The Study It Series Creator, Mr. James Rice, has launched a podcast for ESL students and teachers around the world called: The James Rice Show. Very original name! Visit www.thejamesriceshow.com for past episodes. James discusses topics for teachers and students plus gives English Tips and Teacher Tips. It is broadcast in over 60 countries around the world! Many teachers use different parts of the podcast including Idiom of the Week as part of their classes. 

You can subscribe to the podcast on the Stitcher App for Android users or Podcasts for the Apple Users. 

Remember the days when we used to buy a textbook and then supplement them with heaps of photocopies? Those days are long gone because now we can supplement our digital textbooks with many cool apps. And some of these apps are from the same authors and textbooks we used in the past! Recognize any below? 

I love to see the Raymond Murphy, English Grammar in Use book as an app. When I was a new teacher, this book helped a lot. But, sometimes students were forced to buy the entire book just to study a few grammar points that troubled them. I never liked that. This app has corrected that problem. Now students can buy either the full app or sections in the app to help them with specific grammar issues. Wonderful! It is a great app to supplement our textbooks and give students more practice.

In our Study It english textbooks we supply you with some cool apps to help improve your classroom activities based around the content we have created. Some are new...and some are tried and true. 

​Don't you hate those really dry and boring Fill in the Blank exercises in ESL textbooks. They are so 1990's! We love the Comic Book! app. 
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With this app, we are able to practice English in a really fun and engaging manner. Teachers use this app in many different ways. The most popular way to use it is to give students a specific tenses, specific verbs or specific situations and they have to create a Comic Book! It is very cool. 
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What we love about the Comic Book! app is that students can take their own photos and import them into the app. The app transforms them into the Comic Book style. So beyond just using the app to create sentences or a story, students must get visually creative too. It is another element that helps with the learning process. 


At the end of all this great, creative work, students can export it as a PDF and share with their teachers, their friends and right on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram too. 


Give the Comic Book! app try and you will never want to do those boring, old fill in the blanks exercises again! 

We are proud to welcome the best Math Textbooks on the market to our catalogue of books. Check out Mathventure created by Baobab Education. Mathventure brings Math to life for students! 

Designed by experienced authors, the Mathventure collection facilitates implementation of the Common Core Math Standards. The interactive books in this collection put students in meaningful learning situations that help them understand the world around them.
The books offer a wide variety of mathematical problems and activities that encourage students to reason, develop problem-solving strategies, communicate their solutions, and make connections between concepts and processes. 

Mathventure is more than just a collection. It is an approach that allows young students to discover the wonderful and fascinating world of mathematics. ​

We love teaching idioms to our students. It is a fun way to learn English and to understand North American culture. So we were really excited to find the "English Idioms Illustrated App" - a really cool App to help English as a Second Language students study and remember Idioms. 
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The App provides a free daily Idiom and a set of free Idioms to get students started. Students can also purchase Idioms packs for download starting at 99 cents. 

Pearson released a 2015 mobile device survey of college students that shows incredible demand for mobile learning solutions for students. Students are ready and eager to use their Mobile Devices in education. Here are few amazing stats from the survey: 

• A whopping 79% of students say that learning with a tablet is more fun. 
• An incredible 68% of students say tablets help them perform better in class.
• 70% of students believe tablets will replace textbooks within 5 years.
• And 71% say tablets help them study more efficiently.

Read more here: Pearson's Mobile Study

We are pleased to announce that our Study It Series Creator James Rice on Thursday was awarded the 2015 iBooks Author of the Year for his tireless efforts to create and promote this pioneering publishing platform. James Rice was also nominated as the Educator of the Year and the Executive of the Year. They Study It ESL series was nominated as the Best Textbook Series. 

Winners were announced at the iBooks Author Conference October 8 from the Ford Theater at the Country Music Hall of Fame. The winners were announced by a consultant from Deloitte, and the head of the Association of Customer Facing Scientists and Engineers (AC-FSE), based in Silicon Valley.

​The big winners at the 2015 iBA Awards were the makers of The Mozart Project and Gauche the Cellist, each making three appearances in the winner’s circle. Presented in Nashville at the first iBooks Author Conference, Pipedreams Media’s James Fairclough and Harry Farnham were jointly named Creative Professional of the Year, and the company’s multi-author, multi-touch, multi-media book The Mozart Project won for iBook of the Year and Best Musical Work.

Read the complete story here with a complete list of winners: http://www.diyauthor.com/2015-iba-winners-from-the-ibooks-author-conference/​ 

“The future of digital reading is on the phone,” said Judith Curr, publisher of the Simon & Schuster imprint Atria Books. “It’s going to be on the phone and it’s going to be on paper.”

An interesting article by the Wall Street Journal published last week which argues that over the next 5 years we will be doing more and more reading on our phones. According to the article, "In a Nielsen survey of 2,000 people this past December, about 54% of e-book buyers said they used smartphones to read their books at least some of the time. That’s up from 24% in 2012."

It is clear that by 2020, mobility will be the key for education. "Chunk reading" will become more and more of a skill and a challenge for learners, educators and authors. Readers, inevitably, will be turning on their phones to read in 10 or 15 minute chunks while they are waiting for the bus or grabbing a coffee. Making sure the content is engaging and interactive will help ensure students can retain what they have read.

It will be an interesting challenge. 

Read the full article here: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rise-of-phone-reading-1439398395

August 16, 2015
Bradley Metrock, CEO, Score Publishing

James Rice is an interesting man: part educational innovator, part digital publishing visionary, and part YouTube star.

Educators often blur the lines between technologists, entrepreneurs, and prophets, and James Rice is one of the best examples of this 21st-century reality that we've found.  How he has used iBooks Author to create the "Study It" platform is remarkable.

James presents great perspective on the evolution iBooks Author has undertaken to arrive where it is today.  All of us who have used iBooks Author for any period of time have experienced some of these issues, as the software has begun to emerge as an essential content creation tool.

Check out his story and his take on iBooks Author below, and check out the Study It line of digital textbooks as well - they are excellent.

McGraw Hill Education CEO, David Levin, posted an article in the Huffington Post yesterday declaring that students and faculty should start moving away from print.  And we heartily agree! He claims that beyond the price, students actually are scoring 50% higher when using a technologies that personalized the learning solution.

You can read the complete article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-levin/dear-students-and-faculty_b_7957508.html

You can also learn more about our Mobile Learning Textbooks that can be downloaded on various devices for English as a Second Language (ESL) here: www.studyitbooks.com