Apple announced Thursday that its iTunes U educational service has now topped 1 billion content downloads since its launch in 2007.

The service preceded the recent interest in “massive open online courses.” It provides lectures and other content from top-shelf schools, museums, and other institutions—often for free—giving other educators the tools to create their own curricula for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users around the world.

The result? A lot of very impressive numbers.

More than 1200 colleges and universities host courses online, as do more than 1200 K-12 schools. More than 2500 public courses are offered, Apple says, and “thousands” more are available through private channels. Duke, Yale, Cambridge, MIT, and Oxford have each enrolled more than 100,000 students in an iTunes U course; Stanford University and The Open University have each seen their content downloaded more than 60 million times.

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When San Diego public school officials decided to distribute 26,000 iPads to students this year, they were lucky: They already had a big pile of money.

The city’s voters had approved a $2 billion bond issue in 2008—$500 million of which was designated for a five-year “digital transformation program” designed to update the district’s curriculum. San Diego schools started distributing inexpensive netbooks to students in 2009; the next year Apple unveiled the iPad. And school officials soon changed direction, believing that tablets were a better educational tool.

“We were writing a five-year plan,” says Darryl LaGace, who was the district’s director of instructional technology when the bond passed. He told officials: “I fully expect what we write out in year one won’t look like what we’re doing in year three, four, five.”

The result is that San Diego was financially well-prepared to join the wave of schools around the nation that are placing iPads in the classroom. Districts in Chicago, Texas, and Massachusetts have all earned headlines as they move to iPad-based education.

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If ebook-making is your thing, you may be interested in the latest version of iBooks Author, revealed at Apple’s media event on Tuesday.

Apple CEO Tim Cook presented the updated iBooks Author as part of an “iPad in education” segment during the introduction of the latest versions of Apple’s tablet. iBooks Author remains free, with the update available on Tuesday from the Mac App Store.

New in iBooks Author are new portrait-only iBooks templates. Unfortunately, portrait-only doesn't mean iPod touch- or iPhone-friendly—iBooks Author books are still restricted to the iPad and iPad mini, whether you view them landscape or portrait. The company does seem to have expanded its template offerings beyond textbooks, however: There are now options for photo books, craft books, cookbooks, and biographies.

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Good news for readers: Apple on Tuesday announced the newest version of its ereader software, iBooks, available as a free download on the App Store for iOS devices.

Apple CEO Tim Cook began his iBooks demo with a brief overview on the iBookstore, noting that customers have downloaded more than 400 million books. The iBooks app is “one of the most popular apps on the store,” said Cook, before outlining the enhancements in the new version.

The app now supports more than 40 languages—including Korean, Chinese, and Japanese—and features a new “continuous scrolling” reading option for those who prefer scrolling over page-turning. Another welcome addition: iCloud not only syncs your page turns, but all your purchased iBookstore books over your various devices. (Cook did not mention on-stage if books purchased elsewhere would also sync.)

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When Dr. Martin Ringle introduced the then-new iPad to Oregon’s Reed College in the fall of 2010, he was more than a little cautious. After all, he had seen educational-technology trends come and go—he even had an old Apple Newton gathering dust in a drawer somewhere.

Ringle, the chief technology officer at Reed, planned to try iPads purely as a test and not to get caught up in the hype. “We want students and faculty to have the devices in a live setting,” Ringle said, “and see what they discover.”

Two years later, after multiple pilot programs, Ringle has this to report: He is an iPad believer.

“I think it’s clear that the iPad is here to stay,” he said recently. “Students and faculty—and for that matter, administrative staff—are continually finding new ways that the iPad meets their needs better today than it did yesterday.”

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Each week in this space, we offer up a roundup of Macworld’s biggest stories from the week gone by. Our friends at Ars Technica do something similar, and their roundup last week was written entirely in limerick form. I take that as a challenge; hence, this week’s Wrap is written in haiku.

As a reminder:

That’s five syllables,
And then seven syllables,
And then five again.

Good advice

Dropbox or Google?
Which cloud storage should you choose?
We crown one winner.

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Apple on Monday handed out its annual Apple Design Awards to developers behind the best Mac and iOS apps of the year. The company looked to award those apps that were well-designed, state of the art, and innovative—and available for sale in the Mac or iOS App Stores.

