iBooks, iBooks Author

I die a little on the inside every time I see someone's face light up when they see the relatively new iBooks 2 and its integration of textbooks. Textbooks! What a novel idea! The quality of our education system has waned over the past five to six decades and how does Apple suggest we fix it? Textbooks!

Insanity--doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Don't get me wrong. I think being able to carry all your textbooks on an iPad is great for students, but more from a physical, I-don't-want-my-kid-to-be-a-hunchback sort of way. I don't understand why people get so excited when you dress up a turd and put a bow on it--it's still a turd. A textbook is a textbook is a textbook, no matter how much you can interact with it, no matter how colorful the pictures are, no matter how much it costs or how much you update it--IT'S STILL A TEXTBOOK. Textbooks and their publishers have been the bane of many educators for decades and this tool isn't going to change that. Apple's really good at marketing though, cudos.

Now, I do think that the iBooks Author is a good idea. The problem with textbooks is that they are made by textbook publishers. Textbook publishers know all the right stuff to jam into a textbook to really impress parents and school administrators--"Hey look, there's a table here that has all of the standards on it," "Look at how this picture has the standard below it, this is how you're going to KNOW your students are learning, just read these certain pages for these standards." While linking the standards and inserting "expert teacher" advice and colorful pictures make you feel good, they're not going to make a mite's difference in the education of our children. Good teachers are needed--teachers who know where the textbook errs and where, in Social Studies, for example, the publishers are putting a liberal or conservative spin on the content. Teachers need to smart enough to present "the other side" so our students get a multi-faceted education as opposed to the brainwashing some of our textbooks provide. With iBooks Author, teachers can create their own textbooks that have all the "flashy" new features of the publishers' books, but better content that is tailored to the specific class being taught. Hopefully we will see many open-source books in the the future that educators can choose to use in their classrooms in lieu of the outdated, old world, textbook publishers' books that are so last century.