Apple announcements for Education

Apple announcements for Education

Apple took its annual spring event out of California and hosted it at a high school in Chicago this year, promising to focus its newest products toward the education market that’s been dominated by Google and Microsoft. The keynote was condensed into just one hour, most of which revolved around all the things you can do with a newly announced iPad. Here’s a look at all the biggest news today.

The star of today’s announcement was the new “affordable” iPad with stylus support. Affordable is in quotations because it costs $299 for schools, but $329 for everyone else — the same price as iPad’s 9.7-inch tablet announced last spring. The biggest update with this iPad is that it’ll finally work with the $99 Apple Pencil ($89 for students / teachers), which was previously only supported by the iPad Pro.  Apple announced a cheaper third-party stylus that’ll work with the iPad called the Logitech Crayon. At $49, the Crayon has colorful orange bands that look a bit more playful than the original Pencil stylus.

Apple also says Logitech will offer a $99 iPad case with a keyboard component that’s designed to be rugged. Since schools can be so tough.

Most of the updates today arrive via software, with a new version of iWork that incorporates support for, of course, the Apple Pencil. Pages, for example, now include a Digital Book Creation tool that lets teachers and students build books together by adding pictures, handwritten notes, and hand-drawn illustrations. Numbers can now be used to create lab reports, and Clips will get new kid-friendly filters to encourage them to express themselves digitally.

With the new iPad, Apple is also introducing a new app, Schoolwork, for teachers to manage their classroom digitally. Schoolwork allows teachers to hand out digital assignments to students, such as homework, activities, and mark due dates on various projects. Apple likened the assignment to writing an email, with options to attach PDFs and links to each new project. To accommodate all these document attachments, Apple will update student iCloud accounts to include 200GB of storage by default.

All this is part of a new initiative by Apple called “Everyone Can Create,” which essentially bills the new iPad as the ultimate creative classroom tool for students to learn and express themselves.