On Tuesday, March 27, 2018, at Apple, Inc. hosted a Special Education Event in Chicago, Illinois at Lane Technical College Preparatory High School. This was the first time in six years that Apple has hosted such an event. In those six years, the education landscape has changed dramatically with the Cupertino kids losing significant market share in K-12 education to Google and its G Suite for Education and Chromebooks.

This event introduced a new 9.7” iPad priced at $299 for education ($329 for consumers) with compatibility for the Apple Pencil priced at $89 for education (and still $99 for consumers). In addition to the new hardware updates, there were a slew software updates geared toward students and teachers. Here are the five announcements that I am most excited about from the event:

iBooks Author has been out for years, but students and teachers had to have a computer to create digital books. Now iBooks Author is available on the iPad in Apple’s word processing application Pages. This allows students and educators to easily create books using the iPad. I love when students have different ways to show what they know, think, feel, and understand, and this is a great new option for iPad classrooms. I can also see students creating interactive notebooks and so much more using this tool.

Schoolwork

Schoolwork is Apple’s answer to Google Classroom. The Schoolwork application will be out this June (in beta) and will help teachers distribute and collect assignments, monitor student progress, and collaborate with students in real time. I’m excited about the possibilities this brings to the iPad classroom, and how it will help teachers streamline productivity and save time. This app is long overdue (pun intended).

ClassKit

ClassKit is Apple’s newest API. This update is geared towards developers but has huge implications for educators and students. With almost 200,000 iPad apps made especially for educators, this update can be integrated by them all. ClassKit allows third-party apps to connect and talk to Schoolwork. In other words, teachers will be able to assign, assess, and monitor students’ progress in third-party apps using Schoolwork. Teachers will also we able to assign a specific task inside third-party education apps. This is a feature that does not exist in Google Classroom. Tynker, Nearpod, and Kahoot are a few of the third party developers Apple gave early access to the ClassKit API.

Everyone Can Create

Apple already has the Everyone Can Code curriculum to help educators foster computational thinking and problem-solving in the classroom. They are now releasing a new curriculum for students and teachers to help foster creativity through video, music, photography, and drawing called Everyone Can Create. This curriculum will help bridge the gap between the arts and core subjects to help enhance teaching and learning. Everyone Can Create curriculum will help educators help students to not only be consumers of information but creators of content.

Classroom

Classroom has been available on the iPad for almost two years and allows teachers to push apps, links, and more to student iPads in their classroom. It also allows teachers to group students, view student screens, and lock student iPads. Classroom is now coming to the Mac. This was a question I often received from teachers when I introduce them to the Classroom app. It would be nice to see Google offer something free and natively like this similar to Apple.

What are your thoughts about Apple's announcements? Did you want more? Are you excited about today's announcements? Let me know on Twitter.