Among the presenters at this year’s conference is yours truly, John Brandt representing Maine CITE and the Maine AIM Program. Also there will be my colleague Cynthia Curry, Consultant and MLTI Integration Mentor. Both of these presentations will take place on Friday and require full conference registration.

My presentation, AT & AIM – Tablets and Pods in the Classroom will demonstrate and evaluate several devices and apps used for instruction and as assistive technology (AT). Used with Accessible Instructional Materials (AIM) these devices can be very helpful to students with disabilities. This presentation takes place at 11:00 am (session 2) in the Arnold Room.

Cynthia’s presentation, Text to Speech, Speech to Text, and Screen Readers will discuss “computer programs that talk.” In the presentation she will demonstrate and discuss how these unique applications can be used to enhance student learning. This presentation takes place at 1:20 pm (session 3) in the Washington Room.

Back by popular demand this year is Sarah Herrlinger, Senior Marketing Manager in Apple’s education division. Last year, Sarah presented on the accessibility features built into Apple’s Mac OS X and iOS and gave us a first-hand look at some of the features of the new iPad. This year, Sarah will again talk on this topic and demonstrate some of the new and improve accessibility features of Mac OS X and iOS in her presentation entitled Accessibility Features of Mac OS X and Apple Mobile.

Sarah’s presentation is co-sponsored by Maine CITE and Apple, Inc. and is offered free of charge to ACTEM members. It will take place from 1:30 to 4:30 in the Sagadahoc Room. If you are not an ACTEM member and would like to attend, please contact Maine CITE.

For more information about the conference and to register, please visit the ACTEM Conference website.

• The education (K-12) textbook publishing business is very different from other forms of educational publishing (e.g., college textbooks) or general commercial book publishing. In many ways things have not changed in K-12 textbook publishing industry as dramatically as they have elsewhere. They had better get moving.
• There are 22 U.S. states called “state adoption states” where the curriculum is selected by a single statewide board of education and all schools use the same books. The remaining states are considered “open territory states” where the curriculum is selected by local school boards. In state adoption states, textbooks are chosen and remain in classroom use usually for a minimum of seven years because of the large replacement cost to the state. Many of the “state adoption” states actually have a customized set of textbooks geared specifically to their state curriculum and state learning standards. Texas is a “state adoption” state; Maine is an “open adoption” state. Here is a nice resource about textbook adoption process from the Association of American Publishers.
• The economics of school textbook publishing industry are complex and starting to change as pedagogy changes. I suspect, but I don’t have the data, that instructional materials are now more likely to be workbooks and thinner modular sets of content rather than the large, thick and heavy books of my youth. Most social studies textbooks are probably out of date by the time the ink dries. Math and Reading textbooks probably have the longest shelf life.
• The movement to experiential learning and project-based learning, particularly in the middle and secondary classrooms has dramatically changed the types of instructional materials used.  The increased attention to students’ individual learning styles and the principles of universal design for learning have transformed the practice of teaching in many classrooms with teachers moving away from the use of traditional textbooks.
• The internet has changed the world, albeit somewhat more slowly in our American classrooms than in our homes and businesses.
• Contrary to the predictions made in a Forrester article from 2000, the e-book is not dead. That may have been true in 2000, but not 2011. Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com now sell more e-books than paper books. Check out this data on e-book sales.

In my opinion, many of the folks publishing K-12 educational textbook are scared because things are all changing so fast and they fear that what happened to the music industry will happen to them. They have probably been reading things like this which looks like it was published 2-3 years ago.

If K-12 textbook publishers continue with the same old business plan, they will be gone.

I personally think the future for educational publishing never looked brighter – if they do it right. Here’s someone who agrees:

Peter C. Davis, president of McGraw-Hill Education stated last summer, “We are making content more usable and parsable so it can be targeted to create an individualized and personalized learning experience for students and produce desired learning outcomes.  We need to stop thinking of e-books as transformative.  They are not. Adaptive and interactive learning tools are where education needs to go and where the real opportunity lies. Bring on this new world. The quicker it happens the more exciting it is for us.”  (Source citation)

Whether you call them 21^st Century Learners or Digital Natives, today’s students in K-12 classrooms have been and continue to be exposed to information sources and delivery systems radically different from the ones that existed even a decade ago. The idea of going to a shelf to get a dictionary or an encyclopedia to find information is archaic. The idea that a textbook can hold all of the information a student needs to know, even for a semester, is almost as obsolete.

