This is the best post I’ve read on the Apple education announcement this week:

Apps in Education: My E-Textbook Manifesto: “This announcement needs to be tempered with an evaluation of what we want and what we need as teachers. After all, we are the ones that are at the coalface, we are the risk takers, the experimenters, the alchemists. What do we want for our students? What do our students need from e-texts?”

Go read the entire post.

I can only add that the idea of teachers and students working together in a lab-like environment to create their custom educational experience is insanely appealing to me. This paradigm is especially exciting when thinking of the iBooks Author tool that easily allows for teachers and students to work on and construct their own texts.

However, the bigger revolution (that Apple can’t create by industry disruption) is the recognition by teachers and students that learning means more than content consumption out of a set of agreed upon texts set forth by a corporation or board of education hundreds of miles and dozens of years away from any particular classroom.

Teachers have to remake themselves and our profession into one that recognizes and encourages (responsible) risk taking, alchemy and experimentation with tools, tech and curriculum all the while ensuring that it is relevant and beneficial for student development while actually encouraging students to actively participate in this process as co-learners.

Successful schools will do this and thrive in the coming years and decades. Schools that insist on momentum as the prime mover of curriculum, faculty development, student learning and content engagement will wither on the vine as a whole.

This is the real revolution in education that has teachers, students, parents and learning communities who care about quality education so excited about the shiny new objects coming out of Cupertino (er Shenzhen).

Here’s to the crazy ones.