iPad solid eductaion

Apple's new iBooks 2 app is demonstrated for the media at the Guggenheim Museum on January 19.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Pilot study done by textbook publishers Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Apple
• Middle school students studied from 2010 to 2011 using HMH's Fuse: Algebra I app
• During study, iPad seemed to help students better connect with the content

(WIRED) -- More and more schools are jumping on the digital bandwagon and adopting iPads for daily use in the classroom. Apple's education-related announcements last week will no doubt bolster the trend, making faculty tools and student textbooks more engaging and accessible.
But today another data point emerged, demonstrating that the iPad can be a valuable asset in education. In a partnership with Apple, textbook publishers Houghton Mifflin Harcourt performed a pilot study using an iPad text for Algebra 1 courses, and found that 20% more students (78% compared to 59%) scored 'Proficient' or 'Advanced' in subject comprehension when using tablets rather than paper textbook counterparts.
The study was conducted at a Riverside, California, middle school from Spring 2010 to Spring 2011 using HMH's Fuse: Algebra I app. Similar pilot courses and iPad programs have cropped up all over the country, primarily in private and boarding schools, and select universities. In the public school sector, more than 600 school districts have adopted a 1:1 iPad program.
The iPad seems to help students better connect with the content at hand.
"Students' interaction with the device was more personal. You could tell students were more engaged," said Coleman Kells, principal of Amelia Earhart Middle School. "Using the iPad was more normal, more understandable for them."
Tablets could be less daunting to students, too. Marita Scarfi, CEO of digital-focused marketing agency Organic, says that moving textbooks to mobile devices will reinvent learning.
"Now you don't know if a book is super huge and formidable," Scarfi says. "Learning can be done in snackable chunks. It could be reoriented."
Another study centered on an iPad game, Motion Math, has shown that the iPad can help with fundamental math skills. Fifth graders who regularly played the game for 20 minutes per day over a five-day period increased their test scores by 15% on average (you can check out more about this study on Wired's GeekDad).
Digital textbooks haven't enjoyed the same success as app-based learning tools thus far, however. E-textbooks have been a transitional product, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps wrote in a November 2011 report. They make up less than 3 percent of textbook sales, and don't offer much over their paperbound counterparts.
Apple's new and updated products — iTunes U (an app-based hub for virtual classrooma), as well as iBooks 2, the iBookstore and iBooks Author — should help provide solutions for educators looking to provide more engaging experiences than plain, old PDFs, all without the heavy investments required of building apps from scratch.
"With iBooks, learning will be a lot more experiential," Scarfi told Wired in an e-mail. iBooks also have the potential to ease some of the financial burden of schools, as ebooks could save on textbook costs. "Other benefits include more timely and relevant content, and the ability for students to interact and share this content with ease. Textbooks will now become social in a variety of ways."
However, even if e-book prices themselves won't break the bank, iPads are still a $500-plus investment per tablet. Funding is still a problem, particularly for public schools. Luckily, there are sites like DonorsChoose.org that can help offload the costs from teachers and school districts.
And a program called SA500 Kids is helping to accelerate funding for technology resource requests on the site. Thus far, iPad requests have been fairly low: SA500 Kids has funded 24 iPad-based project requests since Nov. 25. Currently there are 418 iPad-related requests on DonorsChoose, out of the 20,000 projects listed on the site.
When the next iPad debuts, if Apple goes with a similar pricing scheme as it has with the iPhone — as rumored — then schools will be able to pick up iPads on the cheap and really be able to utilize the company's new education related products.
But regardless, it looks like the iPad is starting to do an impressive job of improving the education space. And now that publishers and instructors have these iBooks tools at their disposal, students can continue to reap the benefits of increased understanding and greater participation.


I think that when the iPad 3 will be ready a lot of schools will have that tool because all of its important feautures and his alliances with the editorials of the school books.But also students gonna have a great responsability with the iPad because is very fragil so if they drop it will be ruined. The iPad is a very cool tablet because is very practic and its design i like it a lot. If apple makes the schools buy they iPad will get a lot of money.

