In my first post on the WW ADE Institute I mentioned we learned from the Apple experts. These people are the ones that create the Apple apps we use in our classrooms every day. Who can there be better to show us the power of these apps than these guys? The apps include GarageBand, iMovie, Keynote, Final Cut Pro and all the new features for MDM in education that came with iOS 9.3.
Even though ADE’s are already considered experts on the use of Apple products, we were blown away by some of the things most of us didn’t know we could do with them.
I personally rediscovered GarageBand on iOS. I had played with the new Live Loops features, but I did not realize they were so powerful and diverse. I got completely mad in the Advanced Keynote session. “Mr. Keynote” himself showed us some amazing design features and massive time saving tricks. An example: if you need a table on a Keynote slide and there is also a picture on the slide, you can match the color scheme of the table to the picture very easy by dragging and dropping the picture in the table styles inspector panel.
Watch this short videos to see the magic happen:
Beside giving tips, the experts also listened to us. How are educators using their products and how would we like to see them improved? Among a lot of things, it is these conversations that make being an ADE really worth while.
We also got the opportunity to play with the new Swift Playgrounds app that will be included in iOS 10. Apple developed a complete curriculum to teach children how to code with Swift in the Playgrounds app and in Xcode on Mac. Very good resources are available at http://www.apple.com/education/everyone-can-code/
Two other very good workshops by Apple I attended were Extreme Preso Makeover on how to create better and more engaging presentations and presenter skills and a workshop on Change Leadership by the Apple Professional Learning team. The first will be very useful in my own PD sessions were giving presentations is a big part. The latter is going to help me enormously in my own school to create a better learning environment for students and staff.[:]