In an education-focused event held at Lane Tech College Preparatory High School, Chicago. Apple unveiled an affordable 9.7 inch iPad. This iPad is ultimately meant to be used within the classroom. Apple has also launched a wide variety of new educational resources.
The new 9.7-inch iPad comes with support for Apple Pencil, hence Apple’s iWork suite which includes Pages, Numbers, Keynotes has been updated to include more features. With these new features, one can certainly write, draw, sketch with the pencil on the productivity apps.
With these pages and keynote, users will be able to add images and drawings into their reports and can even include numbers when creating lab reports.
The smart annotation feature is also included in the beta mode. The benefit of using this feature is a teacher could add comments to the documents in real time which anchors to specific text. The app also includes an interesting feature which is the book creation that is common for both iOS and macOS.
This feature helps to create digital books like short stories or travel books. And to create a book you will be able to use different templates in addition to iWork’s new drawing tools or images and videos from the photo library. On the other hand, classmates could collaborate on the books in real time using either iPad, iPhone, Mac or iCloud.com. The final product can then be exported and shared on iBooks.
The other most interesting feature is the presenter mode which makes your iPad or iPhone as a virtual teleprompter. There is not just text auto scroll at an adjustable speed but you can even customize text size, spacing, and background color during playback.
The integrated Apple’s classkit is a new developer framework which is meant specifically to create educational apps for iOS.
Schoolwork can also help to incorporate more apps into the curriculum. This also helps teachers to assign activities to the apps and guide students to the specific point within that app.
When it comes to progress it gives teachers to check on the student’s ability. The teacher will be able to check on the overall class performance, check on student’s app activity and progress assignments. Apple has also assured on maintaining student’s data private. Further, the teachers alone will be provided access to the information. The Schoolwork app is expected to launch in the month of June giving educators to get practiced over it before the new academic year begins.
Added the Apple school manager program adds more value to the note as it offers administrative IT officials to create accounts for students and staffs, to manage devices and buy content. Apple has also stated that the program will now allow administrators to create profiles either individually or in bulk. It has been informed that Apple provides an access to create around 1500 Apple IDs at once which also include 200 GB of cloud storage.