On the iPhone side, the company recognized Disney’s Where's My Water, a casual game; Halfbrick Studios’s Jetpack Joyride ( ), a cave-flyer style game; and National Geographic Society’s National Parks app.

The winners on the iPad side were Fifty Three’s Paper, an innovative drawing app; GameCollage’s Bobo Explores Light, an educational science book for kids; and Fingerlab’s DM1 - The Drum Machine—an advanced vintage drum machine simulator.

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You might think that the week before Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference -- where the company is expected to unveil iOS 6 and potentially reveal a few surprises along the way -- would be a quiet one. Of course, you might also think that the duck-billed platypus is extinct. You’d be wrong on both counts. Let’s remember the Macworld week just ended:

In the news

Virgin Mobile will become the second U.S. prepaid carrier to carry the iPhone, as Apple continues its quest to get every man, woman, child, and well-trained mammal in this country to start using one of its smartphones.

A couple of third parties announced accessories that offer USB 3 connectivity on your Mac via Thunderbolt. Speaking of connections, before you make yours at some airports, you may relieve some stress with iPad installations there.

On the Web, LinkedIn had a rough week, though at least anyone fired at the company in the wake of a pair of security lapses should have a head-start on finding contacts to hit up for new work. Meanwhile, Google bought QuickOffice, furthering Google’s plan of, you know, owning everything.

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Now that Apple has shipped its third iteration of the iPad, older iPads are finding their way into the hands of children. Our own Christopher Breen has written about what parents might do to prepare those iPads (and their kids) for the transfer of the device from adult to child. I spoke with him about his ideas and his own experiences with his daughter.

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Show Notes

If you’re interested in Chris’ advice for preparing an iPad for a child’s use, take a look at his Configuring an old iPad for a Child. You may also be interested in his follow-up article, Embracing the Educational iOS Device in which he describes how he and his daughter have turned a first-generation iPad into a dynamic education tool.

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iBooks Author ( ) may be a fine tool for creating basic ebooks. But if you’re an educational publisher and you want to produce electronic titles that are hundreds or thousands of pages long, with complex graphics, multimedia elements, navigational interfaces, and reader interactivity, iBooks Author won't be enough. But iPad publisher Inkling has another option.

The company calls its new Habitat publishing platform “cloud publishing” (to distinguish it from the familiar desktop publishing model embodied by iBooks Author). It seeks to replace existing publishing workflows, which are often just email- and FTP-enhanced versions of old paper-based systems in which authors, editors, and compositors send files back and forth.

Habitat moves all those materials to the cloud, where everyone involved can get at them easily and simultaneously, and it organizes the entire process of editing, compositing, and proofing those texts. Inkling itself has been producing textbooks with a system like Habitat for several years; now other publishers can sign up to use the same tools.

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Google Earth is so popular that it has a very large, devoted user community, and it’s what most people think of when it comes to a Earth viewer. However, at Macworld | iWorld, you’ll find PersonalPlanet, an Earth viewer by iGlobe that takes things to a whole different level.

PersonalPlanet is more of a educational science tool than Google Earth—and it’s much more expensive, with pricing around $7700. The product uses different components to present a color-rich high-resolution image of the earth as a 3D sphere, without the 3D spectacles.

The first part of PersonalPlanet is the spherical display that mounts on a user-provided iMac. It isolates the imagery to the center of the display, so you can’t use it when you’re normally using the iMac. It’s made to be used with the iGlobe software, the second component.

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The next time SpaceX launches one of its rockets into space, you should be able to track its flight via a pair of popular star-gazing apps from Vito Technology.

Vito Technology makes the Star Walk and Solar Walk iOS apps. The former lets users locate and identify objects in the night sky, while the latter provides a 3D model of the solar system. (Star Walk comes in an iPhone version as well as the iPad-optimized offering; Solar Walk is a single app that runs on both devices.)

In addition to showing you stars and planets in the night sky, the Star Walk and Solar Walk apps also feature satellite trajectories and tracking. To that end, the company told me this week at Macworld | iWorld that a forthcoming update will add the ability to track the next SpaceX rocket launch from either of its star-gazing apps. SpaceX, the informal name for Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, is a private company founded by former PayPal cou-founder Elon Musk that’s pursuing commercial space exploration and transport.

