which was made while HMH was narrowly avoiding bankruptcy. So really they’re not much more newsworthy than the digital textbooks available at launch. But it could still have been a test balloon.Īlas, these are only new editions of textbooks that HMH currently publishes, not ones written specifically for the new iBooks app. These 2 textbooks are for the K-12 market, where that is less of an issue due to more restricted finances. This caught my eye because some time back a friend predicted that textbook publishers would eventually release digital only titles as a way to stymy textbook reuse as well as the used book market. The Americans and World History: Patterns of Interaction will only be available via iBooks due to their heavy reliance on embedded content like History channel videos, audio clips, photo galleries, 3D graphics and animated maps, and section quizzes.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, fiction, academic, and Amazon publisher, is going to release a couple new K-12 social study digital textbooks this fall. Jeremy Greenfield has a post up this morning over on Digital Book World which made my heart go pitter-pat. HMH Digs a Deeper Grave With Two New Digital Textbooks
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