A Few Notes From Apple’s Education Event

I followed the live stream blogs during today’s Apple Education event and took a few notes. These observations are based on reading the live blogs. I'm sure that people in the room will have more insight as the day goes on.

That New iPad

• I'm happy to see the Apple Pencil support moving down the line. It’s pretty great, and everyone should be able to use it.
• I think Apple still has a pricing problem. Chromebooks are in the low $200 range. The new iPad is $300, but when you add a case/keyboard $100 and an Apple Pencil ($100), a fully rigged iPad becomes nearly 2.5 times the cost of a Chromebook. When schools need to buy them by the hundreds (or thousands), that extra $300 is going to matter.
• I think the non-pro iPad has come so far that it indicates we are going to get the iPhone X version of the iPad in June at WWDC. I'd be surprised if the rumors aren’t true about adding Face ID to iPad Pro.

Swift Playgrounds

I'm glad Apple is continuing to press forward with this app. Swift Playgrounds are fun, and I’ve done a lot of coding in there over the past few years. I consider it a puzzle game as much as a coding education. My kids never got interested, but I'm guessing a lot of kids will go nuts for the new augmented reality features.

iWork

• The new features in iWork look interesting. They didn’t talk much about it.
• I think collaboration is where iWork needs the most attention. I'd like to see it collaborate as easily as Google Docs and it currently doesn’t.

iCloud Storage

200GB per student is great. Hopefully, they follow suit at WWDC and announce everybody gets a free 200GB. The current free offering of 5GB, particularly in light of the cost of Apple hardware,  feels pretty cheap on Apple’s part.

Teaching Tools

The classroom tools look impressive. I’ve not got any experience with them and am looking forward to hearing from teachers about this. As I understand it, for the past few years Google has been eating Apple’s lunch on classroom tools.

iBooks

I'm currently in the home stretch of an iBooks media-rich Field Guide, and I was very anxious about iBooks Author today. It looks like I'm fine. They are bringing the ability to create books to the iPad, but it doesn’t appear iBooks Author is porting to iPad. Instead, it will be an additional feature in Pages. So long as they keep improving iBooks Author on the Mac, I'm good.

The iPad in Education

On MPU several years ago we had Fraser Speirs on, who spearheaded one of the first one-to-one iPad programs in a school. When I asked him about why they used iPads instead of a traditional computer with Microsoft Word he had a really good answer. “We’re making CEO’s, not secretaries.”

The iPad is an inherently more creative device than a traditional computer, particularly something as basic as a Chromebook. Apple made this point with the new “Everyone Can Create” curriculum. I think schools and teachers, like Fraser, that take advantage of that will be doing something special for their students.

Apple and Education

Future Source Consulting did a study of the most popular operating systems in education K–12. According to their report Apple is at an all-time low with Mac OS accounting for 5% and iOS at 14%. The big winner is Chrome OS, that has grown to 58%. That makes sense. Chrome OS can run on very inexpensive hardware and is very easy to deploy and manage in a school setting. This jives with a report from an education-IT friend of mine that said a thorough understanding of Chrome OS and its management is a golden ticket in that field.

Clearly Apple’s angle in all of this is iPad. Years ago Fraser Speirs guested on the Mac Power Users and he justified his preference that kids learn to make presentations with iPad Keynote over mastering Microsoft Word by explaining, “I’m training CEOs, not secretaries.”

I’m sure a lot of the reason for Chrome OS’s dominance is cost. It is a lot less expensive to purchase Chrome OS hardware and schools are (too) often underfunded. These numbers give me an excuse to take another whack at iOS software. It needs to get better for productivity-type work and I’m sure that bleeds over into school adoption.

Overall, I dont find this report super-concerning for Apple. Most of this is based on budget and Apple has never really played that game. Apple used to make an education priced Mac, the eMac, which made a lot of sense. If Apple wants to get more penetration into schools, coming up with a more rugged, less fancy (and less epensive) iPad (let’s call it “ePad”) would help out. Looking at all these kids growing up using Chrome OS raises another question … what’s going to happen to Microsoft Office?