Bradley C

Spotify has been in the news a lot in recent weeks due to their acquisition of Gimlet Media and Anchor. Since it’s debut in 2008, Spotify has been focused on one thing: music. A few years ago, Spotify added a podcast section, but until now, it’s been a minor part of the platform. Going forward, it’s clear that Spotify is transitioning from a music company to an audio company. Spotify deserves a lot of credit for driving the music industry forward, but I am concerned about its business health long-term.

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Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) promises to bring a lot of changes to enterprise networking in 2019 and beyond. While none of Apple’s devices yet support it, it’s just a matter of time, and it’s important for IT administrators to begin planning for how the latest 802.11 standard from the IEEE will impact networks. While 802.11ac was focused on raw speed, Wi-Fi 6 and 802.11ax is focused on capacity and optimization. I’ll refer to the technology as Wi-Fi 6 for the remainder of the article, but it’s simply the marketing name the Wi-Fi Alliance has given 802.11ax.
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A lot of the news cycle about Apple in the enterprise can revolve about the iPad and the iPhone, but the Mac is still a prominent device for a lot of IT departments as wel. More importantly, most people are dealing with a mix of all of Apple’s offerings.  Even at my school, I manage a number of Macs along with our large collection of iOS devices. I am excited about the upcoming MacTech Pro events being held around the United States throughout the rest of 2019.

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Over the last few years, I’ve become increasingly concerned about personal privacy. I don’t have anything to hide, but I don’t like the fact that so much of my personal information can be used by various companies. The thought of Netflix and Spotify being able to scan Facebook Messenger accounts to make better recommendations is a prime example of what I don’t like about the current state of technology. One of the changes I’ve made to help protect my privacy is always using a VPN when I’m on a Wi-Fi network I don’t manage. iOS has robust support for it, and I recommend you consider it as well. If you search for VPN on the App Store, a long list shows up. How do you determine the best VPN service for iOS?
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As an IT Director, I am always on the lookout for ways to allow our students to use technology in new and interesting ways. We teach some basic coding skills (I love it for the problem-solving aspect as much as anything), we have an active STEM lab, and we’re always looking to expose our students to different ways of learning. Last fall, I was sent a review unit of the Makeblock Neuron Explorer Kit that is only available at the Apple Store.

About Making The Grade: Every Saturday, Bradley Chambers publishes a new article about Apple in education. He has been managing Apple devices in an education environment since 2009. Through his experience deploying and managing 100s of Macs and 100s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple’s products work at scale, stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for students.

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In a world where everyone is moving to web applications, I still love using native apps, and I think there is still a market for them. Without them, a MacBook Air is just an overpriced Chromebook. Native apps provide a better overall experience vs. simple web apps. One of the questions I regularly get asked by coworkers is about my favorite Mac apps. I’ve been using a Mac since 2004, and I’ve downloaded, purchased, and demoed hundreds of apps over the years. Here’s a list of my essential Mac apps.
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Google has been ridiculed over creating and shutting down various applications over the years, but when it comes to enterprise software applications, I would prefer that over letting things die a slow agonizing death. Apple, on the other hand, has done the latter with two of its K–12 focused software applications: iBooks Author and iTunes U. Apple has let these apps suffer from software rot.

About Making The Grade: Every Saturday, Bradley Chambers publishes a new article about Apple in education. He has been managing Apple devices in an education environment since 2009. Through his experience deploying and managing 100s of Macs and 100s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple’s products work at scale, stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for students.

