Apple had a special education event on March 27th, 2017 to showcase new offerings for education. It was held at a high school in Chicago and featured teachers as presenters and in the audience.
Apple is marketing Macs, iPads and Apple TVs, along with apps, and available accessories as a complete solution for schools. It is emphasising the privacy angle, most likely to differentiate itself from Google. For full details, visit Apple Education, where you can watch the hour-long keynote and explore a section with classroom examples and teacher tips. This post shares the highlights.
New 9.7″ iPad
Apple presents its new 9.7″ iPad as a computer replacement and continues to emphasise the portability of iPad, its excellent performance and its ease of use. The new tablet is compatible with Apple Pencil, a feature previously reserved for iPad Pro, and supports augmented reality. The new features are added without an increase in price. In fact, Apple now offers a greater discount to schools so an iPad costs less than US$300 for schools.
Support for School Use
Schoolwork App – Teachers can create and manage assignments, track student progress and collaborate with students even in real time, and students can quickly access assignments and keep them organised. A ClassKit function allows integration with other apps. Schoolwork will be released in June 2017.
Classroom App – Teachers can track the iPads in your classroom, manage student lessons and receive student work via AirDrop. It is available on iPad and will be released on Macbook in June.
Shared iPad iOS Feature – Schools can set up iPads for multiple students by putting the images of students on the lock screen and securing each account with a PIN or password, keeping each student’s work separate.
Free iCloud storage – 200GB of storage for every teacher and student with a school managed account (up from 5GB)
New Creativity Curriculum – The Everybody Can Create curriculum, to be released in Sept., is created to help integrate drawing, photography, music and filmmaking into teaching and learning. The Everybody Can Code curriculum provides coding lessons, apps and guides for classroom use.
Teacher PD – Apple Teacher Learning Center gives you the resources and training to learn skills for Apple apps and inspires you to use iPad in new ways in your classroom. You can access guides and earn badges while you learn. Resouces are regularly added and expanded.
Other Announcements
Software Updates
- iWork – Support for Apple Pencil is now built into iWork. Pages makes it easier to create digital books and allows markup, Numbers can now be used for lab reports, and Garageband has a new sound pack for kids. You can also write in iWork apps using Apple Pencil.
- Clips – There are new child-friendly filters
New Accessories
Apple showcased a $99 Keyboard case and $49 stylus from Logitech. The stylus is much cheaper than Apple Pencil.
Summary
Apple is clearly trying to place itself as a strong competitor to Google. The $300 dollars price point definitely makes the iPad more accessible to schools, but it is still more expensive than a Chromebook especially when you add a case and keyboard. Also, Apple is making it easier to manage devices and classroom learning with Shared iPads and Schoolwork. Schoolwork is clearly a Google Classroom competitor. Apple would argue that the difference in price is a reflection that they have a superior product.
To finish up, The Verge has an 11 minute summary of the keynote.