iBooks Author and Book Publishing
Today at their little press get together, Apple released iBooks Author and I have to say, I'm a little envious of my teacher friends that get to use this to make their notes and ideas come alive. When I was back at Auburn University, I taught Electrical Engineering, and every class I taught, I always made really extensive notes to make sure that my lectures all "worked", and fit in the time for each class. Sure, some were a little long, but not too many, and after the first few weeks of teaching, you get to know how much you can cover.
The beauty of iBooks Author is that I could do this same thing on my Mac, give it to the students, and then there's never a reason to take notes. It's all there. Sure, it's maybe not as polished as some books, but it's there, it's free, and students would eat it up because it means never making mistakes in the copying of examples, all the things I might skip through in class would be laid out there to everyone to see.
Plus, it's possible to put multimedia in the books, and I could put simulation results, visualization movies, all the things that I had to hope they'd get form doing this on their own.
I got iBooks Author today because I'm convinced that even if I don't do a lot with it, I want to do a lot with it, and that's the important thing. Who knows? Maybe it'll get me back in the classroom.