I wrote a post back in April about my hope that further advancements would occur in digital textbook creation, as well as the need for information brokers to provide services to help teachers develop their electronic textbooks. Recent news of Richard Branson and Rupert Murdock’s efforts to publish magazines and daily newspapers constructed just for the Apple iPad (and I am guessing eventually other tablets) has me hoping their efforts will break new ground for digital textbook companies. The key is to develop a format that takes advantage of the Web connectivity of the device as well as the multimedia playing functions to make the “reading” of the text much more multimodal and immersive.
While electronic textbooks have been around for some time, the iPad’s efforts to publish for it will further the discussion and possibly push for some innovation. The November 2010 issue of Learning and Leading with Technology has a point/counterpoint debate over digital textbooks. I would add to the discussion the points I made in my April post about teachers being empowered to create their e-textbooks to move past the current commercial textbook publishers, thus supporting Michael Cody’s point that online resources provide far richer resources than static, one-size-fits-textbooks.
It would be nice to combine the online resources, audio/visual media sources, and teacher-crafted text sources in a textbook individualized for reading levels, content background, etc., so students can have their “textbook” on whichever device they choose.
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