Comment: I think that is  disappointment  for the player (Serena Williams), the 5 times champion of these competition now its elimined of the tourament.
Its disappointment for him because his a good player and all people think that she will make history in these Grand Slam.
Serena Williams upset by unseeded Makarova in Melbourne

(CNN) -- Unseeded Russian Ekaterina Makarova upset five-time champion Serena Williams of the United States 6-2 6-3 on Monday to reach the quarterfinals of the Australian Open.

The fourth-round match was played as temperatures hit above 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit).

Makarova's two previous grand slam appearances -- at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open last year -- ended with losses in the first round as she faded from a career-high 29th in the rankings -- a position she reached with last-16 appearances in Melbourne and at the French Open.

"I'm surprised because she's a great player and it's really tough to play against her," said the 23-year-old Makarova, who will next play her fourth-seeded compatriot Maria Sharapova.

Nishikori makes history for Japan

"But, I don't know, I was just feeling so good and so focused. So I played my game, and that's it. I won against Serena. That's amazing."

60 apps launch with Facebook auto-share

San Francisco (CNN) -- Joining "likes" on Facebook, the social network has added dozens of new types of posts, including "bought," "read" and "want."

Sixty applications that let users publish information automatically to Facebook launched at a news conference held at a trendy nightclub here on Wednesday. Many of these are new versions of existing online services or mobile apps.

Apps for foodies, like Foodspotting and Foodily, can publish to a user's Facebook profile when she updates her digital diary of meals. Ticketmaster can publish to Facebook when customers buy concert tickets.

Like with Facebook Music, the social network may create monthly personalized reports that are posted to a person's profile showing how the app was used at any given time. For example, someone could see the places a friend traveled to last summer, thanks to TripAdvisor.

Since the launch of Facebook Music in September, participants such as MOG and Spotify have reported large increases in membership. Some 400,000 people coming from Facebook have signed up for MOG accounts since September, and each day, Facebook sends an average of 4,000 people who have never visited MOG before, David Hyman, the music company's CEO, said in a phone interview.

The platform itself is the biggest traffic generator we've ever had," Hyman said. "It is very significant."

Facebook programmers have created a mathematical algorithm that will examine the types of posts a person has chosen to give prominent placement to on his or her profile, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said in an interview.

Whether food, movies or exercises logged into Facebook, the site will try to predict what you're most passionate about based on past choices, similar to how the system determines its news feed based partly on the people you contact most often, Taylor said. Each user will be able to manually override these profile placements, he said.

"People care a lot about the way their profile looks," Taylor said.

These features are only available to those who have enabled theFacebook Timeline, which opened to everyone about a month ago. Eventually, every user will be required to use that version of the site profile.

Taylor described the new app features as part of a maturation of Facebook, which goes beyond the initial perspective of its co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who coded the website in his sophomore year at Harvard University. Zuckerberg, who is now Facebook's CEO, did not attend the event Wednesday.

"Previously, the profile was all the things Mark Zuckerberg was interested in in college," Taylor said. "You know, movies, music and books."

(Zuckerberg, 27, only lists one book on his Facebook profile: Ender's Game, which came out the year after he was born.)

Facebook will review each new action, as it's called, that's proposed by developers in order to screen for profanity or other unwanted words, Mike Vernal, the company's platform engineering director, said in an interview. Software developers will be able to create an unlimited number of these actions, he said.

That would be useful for something like iTunes, which allows users to "listen," "watch" and "buy" things, although Apple is not participating in the program. A spokesman didn't respond to a request for comment.

Despite some early opposition, Facebook wants to encourage all developers to adopt the new tools.

"We've got a whole new set, a whole new class, of applications that we think we're enabling with this platform," Carl Sjogreen, a Facebook product director, said onstage during the announcement. "When we say anything, we really mean anything."

