iPad: the answer to school being "uncool"

link

FINALLY, I GET TO BLOG ABOUT APPLE!!! The reason I'm so excited about blogging about this company is because there's just this certain atmosphere of exclusivity when it comes to mind. The reason I say this is drawn from a personal experience of my own. It was my 21st birthday and I'd asked my mother for a laptop, now the previous week my friend had bought himself an Apple Macbook PRO and my word was it a machine!!! The clarity alone was the first I'd seen of it's kind, switching between windows and different browsers was on a whole new level. To cut a long story short, that laptop cost an arm and a few legs so I ended up getting an HP Pavilion dv6 and ít's no Macbook PRO but it's definitely a tech monster in it's own right. Since then I've gathered a very huge respect for Apple and the innovation behind its products.

Now when a company of this magnitude goes about changing something as rigid and formal as school environments one has to pay attention. Apple have gone about trying to commercialise the usage of iPads in the classroom and exposing them to students of all ages. An interesting statistic which rose in America is that "while 97 percent of the participating teachers in Manhattan Beach reported in November that the iPad makes class more engaging, that proportion had dropped to 86 percent by the end of January. The proportion of students who said so also dropped, though less steeply, from 81 to 77 percent. This kind of drop in interest and excitement makes sense to me. Anyone who has experienced a new gadget will experience a similar type of drop in enthusiasm. That puts a tremendous onus on teachers to change the way they think about teaching and learning. I hope this kind of feedback spurs innovation and creativity in teachers to try new things." So this shows that Apple is not simply releasing a product to the students and merely sitting back but also incouraging teachers to think more creatively and change traditional teaching with the use of the iPad.

When we look at the usage of the iPad in classrooms on a more nation level, namely South Africa. One is able to see it could not have come at a better time with the MD of Think Ahead (an institution which provides educational solutions) Michelle Lissoos said "it is a challenge to keep the classroom environment exciting but, with the introduction of the iPad, school children are now excited about going to school and learning." She also said that "there are currently 20 000 educational applications and 1.5-million iPads at educational institutions globally, which prove the popularity of the device in an education setting." Now Í'm sure a question which comes to mind for alot of people is that how do disadvantaged schools afford the device? Lissoos states that "affordability is a challenge for disadvantaged schools but corporate South Africa is coming on board to sponsor schools in townships and rural areas. There are also different models for the use of the device, in private schools parents and schools can afford one device per learner but, in disadvantaged schools, a group of five kids can share one device."

From a communication aspect Apple really played it's cards right by focusing on bettering the lives of students and how they interact with information in class, they've taken a rather played out innitiative of focusing on schools and adding their own twist to it by making school more fun for students. They have some how been able to manipulate the product to suit all countries and play to each of their characteristics. This shows the level of detail they were willing to go to in terms of researching and finding out exactly how to play to the comunities needs and solve their individual problems.

ebook WARS!!!!

link

I've often asked myself as a student currently studying in a tertiary institution and commonly exposed to different kinds of technological platfroms everyday...how much do I actually know about ebooks? Wikipedia states that "an electronic book (variously, e-book, ebook, digital book) is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices.^[1] Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital. The Oxford Dictionary of English defines the e-book as "an electronic version of a printed book,"^[2] but e-books can and do exist without any printed equivalent. E-books are usually read on dedicated e-book readers. Personal computers and some mobile phones can also be used to read e-books." 

So basically it's taking a physical book you would read and placing it in the platform of a tablet, e-book readers, personal computers or a mobile phone. Now I'm sure your question is how exactly does this appeal to me as a tertiary student? Well the answer is quite simple, the usage of tablets will be the saving grace for applications like the e-book reader. Shipments in terms of enterprises for pads has grown from 20,410 units in 2010 to 1,121,990 units in 2011 making the year on year growth 5397.3%. Where as shipments in terms of consumers has grown from 16,861,160 units in 2010 to 50,589,290 units in 2011 making the year on year growth 200%. The following figures show the current and future growth for tablets:

link

 The huge debacle around e-books right now exists between Apple and Amazon with Apple being accused of fixing e-book prices while the team at Apple says that it was simply trying to break the monopolistic grip Amazon has on the market. Telegraph states that "the US Department of Justice this week accused Apple of conspiring with five major book publishers to fix the price of ebooks, in an effort to loosen the stranglehold Amazon had established via its Kindle device. However, Apple said that the charges are "simply not true" and that it had instead promoted competition. "The launch of the iBookstore in 2010 fostered innovation and competition, breaking Amazon's monopolistic grip on the publishing industry," it said in a statement. Whoever leaves this scuffle as victor could glaim quite a huge foothold in the e-book reader market and inevitably the tablet community. Whether on a tablet or a physical book, as long as people have eyes and are able to read this will be the more prefered way for many to gather and process information, from a student doing an assignment to a PRP preparing an article for an organisation.

PR on the blogging tip....

Search Engine Blogs as Public Relations Tools

link

Blogs are used for various reasons including reporting news, communicating with specific groups of readers, and spamming. With millions of active blogs being constantly launched by journalists, students, CEO’s and celebrities, the blog can be seen as a living and breathing ecosystem dependent on links, trackbacks, databases, feeds, and indexing for survival. Over the past year Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves; the un-argued big four in search, have launched their own blogs.

What started as a way to say hello to their users has now transformed into a cult of transparency and communications. Along with a dash of geek-speak, crisis management and pro-active posting, these blogs have also begun to outshine the traditional forms of press and public relations, as the press and public has become as non-traditional and non-linear as the blogosphere itself.

The new public relations model of the search blog brings with it a change in attitude and information. No longer are journalists and bloggers pitched as often by Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN by the boilerplate press release, which is usually as damn interesting as reading the back of spray cans.

Instead, the new form of communication is an oxymoron; mass intimacy. Instead of one of our favorite PR reps contacting us with those old releases, we’re now contacted via email or IM with a link to the newest blog post. And if we subscribe to the RSS feeds of these blogs, we’re instantly contacted by our aggregator before the search engine PR people can say “PRISA” three times.

Additionally, Yahoo has taken a more intimate approach to announcing new product offerings from Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search and Y Search Marketing on the Yahoo Search Blog They have not used the Y Search Blog as a way to respond to the controversies which have been dogging Yahoo over the summer (China Journalists, Spyware and YSM Crashing) but what they have done is used it as a channel to explain what Yahoo is working on and Yahoo’s direction in Search, Maps and Local; instead of simply announcing. Unlike the Google Blog, the Y Search Blog offers comments, which lets readers send feedback directly to the authors of the blog entries – non-PR affiliated Yahoo employees.

So there you have it, with the convienience of the web benefiting public relations practitioners a whole new level of communication is possible

I’m not a Public Relations specialist but I do pay attention to the PR industry and its trends and do truly feel that the Search Blogs used by the big four search engines are a successful model for some companies, especially tech friendly ones to follow. One of the greatest aspects of reading these entries, is that I already feel like I sort of know these people . Such a feeling of company to public relations is quite priceless.