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"Finally and I think perhaps more importantly, they introduced the new iBooks Author app. An app which gives educators the power to create their own interactive learning experience for their students, the like of which we have haven't really been able to put together before. The following hits are reasons why iBooks Author tied with iBooks2 is a complete win for schools, particularly in 1:1 type scenarios."

Here's a snapguide for how to create a QR code to an ibook. This would let you put a link in a slide or on a page that would immediately take one to an ibook. (You can do this for kindle books too but would just use the URL as you can't buy inside the Kindle app on the ipad because Amazon and Apple couldn't come to terms on Apple's cut. You can just go to the Amazon webpage for the kindle and when it opens in safari, a person can buy and download from there.)

"The Apple announcement this week about iBooks Author - the new app that will allow anyone to create and distribute multimedia interactive books has been a long time coming. The initial introduction of PDF documents and then ePub documents into iBooks was always a stop gap measure because of the limitations of each of the individual formats. Anyone could produce these documents but they did not really live up to the promise of what we knew was possible. I knew what we could create in Pages but I was unable to reproduce this in an interactive format to distribute to my students on iBooks."

"Sometimes we focus on what an app can't do and forget to look at what it can. That's been the case with iBooks Author, Apple's e-book creation platform released nearly a year ago. Part of the problem was Apple's own hyperbolic statements about its "disruptive" nature to the textbook publishing industry. It failed to live up to the hype for a variety of well-documented reasons. But this post is about what it is, not what it isn't."

via Dean Mantz

"A new educational app from global education leader Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), HMH Fuse™: Algebra 1, was studied by research firm Empirical Education Inc. and found to be a platform that successfully "encourages the use of personalized lesson plans by combining direct instruction, ongoing support, assessment and intervention in one easy-to-use suite of tools.""