In characteristic Facebook ambition, Sjogreen added, "We're even more excited about the thousands of apps to come."

my opinion

mi opinion is that the facebook is growing a lot and it would arrive at a point until you would have to pay for get in facebook there are many of peoples that donsen t have gets in a facebook so it would be a beast!!

jose rodrigo villalba lopez

When Tropical Storm Washi ripped through the southern Philippine city of Cagayan de Oro last weekend, it dumped in one day more than the city's entire average rainfall for the month of December.
According to the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration, a total of 181 millimeters of rainfall was recorded in the area last Friday, compared to the expected 99.9 millimeters for the whole month.
The devastating flash floods, which have so far claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people, arrived just weeks after a report from the UK's Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change indicated that global warming has significantly increased the number of people at risk from flooding globally.
The report, "Climate: Observations, projections and impacts," examined how climate change will modify the weather in 24 countries around the world.
While findings vary from region to region, it forecasts an overall increase in this century of coastal and river floods, extreme weather events and a global temperature rise of between 3-5C, if emissions are left unchecked.
According to climate change experts, cities from New York in the U.S. to Dhaka in Bangladesh are likely to be heavily affected.CNN INFORMATION

i think that the wethear that is like that is very dengerous becouse the people can have accident becouse they canot see or somthing like that the wethear like that is very cold i think that the people that live in that country have to ve bery ceorfuli in what they are doing.

Why the iPad won't transform education just yet

Mashable) -- Apple's announcement on Thursday that it would be introducing a new iPad textbook experience and iBooks authoring tool presents huge opportunities for technology in classrooms.

The company is selling textbooks from McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Houghton Mifflin at a price comparable to print versions, and it's presented an unprecedented opportunity for teachers to compile their own materials.

But Apple has a long way to go -- and logistical hurdles to clear in tens of thousands of schools -- before it dominates K-12 classrooms the way it has done the music industry.

Getting approval for the actual purchase was fairly easy. She sent a written request to the district CIO, and he approved it. But it took five months to get the iPads up and running after they arrived.

Instructional Technology Resource Teacher Jenny Grabiec recently purchased iPads for two of the ESL classrooms in her 160-school district using federal funds allocated for students with limited English proficiency

In order to download new apps, she needed to get the Apple volume purchase program approved as a vendor by the budget group. But who would explain to the budget committee the process of paying with an Apple ID? Who would be responsible for downloading the volume-purchased apps? Could the students use them outside of their hour-long ESL class? The list of logistical issues went on.

"Because nobody in our district had done it before, it took a long time," Grabiec says.

Becoming the next big thing

By Apple's count, 1.5 million iPads are being used by schools. But there are 55.5 million students enrolled in more than 130,000 U.S. schools. No matter how you slice it, the iPad is not a mainstream phenomenon in K-12.

Nor is there any guarantee it will become so. One-to-one initiatives for laptops have been pushing forward for years without mainstream adoption. Maine, for instance, gave 33,000 middle school students and 3,000 teachers personal laptops as early as 2002.

But in 2009, a survey by the National Center for Education Statisticsfound that while 99% of public school teachers have some access to computers, just 29% of public school teachers use them during instructional time "often." Just 3% of schools in a 2010 survey by the FCC said they have a one-to-one computer ratio.

iPads do have a couple of advantages over one-to-one laptop initiatives. Grabiec points out that the iPads' batteries last longer than the laptops she oversees in other classrooms. They also have been less expensive to maintain than the computers — not a single one has been damaged — and don't work as stand-ins for desktop computers, but as cameras, GPS devices and video cameras.

"With a laptop you were stuck with consuming content," says Timothy Smith, who works as an Instructional Technology Specialist in the same district as Grabiec. "But with the iPad you're taking videos and looking at ideas in a new way."

