If you haven’t been to the Apple Teacher Learning Center recently, then you really need to check it out again. Apple recently added new resources for teachers meant to improve the teacher and student experience in a one-to-one classroom. The Apple Teacher Learning Center has evolved into much more than the place to get your badges. There is now an entire section of learning resources for teachers with over 120 real examples of the ideas and concepts at work. In case you haven’t visited since your earned your Apple Teacher designation, here are just a few enhancements and additions to the Apple Teacher Learning Center:
Earning badges to become an Apple Teacher
What Apple says: "The Apple Teacher designation is intended to serve as a foundation to launch into other programs such as Everyone Can Create or Everyone Can Code."
My take: The process to become an Apple Teacher has changed. Rather than having separate badges for productivity and creativity, these lessons, badges, and quizzes are embedded into the other badges through examples and questions. There are now six badges needed to become an Apple Teacher with the iPad: iPad, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, GarageBand, and iMovie. These same badges can be earned for the Mac as well.
Learn Skills for iPad and Learn Skills for Mac
What Apple says: "Keep your learning fresh and go beyond the basics with activities and idea-starters that you can apply to your own lessons."
My take: Although this section of the Apple Teacher Learning Center is not new, it's one you should visit. The two sections Learn Skills for iPad and Learn Skills for Mac are great ways to quickly learn, relearn, or practice a task. Do you know how to post an image in Keynote on your MacBook Air but can’t figure it out on the iPad? Can’t remember how to add audio to a Pages document? Want to add shapes and drawings to a Numbers document? The skills sections offer quick and easy-to-navigate tutorials for specific tasks on iPad and Mac.
Creative Classroom Activities
What Apple says: "The Everyone Can Create collection of project guides was designed to help you bring creativity into every lesson. And we’ve created sample activities that apply ideas from the guides to exploring space across multiple subjects. Learn new skills and see how easily you can bring them into the lessons you teach."
My take: This new section to the Apple Teacher Learning Center offers real teacher examples of how to use the creativity and productivity tools of the iPad to unlock creativity in both you and your students. Real-world examples of podcasts, storytelling with Clips, augmented reality (AR), photo, video, and more are explored to help inspire you to take your lesson to the next level.
Everyone Can Create
What Apple says: "The Everyone Can Create collection is designed to ignite creativity for you and your students. Discover project guides, lesson ideas, activities, and more, and learn how to integrate music, drawing, video, and photos in your daily workflows."
My take: This section offers access to the full Everyone Can Create curriculum in a user-friendly, self-paced, step-by-step journey to improving your creative skills in video, music, drawing, and photography. The activities and projects are designed to present small, doable tasks that build on one another until, before you realize it, you are working at a near-professional level.
Everyone Can Create in Action
What Apple says: "Learn how educators are using Everyone Can Create to bring lessons to life with music, video, photo, and drawing activities."
My take: Have you experienced the powerful Everyone Can Create curriculum developed by Apple? This year, every teacher in Barrington 220 will have the opportunity for a professional development experience taught by an Apple Professional Learning Specialist. Whether you’ve had the training yet or not, this section is worth a look. This section provides many examples of Apple Teachers using video, photo, drawing, and audio to enhance their lessons and increase student ownership. Examples include "Building listening comprehension with sketch notes," "Explore number patterns with Rhythm and Beats" and "Bring historical figures to life through podcasts," and many more.
Classroom and Schoolwork
What Apple says: "The Classroom app turns your iPad or Mac into a powerful teaching assistant. Guide learning, share work, and manage student devices—all from the same app. Facilitate individual, group, and whole-class activities with just a few taps. Getting started with Classroom is easy."
My take: This is a great resource to learn more about the Apple Classroom app that you can use to manage the focus and flow of your physical classroom.
Teaching Code
What Apple says: "Introduce students to coding through interactive puzzles, playful characters, and activities for both in and out of the classroom. With the super fun Swift Playgrounds app and helpful Everyone Can Code guides, anyone can start coding in Swift while building essential creativity, collaboration, and problem solving skills."
My take: Exploring the Everyone Can Code curriculum in the Swift Playgrounds series will give teachers a basic understanding of coding language and concepts. Understanding coding, even on a basic level, helps teachers and students ability to problem solve through computational thinking and allows the user to both experience temporary failures and feel the thrill of solving challenging problems. In short, learning coding is good for the soul.
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