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While iPad textbooks have been making news as of late, ebooks in general are a pretty familiar sight on the iPad. While some ebooks are mere digital “ports” of their printed counterparts, others, like Kite Readers’ new Be Global ebook takes the print version and adds interactive elements to enhance the experience. Be Global is being unveiled at Macworld | iWorld this week to coincide with its availability on the iOS App Store.

Based on the book, What Does it Mean to be Global? by Rana DiOrio, the ebook introduces kids to different cultures around the world. In addition to having the printed book in its entirety, each page offers tapable elements that show more educational material. Be Global also presents its content in two languages, English and Spanish, and you can read the book yourself, or have the book read aloud by the app.

Be Global also has a coloring book mode, a journal mode where kids can keep a travel journal, and a lesson plan mode for teachers who want to integrate Be Global into the classroom.

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As it has in the past, Macworld will host the Macworld Live stage at Macworld|iWorld. Starting Thursday, January 26, those attending the show or watching Macworld’s live stream can see some of their favorite editors interviewing and interacting with well-known individuals from the world's of technology and the creative arts. You'll find a link to that live stream on Macworld's home page starting on Thursday. Here’s what you’ll find on stage:

Thursday, January 26

11:00 – 11:50 AM: iFixit Live

Macworld’s Chris Breen and the folks at iFixit talk about repairing your broken Apple gear.

12:00 – 12:50 PM: Playing in the Sandbox: Developing for Apple’s App Stores (Or Not)

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Thursday’s iBooks 2 update delivered interactive textbooks to the iPad. These books incorporate video clips, moving diagrams, audio commentary, and other new features that exploit the iPad’s touch interface. With a handful of such books already available for purchase from the new Textbooks section in the iBookstore, I decided to take the updated iBooks out for a test drive. What I found were books that feature stunning images and impressive graphics that make traditional printed textbooks feel out-of-date.

What’s available now?

iBooks textbooks are geared for the K-12 grade levels at this point; as of Thursday, the books available in the iBookstore are specifically aimed at high schoolers. Apple says it’s working closely with major textbook publishers Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to bring widely used textbooks to life through this new format. Those three publishers account for about 90 percent of textbooks sold in the U.S., according to Apple senior vice president of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller.

Pearson has two titles available for purchase (covering biology and environmental science, respectively), while McGraw Hill has five—for physics, chemistry, algebra, geometry, and biology. For elementary-school aged kids, DK Publishing has three textbooks available. These companies already have more textbooks in the works.

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Ask people in educational publishing about Apple’s foray into e-textbooks, and you’ll hear a consistent message: It’s good for all of us—and good luck to Apple.

It’s good for e-textbooks in general because “Every time Apple enters a market, that market gets attention,” as Dan Rosensweig, CEO of textbook-rental firm Chegg, puts it. Widespread availability of e-textbooks on the iPad could help alert a lot of students, teachers, and parents who didn’t know otherwise that such things exist.

And authoring tools like the just-released iBooks Author could help raise expectations about what’s possible in such texts—things like interactivity, multimedia, and personalized content. “This could be where innovation in publishing comes from,” says Sarah Rotman Epps, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Epps points out that there’s no lack of digital content for schools; there are thousands of apps and e-texts available now. But much of that content wasn’t optimized for digital; it’s often the replica of a print original with a few digital enhancements. iBooks Author could help change that. In the process, it could also enable a new generation of developers who are currently locked out of the education publishing market.

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Today Apple held an education event in New York City where it unveiled a new version of the iBooks app along with iBooks Author, a free Mac application that allows you to create books containing not just text but also rich media elements. Macworld’s Dan Moren and Lex Friedman attended the event. I talk to them about their impressions.

Note that Dan and Lex had to dash into a less-than-silent office to record the podcast. We apologize for the occasional background noise.

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At the Apple education event on Thursday, Apple executives Eddy Cue and Jeff Robbin unveiled the iTunes U app, a new way for students and teachers to manage course material for classes on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.

While the iTunes U app provides access to the content that’s available in the iTunes U section of the iTunes Store, it also offers a means for teacher and student interaction. The opening interface looks a lot like Apple’s iBooks app, with a bookshelf that hosts icons representing your courses. Tap on a course, and you’ll see a list of topics on the left, such as Overview, Instructor, and Outline. These topics can be customized with additional topics. Teachers can post a syllabus, notes, and assignments to the class, and students receive notifications when new posts are available. With the assignment lists in the iTunes U app, students can mark off when an assignment is done.