Rather than asking about where to get a digital textbook, we should be asking: “What are, and how do we acquire, the instructional materials needed to help students learn and to help teachers facilitate learning?

Some things to look at…

• Educational Publishing blog from the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP)
• From xplana: “How” Is More Important that “What” in the Future of Educational Publishing — Services, Tablets, and Mobile Expectations

Have a thought on this…comment please!

Photo credit: Licensed by Creative Commons by Crystal

Fix the Web

There is an experimental website in development that will allow people to report websites that fail on accessibility. Using a “crowd-source” methodology, Fix the Web will allow “web users with disabilities to report accessibility problems by linking them with thousands of tech-savvy volunteers.” A trial version of Fix the Web has been launched and the full service is expected to be launched later this year.

According to the report, “the project’s initial goal is to sign up 10,000 volunteers to cover 250,000 websites a year.” They hope to sign up 1.5 million volunteers worldwide.

The Fix the Web website provides this description: “We can do this if many more disabled people report issues they are having with websites, so we need to make this very simple (less than one minute of time). We want thousands of volunteers on hand to take these problems forwards with website owners. Volunteers will increase their own knowledge and skills in the process – you don’t need to be an expert in e-accessibility.”

Kindle 3: Better Accessibility, But Still Not Perfect

As reported by us last year and this year, there has been an ongoing set of concerns regarding the accessibility of Amazon’s popular e-book reader, the Kindle. Troubles for the product were made widely public when the US Department of Justice spanked several large US colleges for requiring students to adopt the products for class use and in so doing unintentionally discriminated against people with disabilities since the first and second versions of the product were not accessible to students who were blind or had visual impairments.

According to E-Access Bulletin, the third version of the Kindle is better than the first two, but still not without problems. They report:

The Kindle 3, developed by the online retailer Amazon, features a display with improved contrast and an audible menu facility, ‘Voice Guide’, enabling users to select an e-book using sound and activate the device’s text-to-speech ‘Read to Me’ feature. The Kindle 3 also features a display with 50% improved contrast between the text and background, improving the readability of text for partially sighted users.

“The Voice Guide does improve the accessibility of the device significantly”, RNIB Principal Manager of Digital Accessibility Robin Spinks told E-Access Bulletin. “However, certain functions are not yet possible, for example, being able to browse the electronic bookstore using text-to- speech and being able to select, purchase and download book content from the device [using Voice Guide], rather than having to do that from a computer.”

To subscribe to this free monthly E-Access bulletin, email eab-subs@headstar.com with ‘subscribe eab’ in the subject header.  Portions of this blog entry are Copyright 2010 Headstar Ltd.

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Image licensed through Creative Commons – by Horia Varlan

That said, the e-reader, and specifically the Kindle by Amazon, has been having a rough time of it. First introduced in November of 2007, the Kindle was a big hit, selling out in the first five hours and on backorder for months after that. The Kindle 2, released two years later was equally well received and the DX version released a couple of months later was also very popular.

Then the fun began. A controversy with The Author’s Guild forced Amazon to hobble the Kindle 2 by shutting off the text-to-speech feature. Disability groups stormed the Manhattan offices of The Author’s Guild to protest and claim discrimination, but the device, it seems, was already inherently inaccessible to people with disabilities.

In May of 2009, Amazon announced a bold move of a offering the Kindles to several large US universities with the goal of taking over the college textbook industry and making paper college textbooks a thing of the past. More fun followed when the inherent inaccessibility of the device became widely known. A number of the  universities that piloted the program with the Kindle backtracked and dropped out when they started to see the accessibility problems. “Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, also examined the utility of the Kindle DX as a teaching device and decided that they would not use the Kindle DX until it is accessible to blind individuals” – this according to the US Department of Justice (USDOJ).

The latest news on Kindle is a settlement with the USDOJ announced this week. It states:

Under the agreements reached today, the universities (Case Western Reserve University, Pace University, Reed College, and Arizona State University) generally will not purchase, recommend or promote use of the Kindle DX, or any other dedicated electronic book reader, unless the devices are fully accessible to students who are blind and have low vision. The universities agree that if they use dedicated electronic book readers, they will ensure that students with vision disabilities are able to access and acquire the same materials and information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students with substantially equivalent ease of use. The agreements that the Justice Department reached with these universities extend beyond the Kindle DX to any dedicated electronic reading device.

