The iPad is engaging students and transforming the K-12 education experience.
During its education event in January, Apple unveiled its plans to revolutionize the K-12 classroom with the iPad, electronic textbooks, a revamped version of iTunes U that supports content for K-12 schools as well as higher education, and tools for educators to create their own digital content using iBooks Author and iTunes U.
In the intervening months, schools and districts around the country have made significant investments in iPads, including the San Diego Unified School District, which invested $15 million in 26,000 iPads for its students. Those sales created a record quarter for Apple in the K-12 education market.
With the back to school season upon us, it’s clear that the massive iPad deployments will give Apple the opportunity to disrupt the classroom in the ways it has whole industries and, in many ways, that’s a good thing.
Apple’s volume purchase program falls short for many schools and businesses.
Apple’s Volume Purchase Program (VPP) is the company’s half-hearted attempt to deliver some form of enterprise licensing program for the iOS App Store. The program does make it marginally easier for businesses to bulk purchase and deploy apps to iPhones and iPads than telling employees to buy apps and then reimbursing them, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. As we reported earlier this summer, many businesses and school still feel Apple doesn’t meet their app purchase and deployment needs.
Mobile app management (MAM) vendor App 47 summed up some of the key issues and how it can help companies deal with them as part of the company’s summer lecture series on app management.
FileWave’s new free app makes deploying Lion/Mountain Lion incredibly easy.
FileWave launched a new free app called Lightning this week. The new app makes quick and easy work of deploying Mountain Lion (and Lion) to multiple Macs, particularly recent Macs with Thunderbolt. It can be used to roll out existing master images that a business or school has already created as well as a base OS X install that can be customized with a range of files and applications.
School technology policies are often restrictive, but circumventing them can be dangerous for teachers and students alike.
One of the challenges of 21st century education is determining the appropriate ways to use technology in the classroom. That’s a challenge that each school or district needs to confront in its own way. One thing that is universal, however, is that the policies and processes put into place around technology need to come from an ongoing dialog between teachers, school administrators, and IT professionals.
While some schools may have restrictive policies, those policies are emblematic of the community to which the schools belongs. They are the policies that the school itself and the parents of its students feel are needed to protect its students. Those policies also teach students what is acceptable behavior and how to protect themselves in the online world.
Cloud computing has great potential for schools, but isn’t without some pitfalls.
The summer break is winding up and many teachers are getting ready to head back to work for another school year (and many IT staffers in those schools are trying to make sure everything’s ready when those teachers return). Over the past several months, many schools and their IT departments have been struggling to keep spending down while also delivering a 21st century learning environment. That discussion has largely focused on how to most cost effectively deploy iPads, new MacBooks, and other technology systems.
One approach to that dilemma is moving away from traditional software purchasing and towards enterprise cloud solutions. That approach may give schools more control over expenditures and offer other advantages, but it also has downsides including the potential to raise costs and degrade the education experience.
Registration is available for this fall’s MacTech Conference 2012.
Registration is now open for MacTech Conference 2012. The annual conference, which is a great learning and networking experience for IT professionals and developers, will be held October 17 – 19 in Los Angeles. A pre-registration discount is available for anyone who registers by the end of August.
The conference is sponsored by MacTech magazine and was launched in 2010, the year that Apple chose to focus its annual Worldwide Developers Conference solely on iOS. Since then, the conference has grown into a major event for IT professionals that need to support Macs and/or iOS devices in business, enterprise, and education environments. The conference has also become a serious event for Mac and iOS developers.
IT Pros like the idea of Bonjour, AirPlay, and AirPrint, but feel they don’t fit will on college campuses.
An online petition has been created to try to convince Apple to make changes to its Bonjour network discovery service and related technologies including AirPlay and AirPrint. The petition is asking Apple to redesign Bonjour and other services to deliver a better fit with education and enterprise networks. It was started by Lee Badman, wireless network architect for Syracuse University, on behalf of the Higher Ed Wireless Networking Admin Group at Educause, a non-profit resource organization for IT staff working in higher education.
Schools are adding Apple technology, but many don’t integrate it well into the classroom.
Apple kicked off 2012 with its education event in New York. At that event, the company announced its electronic textbooks for iPad initiative, iBooks Author, and the revamped iTunes U. According the Apples latest financial data, the education initiative has paid off with both iPads and Macs being purchased by schools in record numbers.
A 21st century vision of education , however, is about more than getting the iPads and MacBooks into the classroom. It also requires technology goals, professional development for teachers, high-speed access to up-to-date content, education-centric portals for students and teachers, back-end systems, and education apps or software.
Ever wanted to try your hand at iPhone app development? The folks at Code School want to teach you, via a series of web-based coding courses focused on learning to code for iOS now available for backing at Kickstarter. The new set of coursework is called Try iOS, and it will use video, in-browser activities, and a hands-on approach to teaching anyone how to code for the iPhone.
We want to create Try iOS, a Code School course which teaches how to build your own iPhone apps. Our course will combine high quality screencasts, in-browser code challenges, and gamification principles to make learning fun. There will be no need to install anything, since students will build iPhone apps using our in-browser iPhone simulator.
IDC notes that Apple still sells more tablets than Samsung or Amazon, especially to schools.
The iPad continues to dominate the global tablet market and, according research firm IDC, the iPad is responsible for the strong growth of tablets across the board.
While the numbers announced during Apple’s most recent financials call continued to show strong year-over-year growth for the iPad, they didn’t illustrate how significant the iPad’s growth is compared to the rest of the tablet market.
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