At today’s Apple education event in Chicago, Apple announced Everyone Can Create and Schoolwork with educators and students in mind.
Everyone Can Create is a new, free curriculum designed to make it fun and easy for teachers to integrate drawing, music, filmmaking or photography into their existing lesson plans for any subject. The new curriculum joins Apple’s Everyone Can Code initiative as programs for teachers and students. Everyone Can Create is designed to take advantage of the new 9.7-inch iPad and Apple Pencil.
Developed in collaboration with educators and creative professionals, Everyone Can Create includes teacher and student guides, lessons, ideas and examples to help teachers bring creativity and new communication skills into their existing subjects like English, math, science and history. For example, students can use the built-in camera in iPad to learn about fractals or they can use Apple Pencil and apps like Tayasui Sketches to learn about symmetry.
Beginning later this spring, Apple Stores will begin teaching Everyone Can Create as part of their regular Today at Apple sessions for educators. Apple says its 501 stores in 21 countries have already taught nearly 5,000 hands-on Teacher Tuesday sessions on topics including coding and app design, movie and music creation, and presentations or spreadsheets.
Apple also announced Schoolwork, a new app that helps teachers create assignments, see student progress and tap into the power of apps in the classroom. Schoolwork builds on the success of Apple’s Classroom app, which is used in schools around the world to help integrate the iPad into the classroom. Schoolwork and Classroom are designed to help teachers and administrators get the most out of integrating Apple technology into schools.
With Schoolwork, teachers can assign a specific activity within an iPad app and direct their students directly to the specific point within the app. Popular education apps like Nearpod, Tynker and Kahoot are already integrating support for Schoolwork.
And Apple hasn’t forgotten its desktop and laptop line. Classroom, a teaching assistant that helps teachers manage student iPads and guide students through lessons, keep them on track and share work, is now coming to the Mac. It allows teachers to launch apps, books and webpages on all student devices at once or send and receive documents.
Classroom lets teachers view student screens during class to help students stay focused, assign shared iPads to specific students for class and even reset a student’s password. The Mac version of the app will be available in beta starting in June.
