Apple Gives Education A Facelift With Interactive Textbooks & Apps

Apple is branching into the education market with the announcement of a new digital platform including iBooks 2 for iPad featuring interactive textbooks, a new iTunes U app for schools and an iBook creation tool called iBooks Author.

iBooks 2 features dynamic and engaging textbooks with interactive animations, 3D objects, diagrams, videos and photos that come to life when you tap or swipe them. They provide fast navigation, easy highlighting and note-taking, searching, lesson review and study cards. A number of education services companies including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson will offer titles, with most priced at $14.99 or less.

The new iTunes U app gives students access to a huge catalog of free educational content, along with over 20,000 education apps and hundreds of thousands of books that can be used in their school curriculum.

iBooks Author lets anyone with a Mac create their own iBooks textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books and more, and then publish them to Apple’s iBookstore. Authors and publishers can use Apple-designed templates with a wide variety of page layouts and add their own text and images by simply dragging and dropping. Multi-Touch widgets allow you to include interactive photo galleries, movies, Keynote presentations and 3D objects. Take a tour of Apple’s new education tools in the video below:

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