Back to School with Apple - Don't Worry Everyone; The Apple Kids Are Coming!

So finally - finally - your kids might be back at school.

Potentially, that's a whole lot of stress and worry you may have just managed to push out of the car and into a classroom. Phew!

Except, going to school can be the source of its own set of unique anxieties - for both them and you.

Luckily, for most students these days the learning experience has been greatly enhanced with access to powerful digital tools like the Apple iPad.

This isn't actually a particularly new phenomenon; my two monsters were "bringing their own devices" from Year 7 onwards - and they've both been finished school for at least a year now. Of course, Apple's approach to education has evolved dramatically in that time, so it's worth having a quick review of some of the latest developments.

I'm sure the kids know what they're doing - but do you?

For starters, the easiest way to keep a handle on where your kids are at digitally is via Apple's Family Sharing feature. This means as long as you have access to your own Apple device, you can supervise and control the accounts of up to five family members. You'll soon be able to see if the iPad in question is filling up with more "recreational" apps, as opposed to "educational" ones and you can restrict your child's ability to install any paid apps without your express permission.

It's actually a reassuring way to help keep everyone physically safe too; it's never been more important to keep track of exactly where your loved ones and their devices are at any given time.

Screen Time is another useful tool to help you monitor what their device is being used for and for how long. This isn't some clandestine way to turn parents into digital dictators - in fact, it's a good way to open up a discussion with your kids about what the boundaries are and where they should be set. Interestingly, I'm reading more and more reports about young people being concerned about their own screen habits and looking for ways to keep themselves on-task.

Digital discipline is perhaps the most valuable skill we can learn - and by "we" I mean adults as well as kids. Luckily, most devices now have some form of focus mode - and in the case of iPhones and iPads, this is both customisable and able to be scheduled. If you find yourself being constantly bombarded by non-work notifications that distract you away from the job at hand, a tailor-made focus setting sounds like just the ticket.

As someone who definitely pre-dated the digital age when I was at school, I find it very eye-opening to see the myriad ways iPads and similar devices are now used in every subject across the board. This has led to a new trend in cross-subject integration I certainly never experienced as a student, yet would have appreciated greatly.

For example; if I'd been sent off to take pictures of various geometric shapes after identifying, labelling and describing them on-screen - ultimately perhaps even creating a stop-motion video of the construction of a 3D model I'd designed myself, I'm sure I would have felt a lot more satisfied at the end of the day than I did copying down notes about geometry off a whiteboard.

Surely when tasked to use creative skills like these in tandem with mathematical problem-solving, there's a much greater chance of the underlying lesson sticking. What's more, I'd suggest there's also a good chance the student in question will take their day's "digital portfolio" of lessons home and share at least some of them with their family - a lot more interesting than a list of equations scrawled down in a maths book.

Thanks to the processing power of even the base-model iPads in 2023 and the expanding range of features built into iPadOS 16, apps like Freeform, Jigspace and GeoGebra 3D make creating and collaborating on quite complicated projects fun and therefore, immersive. Those apps are all free, by the way.

And that's before you empower kids to make their own apps, thanks to tools like Swift Playgrounds. Remember how I mentioned we should all be developing more productive and focused digital habits? I've seen examples where students are designing apps to help them and their classmates do exactly that.

At this point, the student is literally taking control of their own learning journey which to me is surely the whole point of going to school in the first place; not to learn stuff but to learn how to learn stuff. If you can master that, then there's no limit to your education ambitions.

I'm late to the party - they didn't have iPads when I was a kid so now I'm using them to play catch-up - that's a game I'm petty sure my focus settings will allow. Obviously, Apple isn't the only manufacturer of educational tools like these but as an over-arching ecosystem, it's hard not to recommend Apple's Family Sharing strategy as we head into the 2023 school year.

    

Click here for more details on everything iPadOS 16 has to offer.