The bell rang and I started panicking. There were people everywhere, but I didn’t know anyone. I had my schedule from the administrators, and I needed to find classroom 125. I turned one way, and there was the auditorium. I turned the other way, and it was the cafeteria. I was late. Eventually, I found my class, late, and was one of the last students to arrive. The teacher had already begun. It was 11am, and I already wanted to go home.
This was not, in fact, a nightmare recounting my first day at school, but part of Apple’s education-focused event. The company invited journalists, analysts, and educators to Lane Technical College Prep high school on the northwest side of Chicago to debut a new low-cost iPad and educational software. It hopes that these products will outmaneuver Google and its partners for a greater share of the burgeoning grade-school education market.
During the math class, we followed along as the instructor explained the Fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,…), and then gave us the assignment to create a short poem. The syllables of each verse were to match with the corresponding number within the Fibonacci sequence. We then used the Clips app to record our poem using images, Live Text, new Posters, and the front-facing camera.
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It was impressive to see the practical application of Apple’s efforts, and was certainly entertaining enough for a room of adults. At the same time, how many times can your math teacher ask you to create a video poem throughout the year? It will certainly be interesting to see the other ways teachers in all subjects will be able to take advantage of this platform, and the new features being launched with ClassKit.
Though Apple’s morning presentations only alluded to Google’s Chromebooks a couple of times, their emphasis on kids using iPads to learn through multimedia experiences—and often by creating them—played up an Apple core competency and an area where Chromebooks are weak. Helping students learn how to use technology to express their creativity, Ahrendts says, is a natural calling for Apple: “It’s what kids are aleady doing on our devices, it’s what kids almost expect us to teach them.”
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Part of the news at Apple’s event pertained to new functionality for managing iPads in a schoolroom setting with more students than devices. And though it might be tempting to interpret that as a mundane attempt to make progress in an area where Chomebooks have excelled, Ahrendts surprised me by getting excited as she talked about it. “My favorite part of the preentation this morning was about sharing the iPads in class,” she says. “We’ve done that in Apple Stores for years. Why shouldn’t you do that in a classroom?”
The most notable change in the sixth-generation iPad is its support for the Apple Pencil, which requires a high-resolution touch sensor in the iPad’s Retina screen. Apple also integrated palm rejection technology so you can rest your hand on the iPad’s screen while drawing or writing. [...]
Apple also made a big deal about the role of AR — augmented reality — in education, pointing out that the sixth-generation iPad has the necessary power to provide an immersive experience thanks to its beefier A10 Fusion chip and embedded M10 coprocessor.
Sorry, but this little guy is specifically designed for the 2018 9.7-inch iPad. It uses a special type of connection technology that is not available on other Apple Pencil supported devices. It's not a difference in the iPad's screen or software. It's specific to Logitech's unique connection technology.
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At launch, the Crayon is only available to educators. Starting this summer, along with Logitech's Rugged Combo 2 iPad case, schools and school districts will be able to order the Crayon for $49.99 with a package price of 10 units.
The updated 200GB plans are only for students with school provided Apple IDs.
But, come on, Apple—you’re really going to leave the rest of us at 5GB?
Apple announced that it will bring its iOS classroom organization app Classroom to the Mac, and release a new cloud-based app called Schoolwork to share handouts, apps, and progress updates with students. [...]
Schoolwork allows teachers to make handouts containing documents, PDFs, and links — including deep linking to specific parts of apps — as easily as sending an email. The app also lets teachers monitor student progress, including completion percentages and student-specific views of completed work. Schoolwork will be offered in iOS in June and will use a new ClassKit development framework, which is debuting in iOS 11.4.
One special Pencil feature Pages receives is something Apple calls Smart Annotation. Launching in beta with today's update, Smart Annotation enables making comments and proof marks on written work that will then remain dynamically attached to the annotated text, so your Pencil markings will remain with the right words even if changes are later made within the document. [...]
Pages for both iOS and Mac can be used to create enhanced digital books that are viewed perfectly in iBooks. Unlike Pages' previous ePub export capabilities, where you were creating a standard Pages document then exporting it, now the full creation process is optimized for digital books.
You can now use facial expressions on the iPhone X for “hands-free control” over musical effects. Apple says this includes things such as guitar wah and synth parameters.
And because this is Apple, you’ll have to pay more to get the dark items. The Magic Mouse 2 costs $79 in silver and $99 in Space Gray.
While not as extensive as the new Apple Watch bands, it's still a nice injection of spring color to the iPhone and iPad accessories lineup.
Apple’s new iPad ad shows how the tablet can be used in creative ways to make learning a fun experience. The two minute ad follows a group of kids as they do a series of gravity experiments utilizing the iPad and Apple Pencil to complete the project.
The curriculum focuses on four creative areas: music, video, photography, and drawing. Everyone Can Create includes a teacher guide, student guide, lessons, ideas, and examples to assist teachers who want to incorporate the new curriculum into existing subjects like math and history.
Apple has announced a new collaboration with Chicago Public Schools and Northwestern University to offer free professional learning to teachers across Chicago, designed to give educators the tools they need to bring coding and computer science into the classroom.
They’ll establish a Center for Excellence at Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago, which will serve as a teaching and learning hub to introduce high school teachers to Apple’s Everyone Can Code curriculum. This collaboration will help expand opportunities for local teachers, giving them new expertise to share with their students, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook.
When Apple unveiled the iMac Pro in December, it did so with an assist from third-party developers. The company showcased creators who were working on applications that applied the iMac Pro's capabilities to new things previously not possible on prior, less-capable Mac hardware. Most notably, more than one dev was using the iMac Pro for virtual reality (VR) development, something Apple had announced its intentions to support at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June of last year.
One of the participating studios, Survios, had been approached by Apple to port its new title Electronauts to macOS. Electronauts is a virtual music-production tool that allows the user to DJ quantized music with various 3D tools, as if they were standing on a stage surrounded by equipment.
According to Apple’s Australian education page, the company is planning to build a “simplified login experience” which will let both teachers and students “log in to iPad, Mac, iCloud, iTunes U and Classbook” with their existing Google or Microsoft accounts, bypassing a need for an Apple ID altogether.
My wallet is safe. For now.
And yes, I did go and look at the new Spring colors for iPhone cases, but nothing attracted enough to part money. I do hope Apple will consider doing multi-color cases, like how they are doing for watch straps.
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Thanks for reading.