Hands on: a walkthrough of the educator-centric Apple Teacher portal
As part of Apple's new education initiative, Apple has refreshed a new e-learning tool for teachers to quickly get up to speed with what Apple offers, and AppleInsider has delved into it a bit.
With all of the things announced this morning, a valid question is, how is a teacher supposed to learn to use any of this in the classroom? Isn't teaching hard enough without adapting curricula around these devices?
Apple Teacher helps alleviate that with some very approachable training. Signing up for Apple Teacher requires an Apple ID, and asks which grade is being taught, which subject, and where. The school name appears to be optional at this time, but city and state are required.
Once inside Apple Teacher, a welcome screen gives an overview of the portal. Teachers select the iPad or Mac, with eight quizzes for each device. Pass all eight quizzes, and the teacher officially becomes an "Apple Teacher," is awarded a special Apple Teacher badge to share with the world, and gains access to more learning resources and badges in the future.
It's not clear at this time what those resources might be, or how advanced they may get as Apple rolls out software it announced on Tuesday.
Clicking on iPad or Mac changes the eight icons to show what the quizzes will be on.
Each resource page can be explored to find helpful guides for using Mac, iPad and Apple apps in the classroom. The resource pages are very well done.
After this welcome screen, the initial portal page has News, Home, and Profile at the top of the page. News is a view of Apple PR for education. Profile has basic account settings and a display of all the badges completed.
Home contains a top row carousel of links to resources. Discover Clips opens a page with videos of how to use Clips.
Student Project: All About Me opens a page with videos that show how to use Keynote and the shapes tool to make a Keynote that uses the shape tool. These are resources for learning how to use a tool before taking the badge quiz.
The row below the carousel is the Collections row. It consists of Badges for iPad, Badges for Mac, Clips, and the Classroom App.
There are three apps for education that were talked about today, and not a lot of clarification about the differences between them. Apple School Manager (ASM) is about data management, ID resets, and account and device administration. Classroom is about live management in the room. Schoolwork allows teachers to create and send assignments (not just watching information from Classroom).
Apple Teacher is the portal that teaches about Classroom and the apps, with project work in mind. After clicking through a few parts of the collections, a Recently Viewed row appears that covers just what it sounds like.
At this early date, the quizzes are only five questions long. They aren't very difficult, but do require some reading for teachers that may not be as familiar with Apple's products like the typical AppleInsider reader might be.
Getting a question incorrect links you to review the resources about that device or app, and allows you to review the answer that had been given, but not correct it. Teachers have to live with their errors, or retake the whole quiz.
Even so, a 4 out of 5 score on a quiz is enough to earn the badge.
This training feels very similar to resources Apple has made in years past. One AppleInsider editor compared it to the training given through Apple's portal on eWorld years ago. It also feels similar to the training made available to Mac Specialists prior to and in the very early days of the Apple Retail Store.
Apple strikes a balance between too much study and too long a quiz, while making resources available to do just what they need to do with Apps and the Classroom tool. It will be interesting to see how teachers respond to it.
With all of the things announced this morning, a valid question is, how is a teacher supposed to learn to use any of this in the classroom? Isn't teaching hard enough without adapting curricula around these devices?
Apple Teacher helps alleviate that with some very approachable training. Signing up for Apple Teacher requires an Apple ID, and asks which grade is being taught, which subject, and where. The school name appears to be optional at this time, but city and state are required.
Once inside Apple Teacher, a welcome screen gives an overview of the portal. Teachers select the iPad or Mac, with eight quizzes for each device. Pass all eight quizzes, and the teacher officially becomes an "Apple Teacher," is awarded a special Apple Teacher badge to share with the world, and gains access to more learning resources and badges in the future.
It's not clear at this time what those resources might be, or how advanced they may get as Apple rolls out software it announced on Tuesday.
Clicking on iPad or Mac changes the eight icons to show what the quizzes will be on.
Each resource page can be explored to find helpful guides for using Mac, iPad and Apple apps in the classroom. The resource pages are very well done.
After this welcome screen, the initial portal page has News, Home, and Profile at the top of the page. News is a view of Apple PR for education. Profile has basic account settings and a display of all the badges completed.