Textbook availability

Even though Apple's first iPad textbooks will sell for $15 or less, they won't be any less expensive for schools than paper books. Vineet Madan, head McGraw-Hill Higher Education eLabs, tells Mashable that iBooks will be sold to schools rather than directly to students, but that schools will grant students access to those books through their personal IDs.

In other words, even if a school reuses iPads, it won't be able to reuse books. The books will be kept on individual students' iTunes accounts.

Schools reuse the same paper book for about five years, and those books usually cost about $75. Because a new book will be purchased every year, the iBook version still costs $75 for five years.

Relying on iBooks as textbooks isn't a feasible option for most public schools at the moment because Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson have each dedicated just a small number of titles each. Madan puts the typical cycle for textbook approval in most states at about five years.

Unless the school happens to be using one of the selected titles, it can't use iBooks yet. Most other options for digital textbooks that can be read on an iPad --including Coursesmart, Kno, Chegg and Inkling — focus on books for higher education.

Unless major publishers decide to add more of their titles to iBooks, it won't be a feasible default reader in most schools. Madan says that McGraw has already committed to adding five additional titles before September, but it will commit to additional titles based on uptake.

Broadband and red tape

In a FTC 2010 survey of the schools in its program for discounted telecommunications, almost 80% said their Internet connections don't fully meet their current needs.

"It's not atypical to see one classroom of students on connected devices bring down a network," Madan says.

Before schools introduce connected devices, many of them will need to introduce better Internet connections. And that's just one logistical issue. Schools and districts will likely have a longer list specific to their circumstances. Consider the situation that Smith, who recently helped put an iPad in the hands of every administrator in his district, faces when he thinks about introducing iPads district-wide:

Some types of funding, like the one used to buy iPads for the ESL classrooms, can't be used for anything already being paid for by the school district. If the district bought iPads for some students, in other words, it would be cutting off other sources of funding. It's a puzzle.

Bringing iPads to the mainstream

Many schools already use iPads in their courses. Policies that allow students to bring their own devices to school might make make this more common.

According to a 2011 Pearson Foundation survey, 70% percent of college students and college-bound high school seniors are interested in owning a tablet device, and 20% expect to purchase a tablet within the next six months.

The inevitable price decline on the iPad could also make iPads a more mainstream conduit for educational material.

"This is a change in how school districts think," Smith says, "and in a larger school district, that can take some time."

MY COMMENT

I think that i pads will be the new books in almost all countries in the future they are a little expensive but they help the cutting of trees that will reduce the use of papers and more trees will be save.

                                          IPAD A SOLID EDUCATION TOOL, 

(WIRED) -- More and more schools are jumping on the digital bandwagon and adopting iPads for daily use in the classroom. Apple's education-related announcements last week will no doubt bolster the trend, making faculty tools and student textbooks more engaging and accessible.

But today another data point emerged, demonstrating that the iPad can be a valuable asset in education. In a partnership with Apple, textbook publishers Houghton Mifflin Harcourt performed a pilot study using an iPad text for Algebra 1 courses, and found that 20% more students (78% compared to 59%) scored 'Proficient' or 'Advanced' in subject comprehension when using tablets rather than paper textbook counterparts.

The study was conducted at a Riverside, California, middle school from Spring 2010 to Spring 2011 using HMH's Fuse: Algebra I app. Similar pilot courses and iPad programs have cropped up all over the country, primarily in private and boarding schools, and select universities. In the public school sector, more than 600 school districts have adopted a 1:1 iPad program.

The iPad seems to help students better connect with the content at hand.

"Students' interaction with the device was more personal. You could tell students were more engaged," said Coleman Kells, principal of Amelia Earhart Middle School. "Using the iPad was more normal, more understandable for them."

Tablets could be less daunting to students, too. Marita Scarfi, CEO of digital-focused marketing agency Organic, says that moving textbooks to mobile devices will reinvent learning.

My comment:

I think that is too important the technology in study like in the work, the childrens get better grades. why? becouse the ipad have many accesories to use, and many downlouds to use.