This sounds pretty bad for Amazon and the Kindle.

And given Mr. Jobs recent efforts at making Apple products fully accessible, one can only imagine that the rumored “Apple Table device” WILL be fully accessible and perfectly timed to kick butt.

Stay tuned.

In the meantime, Kindle has also been embroiled in a debate between consumers who have disabilities and the association that represents writers, The Authors’ Guild. Central in that debate was copyright issues and whether having a text to speech conversion tool built into Kindle’s operating system would be a violation of the copyright rules. More on that story.

But the Kindle story took a new twist when two of the “major universities”  rejected the Kindle because – get this – “the menus of the device are not accessible to the blind”

Reported widely in the press, both Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have decided to say, “Thanks, but no thanks” to the Kindle.

E-Access Bulletin reports,

The institutions’ decision was “applauded” by the US National Federation of the Blind ( NFB: http://bit.ly/gBnAC ), which said that although the reader contains a text-to-speech feature, “the menus of the device are not accessible to the blind”, meaning that blind users cannot purchase books from Amazon’s Kindle store, select which book to read, or even activate the device’s text-to-speech feature.

They further state,

“If e-books are accessible, then there will be no need for the expensive and time- consuming process of converting a printed textbook into Braille, audio, or electronic form. Blind students will have access to the same book at the same time and at the same price as their sighted peers”, said Chris Danielsen, director of public relations for the NFB.

Danielsen said that Amazon could increase the accessibility of the Kindle DX by “making the menus speak and/or by allowing the functions of the device to be controlled by keystrokes from the keyboard.”

Read the full article on E-Access Bulletin.

Here are some of the latest stories, just in case you are interested.

California names first digital textbooks that meet standards for high school math, science

Online textbooks offered free to students

U.S. company to offer digital textbooks on iPhone

Students’ textbooks might soon be a thing of the past: Virtual books could be turning the page on modern education

Digital textbooks may soon take over for paper predecessors

And so it goes…

~j

Yesterday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the latest entry in the Kindle family – the DX. The new larger e-book is being marketed to colleges and universities as the first e-text for higher ed. The announcement was made at one of my Alma maters, Pace University in NYC. Apparently Amazon has several colleges lined up to pilot the new device in their classrooms and lecture halls. The new Kindle comes in at nearly $500 so the colleges have indicated some interest in subsidizing the cost of the device. Read the NY Times article about the announcement.

The second big e-text news came yesterday as well as California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a plan to “make California the first state in the nation to offer schools free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students.”

According to the news release on the governor’s blog:

“At the Governor’s request, Secretary Thomas will work with State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell and State Board of Education President Ted Mitchell to develop a state approved list of standards-aligned, open-source digital textbooks for high school math and science. This list will be compiled after content developers across the country are asked to and have submitted digital material for review. “

It is clear the the e-book is the future of education. The exact shape, size and format remains to be seen. But whatever the outcome, the actions of the last two day will no doubt push accessibility issues forward as both the higher education and public schools entities will require that all of these devices and materials will be accessible.

Very exciting.

~j

I know things are tough financially all over, but this seems pretty mercenary to me. Personally, I see a big difference between a mechanized text-to-speech reading application and audiobooks where the content is usually read by a compentent actor or perhaps by the author themselves. The richness of that experience is very different from the “computer voice. ”

It also seems to me that the publishing industry is running scared in light of what has happened to the recording industry and the Napster fiasco. They really need to put their heads together and come up with a plan to get into the game or they will simply dematerialize. Challenging every new innovation is not a solution and will only leave a bitter taste in the mouths of many consumers.

The text-to-speech features of Kindle 2 are a wonderful and universally designed element making printed materials much more available to persons with print disabilities. They should be rewarded and not punished.

Read the whole blog entry from E-Access Bulletin

UPDATE: Just read this additional blog entry from TechFlash about this controversy. Note the comments from the Authors’ Guild disputing some of the commentary.

National Federation of the Blind is into this – see press release. And see “KindleBoards.”

Some twittering about a protest in NYC on 4/7/09. Will post more when I know.

~j