Home contains a top row carousel of links to resources. Discover Clips opens a page with videos of how to use Clips.
Student Project: All About Me opens a page with videos that show how to use Keynote and the shapes tool to make a Keynote that uses the shape tool. These are resources for learning how to use a tool before taking the badge quiz.
The row below the carousel is the Collections row. It consists of Badges for iPad, Badges for Mac, Clips, and the Classroom App.
There are three apps for education that were talked about today, and not a lot of clarification about the differences between them. Apple School Manager (ASM) is about data management, ID resets, and account and device administration. Classroom is about live management in the room. Schoolwork allows teachers to create and send assignments (not just watching information from Classroom).
Apple Teacher is the portal that teaches about Classroom and the apps, with project work in mind. After clicking through a few parts of the collections, a Recently Viewed row appears that covers just what it sounds like.
At this early date, the quizzes are only five questions long. They aren't very difficult, but do require some reading for teachers that may not be as familiar with Apple's products like the typical AppleInsider reader might be.
Getting a question incorrect links you to review the resources about that device or app, and allows you to review the answer that had been given, but not correct it. Teachers have to live with their errors, or retake the whole quiz.
Even so, a 4 out of 5 score on a quiz is enough to earn the badge.
This training feels very similar to resources Apple has made in years past. One AppleInsider editor compared it to the training given through Apple's portal on eWorld years ago. It also feels similar to the training made available to Mac Specialists prior to and in the very early days of the Apple Retail Store.
Apple strikes a balance between too much study and too long a quiz, while making resources available to do just what they need to do with Apps and the Classroom tool. It will be interesting to see how teachers respond to it.
Comments
https://edu.google.com/?modal_active=none
Click the tabs across the top.
And the privacy policy is here:
https://edu.google.com/k-12-solutions/privacy-security/?modal_active=none
Yeah, they're not data-mining kids with school's Chromebook's.
No guarantee that someone somewhere hasn't figured out what kind of adult you will be someday but I think that's more in the realm of genetic testing.
Here Apple even has to differentiate between iPads and Macs. Integration should be seamless regardless of what hardware is being used.
It is there business after all, so what do we expect?
I doubt Google could get away with much of anything as high profile as they are, and with millions of Apple fans eyeballs watching their every move for a misstep. Like when they scooped up wifi snippets in Germany when doing mapping, then claimed they knew nothing about it. Or when they "accidentally" bypassed user Safari settings and misled those users on how to opt out. Yeah they screw up, but when they do it's all over the news, not some single report.
So when they step over the line we'll all know about it, and from more than a single blog. And they will. They all do once in awhile.
It’s just Google fans who spend their days polluting Apple forums in search of validation for their choice of platform.
https://www.androidcentral.com/iphone-x-review-second-opinion
https://www.androidcentral.com/its-2018-and-android-phones-still-cant-compare-iphones-taptic-engine
https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/12/05/android-iphone-part-two-ive-liked-switching-iphone-x/
So yeah Apple fans spend time on Android blogs too. The residents just don't have a fit about it.
And, oh, nice try there trying to de-legitimize the EFF report saying it was done by an intern. So, you mean to say the EFF was stupid enough to make a formal complaint to the FCC based on an intern's imagination and that the investigation had no merit or concern? How lovely!
https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2013
...and it was the EFF who credited the report to an intern, the term they used and not mine. BTW the complaint was lodged with the FTC, not the FCC . Far too many government acronyms aren't there? I have trouble keeping them straight myself.
lol. Why don't you include the latest report (2017) ?
They just started to include Apple in 2013. Took them some time to gather more info.
Besides, Android phone users are leaking call logs and data to FB because both FB and Google didn't care about privacy. Whatever EFF publishes are just Google's empty talk at that time. They have grown to collect even more data now, while publishing even more privacy policies.
Besides that if you now want to claim they were wrong about Apple back then because "they just didn't have enough information" they can be wrong about other stuff too like Google...
and in fact you claim they are wrong, saying Google doesn't deserve the same good 4-star privacy rating that Apple gets in the latest EFF report (Adobe gets 5 stars). Is that because they still don't have enough information? Seems you're helping me prove my point, so thanks.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