Apple has announced expanding its iBooks Textbooks and iTunes U Course Manager to new markets across Europe, Asia, Latin America and other parts of the world.
iBook Textbooks, which features education-based interactive content for iPad users, is now available 51 countries now including India, Brazil, Italy and Japan. iTunes U Course Manager is now available in 70 countries now including Russia, Thailand and Malaysia. The course manager allows educators to create and distribute courses for their own classrooms, or share them publicly, on the iTunes U app.
“The incredible content and tools available for iPad provide teachers with new ways to customise learning unlike ever before,” says Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “We can’t wait to see how teachers in even more countries will create their new lesson plans with interactive textbooks, apps and rich digital content.”
iBooks Textbooks features interactive animations, rotating 3D diagrams, flick-through photo galleries and tap-to-play videos. It has about 25,000 educational titles created by independent publishers, teachers and leading education services companies, including new educational content from Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Hodder Education.
“Oxford University Press is using iBooks Author for Headway, Oxford’s all-time best-selling English language series, to create engaging iBooks Textbooks for iPad,” said Peter Marshall, Managing Director, ELT Division at Oxford University Press. “In releasing 13 new iBooks Textbooks, including ‘Headway Pre-Intermediate,’ the best-selling level in the series, we are enriching the language learning experience for students around the world.”
“We believe resources like iBooks Textbooks represent a monumental shift in learning because they engage multiple capacities of each individual student,” said Miguel Dominguez, Marketing Director of Imaxina Novas Tecnoloxias in Spain, an independent educational content developer and publisher of iBooks Textbooks, including “The Senses,” which incorporates interactive elements such as video and animated images of the human eye and ear to illustrate how the body works.
With iTunes U Course Manager educators can share content with their audience on iTunes U. iTunes U Course manager also gives teachers the ability to integrate their own documents as part of course curriculum, as well as content from the Internet, books on the iBooks Store, over 750,000 materials from existing iTunes U collections, or any of the more than one million iOS apps available on the revolutionary App Store.
“iPad is so much more than just a textbook or just a notepad for students—it’s a powerful educational tool, a study partner, a window into the past and a glimpse of the future,” said Sophie Post, fourth grade history teacher at UK’s Falkner House school. “Teaching history was once a static timeline of events. In leveraging the entire educational ecosystem of iPad, creating my own iBooks Textbooks and iTunes U courses, and pulling in apps like History: Maps of the World, studying history has suddenly become a creative, dynamic and truly transformative experience for my pupils.”
