Mike Wuerthele
Apple has released the Schoolwork app, which in conjunction with Classroom provides a wide array of teacher and student collaboration, and performance monitoring.
The free Schoolwork app, first announced in March is now available to all teachers. With it, teachers can create assignments, collaborate with students, and use a series of apps for learning, with assessment of student progress. In conjunction with Apple's Classroom app, Schoolwork gives teachers more tools to enhance learning and help both educators and students get more out of Apple technology used in the classroom.
Schoolwork allows creation and broadcast of assignments with a wide range of content, ranging from web sources, to PDFs, and other documents, in conjunction with specific activities in apps. Students can use Schoolwork to stay organized and keep track of the work they need to complete and due dates.
According to Apple, popular education apps including Explain Everything, Tynker, GeoGebra and Kahoot! work directly with Schoolwork. Developers can now update their apps to take advantage of Schoolwork by utilizing ClassKit, a new education framework, to make it easy to assign activities and view student progress.
Classroom has been around for two years on iOS, as a way for teachers to manage iPads used by students in the classroom, automatically connecting to a class' iPads. It can be used to remotely open apps, launch websites, or access books, with educators also able to remotely monitor the student's screen, and to lock all devices to refocus the student's attention.
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.
Using the pair of apps, teachers are provided a snapshot of class performance and can check on an individual student's progress across all activities. Apple has included its normal privacy and security features to allow students to control the accounts used by their students and decide when student progress information is shared.
Apple will be releasing a Mac version of Classroom, which will provide the same functionality as its iPad-based counterpart. It is presently in beta through the AppleSeed for IT program for Apple's education and enterprise customers.
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
Oliver Haslam
6 Comments
Just wish they brought the multi user support from Classroom to everyone.
Just in time for Summer recess... /s
FINALLY!!! I don’t know what took them so long to do this.
The need for classroom and assignment management controls was obvious from the start of Apple’s iPad push into the classroom. If Apple had been more aggressive earlier on iPad penetration into K-12 would not have been blunted so much by cheap Android tablets and PC laptops.
Wish Apple would have had this like 3-4yrs ago. For a lot of districts....its too late. We'll see how well Google works out in the long run though. I still don't believe in using Crapbooks for K-12 as they're far too limited. It reminds me of the Netbook era and we all know how that went long term. Short term it sounded great and many jumped onboard and then after a few years and quickly died off.
I've envisioned this type of software pre-iPad. Hell I remember envisioning a tablet like device that could do all this and more. The software on the teacher side should also be able to automatically do roll call, and automatically grade the papers based on pre-determined answers on the teacher side. This alone would save teachers so much time and would eliminate the need to have to grade papers at home, which is often something teachers do not get paid for and takes the most time.