The iTunes U app also allows for interoperability with other media. A teacher can tell students to read certain texts, with links that send the student to the iBookstore or another source. Or a teacher can assign videos for students to watch; the student can watch a video stream, or download the videos to the iOS device for viewing at a later time.

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Apple on Thursday launched iBooks Author, a free Mac app designed to let authors and publishers easily create multimedia-rich e-textbooks for the company's updated iBooks 2 app for the iPad.

Although digitial textbooks were the focus of Thursday’s Apple event, Phil Schiller, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, noted that iBooks Author could be used to create other media-intensive offerings, such as cookbooks and travel guides, for Apple’s iPad. (Currently, iBooks Author does not work for creating iBooks for the iPhone or iPod touch.)

The app itself is a WYSIWYG editor with a user interface similar to Apple's iWork product line, which includes Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. Text can be dragged directly from Pages or Microsoft Word into the editor; the app uses the document’s styles to automatically create sections, headers, and layout. Keynote presentations can also be automatically inserted into textbooks, giving the final document more interactivity than a traditional publication.

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At Thursday’s education-themed Apple event at the Guggenheim museum, Apple executives Phil Schiller and Roger Rosen were on hand to introduce iBooks 2, which heads the first of two education initiatives unveiled by the company.

Before introducing the app, which is now available from the iOS App Store, Schiller outlined the problems with modern textbooks: They aren’t portable, durable, interactive, searchable, or updatable. In his words, “The iPad stacks up better.”

More specifically, it stacks up better with iBooks 2, which brings fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, and videos to students and teachers. Apple vice president of productivity software Roger Rosner took to the stage to demonstrate the app’s new features for textbooks, which include a revised index for easier search, page thumbnails, virtual study cards, interactive multiple choice questions for section and book quizzes, and new portrait and landscape views.

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Apple’s education announcement is all over the news, with suggestions ranging from interactive textbooks to ebook publishing tools (gee, those sound familiar). Some, however, say that it’s all over-hyped—so clearly we should be looking forward to the next next Apple announcement. The remainders for Tuesday, January 17, 2012 are almost excited enough to consider going back to school. Almost.

Apple to Give a Lesson About Textbooks (Wall Street Journal)

As with the week leading up to any Apple event, speculation is rife about what the company will announce. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) says Apple will roll out interactive textbooks along with partnership deals with major publishers like McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Also, the company is expected to release a themed Smart Cover made out of a brown paper bag.

Apple to announce tools, platform to “digitally destroy” textbook publishing (Ars Technica)

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It’s starting to seem like it wouldn’t be January without an Apple event, as the company announced on Wednesday morning that it will hold an education-related shindig in New York City next week. The fun starts on January 19, at 10 a.m. Eastern/7 a.m. Pacific.

The invitation received by Macworld shows a New York City skyline drawn on a chalkboard, with the outline of an Apple logo in the middle. The event has some swanky digs, too—the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue.

Rumors of a January Apple event first surfaced earlier this month, and they’d already crystallized around some sort of education topic. Given the New York City location, it also seems reasonable that publishing is in some way involved—perhaps an initiative for bringing textbooks to iOS devices? Will we finally see a version of iBooks for the Mac?

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In our last podcast we discussed our annual Editors’ Choice Awards—awards Macworld presents to the year’s best Mac-related software and hardware. But our praise doesn’t stop there. Apple makes a fair living from computing devices that don’t bear the Mac label—the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. We honor the apps that feed these devices with our just-as-annual App Gem awards.

In this episode of the podcast, Macworld’s Philip Michaels, Dan Moren, Lex Friedman, and I talk about how we go about choosing the winning apps as well as what makes some of the award winners so special.

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The iPad is becoming increasingly popular in academic settings, gracing everything from undergraduate lecture halls to medical schools to grade-level classrooms. But the iPad’s educational uses don’t stop there. Intellipad’s new Intellipad 1.0 iPad app aims to make Apple’s tablet more useful for special education, especially kids learning to read, write, and communicate.

