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Apple This morning launched Schoolwork, a free app for teachers that was presented for the first time at the Apple Education Event in Chicago in March. The cloud-based application allows teachers using iPads in the classroom to create and distribute documents and other tasks, collaborate individually with students, track student progress and, most importantly, their assign specific activities.
This means that instead of showing students how to download an application and give them instructions on how to access the individual task, teachers can instead guide students directly to a specific lesson with a application.
This allows schools tap into the power of the Apple App Store ecosystem, which has benefited from a better organized experience, where many children's app publishers are launching their new and updated apps in first and / or keep larger catalogs.
Some educational apps already work with Schoolwork, including Explain Everything, Tynker, GeoGebra, and Kahoot!
With this ability to assign tasks in the application, teachers can see how much the student is doing a given task, not just its overall use of the application. And they can also see how the whole class made from their own dashboard, too.
Apple also highlighted the elements of privacy at Schoolwork when it was announced, and it reiterates them today.
Schools can "create, own and control" the accounts used by students, the company says, and they can determine when information about student progress is shared.
Apple also can not see student activity because it stays in the system.
Confidentiality is a key selling point these days for Apple products. This could boost the adoption of its hardware and software devices in the classroom, even though its new $ 299 iPads for schools are more expensive than some of Google's low-end Chromebook options that can range from $ 100 to $ 150, for example.
The new iPads, as well as software for creating digital books, Classroom for Mac, an updated Swift Playgrounds app and other educational tools were also showcased at the Chicago event earlier this year.
Schoolwork is designed to work with the Classroom app, which now runs on iPad and Mac.
The Classroom application allows teachers to view students 'screen in class, share documents with students, assign shared iPads and reset students' passwords. Students, meanwhile, use Schoolwork to view content shared by teachers – such as ads, documents, PDFs, web links – and track their homework.
Apple's efforts in the field of education come at a time when Google is conquering the market with its Chromebooks, which have reported nearly 60% of the shares in the classroom, according to estimates.
But Apple devices may interest other activities than word processing and search on the Web: iPad for the class, for example, Apple Pencil, including in iWork, as well as the "pencil" of $ 49 Logitech. iPad Author, and kids can learn how to build AR apps in Swift Playgrounds.
Teachers can learn more about Apple's educational tools on its dedicated website here.
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