Apple Schoolwork App for iPad Now Available for Teachers

Furthering its efforts in the education sector, Apple has announced that its Schoolwork app - announced back in March alongside the iPad (2018) - has now come out of beta, and is made available for iPad users. The app is available for free, and is aimed at streamlining tasks for teachers in a classroom. The app provides tools for teachers, making it easy to create assignments, view student progress, collaborate one-on-one with students, and more. It works seamlessly alongside other education-friendly apps like Explain Everything, Tynker, GeoGebra, iBooks and Kahoot!, Apple says.

With Schoolwork, teachers can check in on student progress using ClassKit and tailor teaching methods for each individual. It works alongside Classroom to make the teacher in charge of the technology used in her class, and direct her students to an app, a book, a test, or an assignment. Teachers can also distribute any type of content, from web links to PDFs and documents, among students, and students can, in turn, use Schoolwork to keep track of the work they need to complete and when they need to hand it in. For more information on how to set up Schoolwork and Classroom, Apple directs teachers to its dedicated teaching tools page.

"Schoolwork and the apps supporting it give teachers new insight into how their students are performing, helping them tailor their teaching to the needs and potential of each student. Teachers have a snapshot of class performance and can check on an individual student's progress across activities - progress within apps or projects they've created. As with every Apple product, privacy and security features are built in so schools get to create, own and control the accounts used by their students and decide when student progress information is shared," the tech giant explains in a blog post.

In March, Apple announced a new iPad with Apple Pencil support, and software for teachers to manage students and schoolwork - alongside the new Schoolwork app, Apple had said its Classroom app will no longer be limited to the iPad, and make its way to macOS in June. Apple is looking to reassert its dominance in US schools, where inexpensive laptops running software from Alphabet's Google and Microsoft Corp now top iPad by sales, offering a cheap way to get to cloud-based productivity tools.