“I feel as though the iPad was developed specifically with the special needs child in mind,” Cheryl Bregman, Director of Intellipad and an occupational therapist, told Macworld. “It is interactive, delivers a direct cause-and-effect relationship, and provides opportunities to learn materials in a multi-sensory way.”

Even Apple’s latest iPad 2 commercial shows off the tablet’s educational power, featuring several apps that can be used to learn a new language, topic, or instrument. Yet there aren’t as many apps available for special needs children and students. In fact, Bregman and the Intellipad team—made up of occupational and speech therapists—decided to create Intellipad 1.0 because they could not find an app that facilitated writing for individuals with disabilities. A lower-case letter keyboard, in particular, was important to the group, “to correspond with the letter forms the students use to learn to read and write,” Bregman said.

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NASA’s space shuttle program lifts off for the last time this week, with space shuttle Atlantis slated to take off on Friday, July 8. And two iOS apps aim to let you participate in the launch.

If you’re looking to follow the shuttle as it orbits the planet en route to the International Space Station on its 12-day mission, GoSoftWorks’s free GoAtlantis app will let you know when to turn your gaze skyward. The universal app will provide real-time tracking of the final space shuttle mission and, using the location capabilities of your iPhone or iPad, predict when the shuttle will pass over you and where you should look.

GoSoftWorks released GoAtlantis as a free app to commemorate the last space shuttle mission, but the company has other paid apps in its roster as well. GoSatWatch allows you to track hundreds of satellites currently orbiting in space much in the same way as the GoAtlantis app will do with the shuttle, while GoSkyWatch Planetarium helps you identify stars, planets, constellations, and other celestial bodies simply by pointing your iOS device toward the night sky.

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When Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta began designing the Pulse News Reader for iPad at Stanford University, what they were really hoping for was a good grade.

Well, they’ve got it. The pair—who turned their Stanford University class project into a full-time job—this week received an Apple Design Award in the student category at the Worldwide Developers Conference. Other student winners were Jeremy Olson for the Grades 2 app and Stephen Varga for the Pennant app.

“I’m still kind of getting over it. It was a class project, and from that we just wanted to sell a few hundred apps,” said Gupta, 24, who has partnered with Kothari to form Alphonso Labs. Under that umbrella, they plan to refine their news-reading app and distribute it to other platforms.

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Around 700,000 people are expected to watch the Space Shuttle Endeavour launch this Friday at 3:47 p.m. EST on its final mission to the International Space Station. Among them are 150 people selected by NASA to view the action close up at the NASA Tweetup (including this Macworld editor).

I asked some of the NASA Tweetup attendees if they had any favorite shuttle-related iOS apps. Here’s what they came up with:

NASA’s own free app brings you live streaming from NASA’s public TV channel as well as countdown clocks, photos, and launch information. Watch the launch here as well as pre- and post-launch videos. You can also keep up with the @NASA Twitter feed from here. iPad owners have their own tablet-sized version of the NASA app. (Recommended by @jonverve and @eugenephoto.)

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For kids, learning the alphabet isn’t exactly as easy as A-B-C. While you and I may have mastered the alphabet from books or television, children today are just as likely to study letters and their sounds with the magical multitouch device that is the iPad. My daughters (ages 4 and 2) helped me test three ostensibly educational apps. Our questions: Are they really teaching the kids anything? And perhaps even more importantly, are they fun?

What to look for

My kids are iOS pros. They can unlock an iPad, swipe between screens, and launch the app they’re after. The best kid-focused apps offer simple navigation, clear instructions, and easy targets for little hands to manipulate.

Apps that purport to help my kids master the alphabet should do all that and more. Beyond offering fun, engaging visuals, they should employ both lowercase and uppercase letters, associate letters with their sounds, and ideally not feel too repetitive (and thus unworthy of repeat launching).

ABC Expedition

The first app my kids and I tried out together was ABC Expedition ( ). The $3 game from developer Meldmedia stars Captain Wallace, an accented character (of the non-typographic variety) who leads an alphabet expedition through a virtual zoo. The app’s main menu presents a grid of colorful, clear capital letters; tapping on any visits the animal whose name begins with that letter. The approach is somewhat similar to Safari Animals HD ( ), another animal-themed ABC app that suffered from some navigation limitations when I reviewed it recently. (The Safari Animals HD 1.1 update, released after my review, added sorely needed bidirectional navigation.)

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