iPhone for education case study

Great Article discussing Abilene Christian University's implementation of the iPhone to enhance education.

In class the iPhone allows for anonymous student polling and quizzing. It also connects students with class notes or access to web resources so that students can look up anything they are not fulling understanding as they listen to the lecture.

Outside of class the iPhone has apps to "turn in homework, look up campus maps, watch lecture podcasts and check class schedules and grades".

It's ideas like this that really make me believe that the iPhone/iTouch is the next Personal Computer. What we have now is a smaller portable processor, with its own platform for application development, and constantly connected to the network. I would not be surprised that in five years, you'll walk into work or school, throw your iWhatever on your desk, turn on your wireless Monitors, start navigating using your wireless mouse and keyboard and when you're done pick up you iDevice and walk away.

Is your infrastructure planning for the future?

Thoughts on Digital Textbooks

Top ten reasons for Academic Publishers to move to Online Textbooks, from a student's point of view without any care for development costs:

1. Embedded audio and video.


2. Randomly generated practice quizzes/exams from a giant pool of questions that are constantly updated


3. Accessible from a Kindle, iPhone, Blackberry, laptop, Japan, a toaster...


4. A lower cost that is Semester Subscription based


5. A dynamically created Study Calender, where the student enters what topics they need to read and by when, and the web textbook will create a schedule, track progress, and email alerts if the student falls behind


6. Games and Simulations!


7. Teachers can build their own learning path from the books content. This way students don't have to worry if they are studying the right material or not


8. Fixes and Updates to the content are made on the fly so students always have the most up to date version


9. Chat room for online Study Groups, or Event Posting for live study groups


10. No more sore backs from lousy heavy books

Stay Classy Webernet.