Apple has launched its second cohort of Apple Learning Coach across America, a free professional learning program to help educators coach teachers on how to get the most out of Apple products. The program, available to instructional coaches, digital learning specialists, and other coaching educators across the US, is now accepting applications through November 16, 2022.
Through a mix of self-paced lessons and virtual workshop sessions with Apple Professional Learning Specialists, participants come away from the experience with a coaching portfolio, a cohort of peers, and the opportunity to apply for continuing education credits from Lamar University.
“For more than four decades, Apple has worked alongside educators to help enable students to create, problem-solve, and express themselves in new ways. We designed Apple Learning Coach to support educators using technology in the classroom,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Education and Enterprise Marketing, in a statement. “Apple Learning Coach is already making a real impact with educators and their students, helping to build a strong foundation for lifelong creativity and learning.”
The largest cohort to date was certified in July, and there are now more than 1,600 Apple Learning Coaches across 49 states, plus Washington, D.C.
“Technology helps students develop creativity and critical thinking, which are highly necessary for future career opportunities,” said Heidi Westrop, Wasatch County School District’s instructional coach and a certified Apple Learning Coach based in Utah, in a statement. “It’s my job to empower teachers in our district to spark the unique creativity in all students. Apple Learning Coach gave me the tools and resources to work with teachers with different levels of technology experience to design, deliver, and reflect on engaging learning experiences that can expand the classroom walls and celebrate every child’s unique talents.”
Along with the new Apple Learning Coach cohort, Apple continues to add other resources for teachers.
The Apple Education Community is now live and growing with valuable content from educators around the world. The Community is a professional learning hub designed for educators who use Apple technology, and includes the Learning Center with self-paced professional learning and the Forum, a collaborative space where educators can connect and share with one another.
Within the Apple Education Community, Apple released Everyone Can Create Projects, a new online series of simple, timesaving tutorials and downloadable resources to inspire new ideas and bring creativity to any subject. Everyone Can Create is designed to empower educators to build their creative teaching skills and deliver engaging learning experiences on iPad.
New Everyone Can Create Projects include:
• Design with Shapes in Keynote to help students visualize anything they can imagine, from math concepts to works of art.
• Animate with Stop Motion using Photos and Keynote to tell compelling stories with everyday objects.
• Create Editing Effects with iMovie.
• Write Your First Song using GarageBand.
Updates to Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and Swift Playgrounds
Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, popular apps used in education, are updated to give users the ability to view recent activity in collaborative files and get notifications when people join, comment, and make edits. All three apps now enable users to automatically remove the background of images, and users can remove or replace the background of live video objects in Keynote.
Swift Playgrounds now helps users learn the fundamentals of machine learning by training a model with a simple rock, paper, scissors game, demonstrating how computers make predictions from data. Additional walkthroughs show how to arrange app layouts by building a journal app. Swift Playgrounds requires no prior coding knowledge, so it’s perfect for those just starting out, and it uses Swift — the powerful programming language used by pros around the world to quickly bring ideas to life.
Updates across iWork and Swift Playgrounds support new desktop-class iPad features on iPadOS 16, including a customizable toolbar, new document menu, and support for Stage Manager, making it easy for students and teachers to get more done on iPad.
Availability
• The Apple Education Community is available now.1
• The new Everyone Can Create Projects are available in the Apple Education Community.
• Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are preinstalled with every new iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and updates are free on the App Store.
• Swift Playgrounds is available as a free download on the App Store. The latest updates require iPad devices running iPadOS 16 or later and Mac devices running macOS Ventura or later.
MacDailyNews Take: More details are available at apple.com/education.
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Honestly: the best thing for teachers and school districts to do at this point (and my spouse is one of them, has been for 25 years) is to throw ALL of the devices into the trash and pull out a paper book. This is not ‘noble’ of Apple, it’s a a perpetuation of what has left our students across the entire nation at 50% proficiency, at best, and that is a fact you can look up, and it is a fact that transcends culture, location, and economics; it is also a fact that predates the pandemic. It’s the technology, stupid, as they say, no personal offense intended. Those of us who are older had the benefit of the pre-web age, kids today do not, and digital learning is the worst kind of learning. When you post that Apple is printing books and encouraging penmanship on paper and putting phones and tablets away, then we will have something to talk about. This all STILL continues to get worse, and worse, every single school year, and it is quantifiable. If this doesn’t resonate in the present, understand that these students will one day be running the country, when you are old and can no longer bear the burden.