Before I start bellyaching, you should take a look at PicPocketBOOKS. They have some interesting features.
“Now kids can enjoy their favorite books from your iPhone! Forget the playstations, game consoles and DVDs, our mobile picture books will entertain and educate your child in the car, plane, train and more.” — PicPocketBOOKS
There is an Elliot Templeton line from The Razor’s Edge that I have always identified with — especially yesterday. He says,
That’s the trouble with me, when I’m being serious people always think I’m joking and when I’m joking people always think I’m being serious.
I was gratified to read this tweet just a few minutes ago about yesterday’s blog entry,
Reading @dwarlick’s blog 2Cents: The Answer for Textbook Publishers http://bit.ly/1wxJEi making me laugh.
There weren’t enough winks to indicate the facetiousness that I intended, and, sadly, there was just enough of the flavor of our standard edtech babel in that post to make it appear serious (when I’m really joking). The Answer for Textbook Publishers was a reaction to a Tweet that was @’d to me the night before.
@dwarlick Let’s face it. Kids love computers! Leverage that love to help them get reading. Picture books for the iPhone http://bit.ly/acjrq
It is often a mistake to try to read too much into a 140 character message, but this sort of statement just makes me crazy. First of all, kids do not love computers any more than I loved my baseball bat, shoulder pads, or box of legos. They were merely the apparatus of the play that I engaged in. Computers are no different, except that they are NEW to my generation and in almost every respect more compelling than any Louisville Slugger (JU’s Thinking Stick notwithstanding). Our children do not go to their mobile phone because it is their “tech of choice.” They go there because it is where their friends are.
It just seems to me that if putting children’s books (or textbooks) on a mobile phone was such a great idea — if the ideal size for instructional deliver was that of a baseball card, then we would have been handing out trading card sized textbooks all along.
To be completely fair, I learned, on closer inspections, that PickPocketBOOKS does some interesting features. The FAQ lists as options of each PPB,
audio narration, automatic page turning, touch-screen interaction and “learn-to-read” functionality in which words are highlighted as they are read aloud and/or can be touched to be heard. We are updating our apps to also include personal recordings and greater interactivity with the text for early readers.
To me, getting books and textbooks onto our computers and phones is not nearly as interesting a problem as considering what we might do with that information, that empowers our learners, when the information becomes networked, digital, and abundant.
Powered by ScribeFire.
David,
I appreciate you holding “The Stick” in such high regard. 🙂
You have to hand it to the makers of this product. I’m thinking they never intended for it to be “educational” they intended on it being a replacement to the mini-DVD player and stack of books that parents carry with them. I agree educationally this probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. But if I was traveling with a 6 year old on a plane for 10 hours and I could load my iPhone with a ton of books rather than take up luggage space…..that makes a heck of a lot of sense. I think they need to change their blurb to “…entertain and keep your child occupied so you don’t have to..” then again…that won’t sell as many subscriptions. 😉
Great post. I think it’s easy for adults to misinterpret kids’ enthusiasm for something by attributing it to the tech rather than the activity facilitated by the tech. Your post reminds me of a workshop I attended yesterday on how to foster active learning in online classes. For an hour, the facilitator showed us one tool after another, with some learning theories thrown in there. I didn’t hear anything mentioned about teaching strategies or techniques that foster active learning. In an era when the tech gets cooler and cooler, it hard not to be drawn in like moth to a lamp. Is a picture book app for the iPhone a bad idea? No way. I have kids, and some form of distraction is a lifesaver at times. But I don’t think putting books on a mobile device will suddenly make a student love to read.
I wasn’t sure whether it was real or not. It isn’t always easy to tell in ed tech.
Although this isn’t so much related to the iPhone as textbook post, you might find this interesting regarding the coming change in education.
Robert X. Cringley has been writing about technology for MANY years and his insight in the education world I would take as a pretty cool one.
Here’ the article.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ICringely/~3/RqW_6tKrZuU/
Clay