Last week I toured the middle school that my daughter will be attending next year. One thing that struck me was the school’s decision to issue every student an iPad at the start of the term, as a core teaching device. The operating system was slightly modified to restrict certain applications and features; students can’t download games–the general obsession with Minecraft comes to mind–and after some experimentation this year, they chose to disable messaging as well, due to the (one-could-have-guessed) distractions it causes. The staff at the school cited the weight and heft of textbooks as one factor in their decision to go with eBooks on the iPad. But the advantages I saw went far beyond the tablet as a lightweight alternative to a child lugging a crippling backpack. While observing students in their classrooms, I saw that they were adept not only at note-taking, but in switching applications rapidly and effectively, from reading to research to note-taking. And all of those tasks now embrace interactive multimedia, which makes learning not just more immersive and stimulating, but actually fun. I recall spending hours poring through the World Book Encyclopedia as a child. I don’t miss it; I’d rather use and support Wikipedia. During the tour I had the opportunity to sit down with a 5th grader who had just completed an assignment on her iPad, an extended and thoughtful blog post (“essay” for you old-timers) on “Was Cooking in the 1950’s Fun?” Not only was this bright young lady impressively articulate and engaged, she was eager to share with me the process she used for her research (searching online sources), drafting (first on paper!), and project management (Evernote, which I have now downloaded upon her thoughtful recommendation). Students and teachers admit that the ability to cross-reference and flip back and forth between pages, especially of multiple books, was often awkward. And some of the larger form-factor textbooks might be a bit squashed as compared to their print counterparts. But overall, the students were far more engaged with their eBooks, and increased engagement simply equates to more learning. The middle school’s iPad experiment for the 2012-13 school year has been...
Read MorePrologue: It’s Time for eBooks to Evolve
I’m a habitual bedtime reader—especially my daughter’s bedtime. I’ve been reading to her almost every night for what is coming up on 10 years; since she was almost 10 months old. We have gone from Sandra Boynton to Dr. Seuss, from all the Magic Treehouse books to countless American Girl books, from timeless classics like the Little House on the Prairie series to fantasy classics like The Hobbit and of course Harry Potter. I dread the day, and I know it’s coming soon, when she’s too old for bedtime stories. Read the series: “The Miranda Proposal: Tomorrow’s eBook Platform”: Prologue part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 Epilogue A few years ago we purchased our first Kindle, and then an iPad. My daughter and I both like paper books, especially hardcovers, but we have grown comfortable with eBooks. I personally find them easier on the eyes, not to mention far more convenient while traveling (some of those Potter books are over 900 pages). A little over two years ago I wrote to a colleague, “Children’s online books need more than a black-and-white Kindle experience. Children need color and imagery, and the e-books of tomorrow will include animation and both sound and video narration. The technology is there; imagine sitting in bed with your child and an iPad, choosing what to read from among thousands of titles. Imagine a child not glued to a TV but to an e-reader. What kids and parents need is a safe and simple medium for discovering both old ‘static’ titles (perhaps enhanced by wonderful narrators with masterful storytelling skills), as well as a new generation of highly interactive books that resonate with the online world of tomorrow’s generations.” Today we are much closer to that reality, but eBooks are still far behind where they should be. Color and multimedia are making inroads, and there is some rudimentary social networking, although nothing particularly interesting yet: just the ability to express your likes and tweet happily to your social network (which assumes that they care about your reading habits). Some of today’s eBooks offer text-to-speech, and Amazon Audible offers...
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