Apple today announced an all-new iTunes U app, giving educators and students everything they need on their iPad, iPhone and iPod touch to teach and take entire courses. The all-new iTunes U app lets teachers create and manage courses including essential components such as lectures, assignments, books, quizzes and syllabuses and offer them to millions of iOS users around the world. The iTunes U app gives iOS users access to the world’s largest catalog of free educational content from top universities including Cambridge, Duke, Harvard, Oxford and Stanford, and starting today any K-12 school district can offer full courses through the iTunes U app. iTunes U has already become an incredibly popular learning tool for students with over 700 million downloads.
“The all-new iTunes U app enables students anywhere to tap into entire courses from the world’s most prestigious universities,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, in the press release. “Never before have educators been able to offer their full courses in such an innovative way, allowing anyone who’s interested in a particular topic to learn from anywhere in the world, not just the classroom.”
Prior to iTunes U, only students in the classroom at that time had access to educational content from top universities. With the iTunes U app for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, those barriers no longer exist. Students anywhere can take an entire course with complete access to all course materials right at their fingertips. With the iTunes U app, students are able to access new books right from within the app, and any notes taken in iBooks are consolidated for easy reviewing. In addition to reading books, viewing presentations, lectures and assignment lists, students can receive push notifications so they always have the latest class information.* The iTunes U app is available today as a free download from the App Store.
Educators can quickly and easily create, manage and share their courses, quizzes and handouts through a web-based tool and utilize content and links from the iTunes U app, the Internet, iBookstore or the App Store as part of their curriculum. They can also upload and distribute their own documents such as Keynote, Pages, Numbers or books made with iBooks Author.
*Some content is available only for iPad.
Source: Apple Inc.
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Kids are lucky these days.
I grew up in the 50’s. I was lucky go be able to go outside and play in the woods, hunt, skip stones on a lake, or climb trees.
I’ve never live near ‘the woods’ but like boarding, surfing and other outdoor stuff. I have several friends who live near woodsy areas and they are totally excited about having access to courses from real universities they could never access before. For them, it’s a win-win.
And with digital textbooks in the future, those trees might still be standing…
+1
Thank god we could still do all those things in the 60s when I was growing up.
No, I was lucky, I used to live in a shoebox in a lake. My parents used to beat us kids, every night before bed, and we were happy.
Ha! You beat me to it!
Ditto on that. It was the late thirties and on for me. Before TV on our street. Loved hanging on the back of the coal horse and cart, and roller skating to the town – zipping between the buses and hanging on the backs of them at thirty mph. I’m still loving it – but I also love my iPad. ronnorrisart.com
We appropriated all the 4×4 street sign posts in our small town. Did it over 4 months so we wouldn’t raise suspicions.
Took ’em in my backyard, dug down 16 feet then started to go horizontal under the road, 4x4s for shoring.
Thank god my neighbor stopped us. Our backyard was huge and sloped down into a brushy canyon, in case you wonder what was up with my parents.
We loved The Great Escape, Rat Patrol, etc..
iTunes U app > Categories > History > Vintage Mac Video
Excellent resource for a historical perspective about all things Apple, including written articles, video, etc.
U guys make me feel nostalgic for an experience I never even had.
You, and every inner-city kid who’s never seen a beach, picked an Apple from a tree, skipped stones across a pond, drove a tractor, climbed a mountain, built a tree house, made a sand castle, etc., ad nauseam.
You capitalized apple…
force of habit… I rarely write about the fruit. 🙂
I remember when I went outside to FIND my friends to play… there was no make a ‘playdate’, just go outside and play.
Cool.
I’d be happier about iTunes U if the app didn’t crash On opening…every time.