INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Apple this morning launched Schoolwork, a free app for teachers that was first introduced at Apple education event in Chicago back in March
The cloud-based app allows teachers using iPads in the classroom to create and distribute handouts and other assignments, collaborate
individually with students, track students& progress, and & perhaps most notably & allows teachers to assign specific activities within
educational apps.
That means instead of pointing students to download an app and then give them instructions on how to access the individual
task, teachers can instead guide students directly to a specific lesson with an app.
This lets schools tap into the power of Apple App
Store ecosystem, which has benefitted from being a more curated, trusted experience, where many kids& app publishers launch their new and
updated apps first and/or keep larger catalogs.
Select educational apps already work with Schoolwork, including Explain Everything, Tynker,
GeoGebra, and Kahoot!.
With this ability to assign in-app tasks, teachers can see how well the student is doing with the given assignment,
not just their usage of the app overall
And they can also see how well the whole classroom is doing from their own dashboard, too.
Apple additionally emphasized the privacy
elements to Schoolwork when it was first announced, and it reiterates them today.
Schools get to &create, own and control& the accounts
used by students, says the company, and they get to determine when student progress information is shared.
Apple cannot see the student
activity, either, as it stays within the system.
Privacy is a key selling point these days for Apple products
It could spur more adoption of its hardware and software devices in the classroom, even though its new $299 iPads for schools are higher
priced than some of the low-end Chromebook options from Google that can range $100 to $150, for example.
The newiPads, along with software
for digital book creation, Classroom for Mac, an updated Swift Playgrounds app, and other educational tools were also shown off at the
Chicago event earlier this year.
Schoolwork is designed to work with the Classroom app, which now runs on both iPad and Mac.
The Classroom
app lets teachers view students& screen in class, share documents with students, assign shared iPads, and reset student passwords
Students, meanwhile, use Schoolwork to view the content teachers& share & like announcements, handouts, documents, PDFs, and web links & and
track which of their assignments are due.
Apple efforts in education come at a time when Google is winning the market with its
Chromebooks, which have a reported nearly 60 percent share in the classroom, according to estimates.
But Apple devices may appeal for other
activities beyond word processing and web research & its iPads for the classroom, for example, support Apple Pencil, including within iWork,
as well as Logitech $49 &crayon.& Teachers can create lightweight iPad-based texts using iPad Author, and kids can learn to create AR apps
in Swift Playgrounds.
Teachers can learn more about Apple educational tools on its dedicated site here.
