Oxford University Press Launches e-books for Learning English Through Microsoft’s Office 365
Oxford, Oxfordshire (PRWEB UK) 9 July 2014 -- Oxford University Press has collaborated with Microsoft to make its enhanced e-books solution, Oxford Learner’s Bookshelf, available through Office 365, a SharePoint app. The app transforms Oxford’s coursebooks and Readers for learning English into smart digital books with a balance of interactivity that encourages students to study independently at home, and tools that help teachers to engage students in the classroom.
“The cloud has the power to make anytime, anywhere learning a reality, and this partnership with Oxford University Press brings it a step closer,” commented Anthony Salcito, Vice President of Worldwide Education at Microsoft. “By combining the depth of content in Oxford Learner’s Bookshelf with the power and scale of Office 365, students around the world can use any device to benefit from enhanced learning and problem solving that helps prepare them for the workplace.”
The app makes extensive use of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and was created with involvement from specialist Korean e-book developer iPorfolio, Inc. together with UK-based developer ShapingCloud Ltd, a leading exponent of cloud technologies in the education segment.
“Over 50,000 students worldwide already use Oxford Learner’s Bookshelf on tablets and we are delighted to have collaborated with Microsoft in expanding its reach to the Office 365 environment”, said Joseph Noble, Head of Channels and Partnerships at Oxford.
“SharePoint on Office 365 provides a flexible and scalable means of collaboration for your school”, he continued. “You can quickly bring together the apps and components you need on the platform to create an engaging, productive environment for teachers and students; and our e-books are now a seamless part of this”.
The integration of video, audio, interactive exercises and written sticky notes within the e-books lends itself well to in-class presentation and the flipped classroom. Teachers project videos or pages onto their whiteboard, quickly zooming in where needed. Students can then work in groups or individually, using the materials in the coursebook. Teachers may also ask students to come to the classroom prepared with having watched a video or listened to real life conversations, then answered some questions, and be ready for further exploration in class.
For differentiated learning, students watch or listen with headphones as much as they need. To help with listening skills, a vital part of learning a new language, students can slow down the audio so that they hear each word clearly, and set sections to repeat so that they can hear and practise intonation and pronunciation.
For self-study work at home, students complete activities on the page and can check their progress with automatic marking, or an answer key. Students can also save a page to OneDrive for adding to a portfolio of their work, or for their teacher to mark. The Graded Readers are also ideal for extending the classroom with at home learning, increasing learners’ vocabulary, grammar, and listening skills or just for general enjoyment.
To find out more and purchase e-books, go to http://www.oup.com/elt/fingertips/institutions
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About Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. OUP is the world's largest university press, with a wide global reach. It currently publishes more than 6,000 new publications a year, has a presence in around fifty countries, and employs more than 5,000 people worldwide. It has become familiar to millions through a diverse publishing programme that includes scholarly works in all academic disciplines, bibles, music, school and college textbooks, children's books, materials for teaching English as a foreign language, business books, dictionaries and reference books, and academic journals.
To find out more about Oxford University Press please visit http://www.oup.com. To find out about OUP’s English Language Teaching publications please visit http://www.oup.com/elt.
For more information contact: [email protected] +44 1865 354308
About iPortfolio
iPorfolio, Inc. is the strategic solution partner for the critically acclaimed Oxford Learner's Bookshelf. The company was founded in 2011 out of 12 years of research and development in the area of e-learning technology and has received backing from both Korean state as one of the country’s most promising smart-content solutions providers, as well as from equity partner DSC Investment. The company has received ISO9001 certification for its quality management systems and has earned recognition as Innovative Technology Company from the Korean government.
To find out more about iPortfolio please visit http://www.iportfolio.co.kr
About ShapingCloud
Shaping Cloud are Microsoft Education partners with Offices in Manchester, London and the US. They are at the forefront of the Cloud-First and Mobile-First revolution that is taking place within the technology sector as a whole and especially within Microsoft. With years of experience in delivering software and applications that work with the Microsoft’s Cloud Services in particular Microsoft Azure and Office 365. As one of the world’s leading experts on Office 365 they have built up a set of simple, intuitive API’s and tools that allow companies to rapidly unlock the value of their 365 platform and deliver user-centred applications that seamlessly connect a wide range of systems.
To find out about Shaping Cloud’s services please visit http://www.shapingcloud.com
For more information contact: [email protected] +44 161 4085333
Joseph Noble, Oxford University Press, http://www.oup.com/elt, +44 1865 354308, [email protected]
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