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I’m a big fan of the “Getting Things Done” methodology from David Allen. I’ve been following it for most of my professional career, and I attribute it to being able to stay organized and on task with my full-time job and writing here at 9to5Mac. With that being said, I don’t put everything in my GTD app. There are a lot of items like grocery lists, home repair plans, or even simple weekend tasks that end up in a list app. I want it to be easy to add to, easy to mark off, easy to organize, and simply get out of the way. It’s the heaviness of my GTD app that allows my simple list app to be light. I’ve tried a bunch of apps, so here’s my round-up of the best list apps for iPhone.
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One of my major tasks for January was to decide my next steps with my Apple lease on all of the gear at my school. We’re coming up on the end of year three of our four-year lease. When we originally took out the lease, I always had in the back of my mind that we might trade in all of our gear at the end of year three (March 2019), but I couldn’t come to a conclusion about the best steps forward in the fall of 2018. My main concern is with the butterfly keyboard reliability of the new MacBook Air.
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Security on the internet has become more important with each passing year. It seems like every other month there is a major data breach from major retailers or online properties. One of the key things that you can do to minimize the effect these breaches will have on you is to set up and use two-factor (or multi-factor) authentication. Two-factor authentication can be explained as something you know (your password) and something you have (a smartphone or another authorized device). With most implementations, you will log in to a website using your normal login, and you will then prompted to input a secondary code. The secondary code can be generated in multiple ways (more on that later) and changes every thirty seconds. By enabling two-factor authentication on websites that support it, a hacker wouldn’t be able to log in just using your username and password. They’d need access to your two-factor authentication database in order to access the current code.
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When I first started in education IT, I could already see the multi-device world coming. The iPhone 3GS had just been released, and the iPad was rumored to be coming soon. At the same time, I also could sense enterprise networking moving to cloud services. Google was making headway with its Google Apps for your Domain product with schools, and the days of running onsite servers seemed to be coming to a close. A few years later, as everything moved to “apps,” I began to see a new trend. Security was moving away from the network and more to the device and corresponding apps. At the time, I called it “zero trust” networking, and I think it still remains supreme today.

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Last fall, I wrote about the announcement with Jamf and Microsoft where Microsoft Azure Active Directory would be added as an authentication plugin for macOS developments. I’ve written extensively about the problem of identity management in the enterprise here at 9to5Mac, and this announcement was a breath of fresh air. A decade ago in IT, everything was about Active Directory. It was the first thing you interacted with, and everything was tied to that system. Post iPhone, things got a lot different.
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One of the best parts of iMessage is its seamless integration with SMS. One of the worst parts about iMessage is its reliance on looking like SMS in an app. I still remember when iMessage originally launched in iOS 5. With an 80+ year-old office building, getting text messages was nearly impossible for me. When Apple launched iMessage, I was able to use Wi-Fi, it was a game changer for me. Over six years later, iMessage is mostly the same. It’s still heavily tied to the same app that uses SMS. While it’s added iMessage “apps”, it’s still largely the same app and service that Apple launched years ago. I’ve realized that out of my major frustrations with iMessage, how it handles notifications is at the top of the list.
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One of the buzzwords that we’ve been hearing for years in the K–12 environment is iBeacons. Apple introduced iBeacons back in 2013, but to be honest, I’ve yet to see a killer use case in K–12. I’ve seen some discussion around the iBeacons used well in retail, hospitality, and sporting events, but even that hasn’t taken over the world. Wi-Fi vendors have been building in beacons into their access points for a couple of years now, and iOS devices have had the technology in it for multiple revision rounds, so I am left with the question: Where are the killer iBeacon use cases, and why aren’t we hearing more about them in real life deployments? This week, I’m looking at some potential ways that iBeacons can be used in K-12 environments.
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I’ve written a lot about the podcast ecosystem on iOS. I think that Overcast is an absolute gem of an app. Castro is also a top-notch app as well. I manage a few podcasts for some clients of mine, and I know that despite the incredible third-party podcast apps, Apple Podcasts is podcasting to the vast majority of people out there. That withstanding, the Apple Podcast app isn’t perfect, but it’s come a long way from version 1 many years ago (the tape player UI). While Apple Podcasts doesn’t need to offer the exact same features as other apps, its development does help drive the industry forward. Here are four new features I’d love to see in Apple Podcasts in iOS 13.
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At the beginning of every school year, each person on our staff has to put together three personal goals for the year. The goals need to be a way for you to stretch yourself professionally and accomplish certain tasks. One of the projects I put on my goals for this year was to overhaul our classroom AV setup. Right now, teachers have projectors on portable carts. Our building is 80+ years old (full of concrete), so running ceiling mounted projectors is a labor-intensive project as additional power outlets need to be installed for each classroom. I also then have to consider the cost of projector maintenance, running AV cables back to the proper location, and difficulty of upgrades in the future.

I know some schools have been using Apple TVs, but I’ve been hesitant because it always felt like complete overkill because we’d just use it for AirPlay functionality in the classroom. When you figure in the cost of an Apple TV ($149), it adds significant cost to the overall setup. Now, after reading the Apple news from CES, my plans for the future have changed.
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As I wrote last week, I believe that Apple exited the home Wi-Fi market at precisely the wrong time. Back in 2004, I worked for a company that was trying to get into the home integration/home automation market. At the time, everything was extremely complicated. All of the products were expensive, everything was complicated to set up, and it wasn’t set up well for future growth.

Fast forward to 2019, and things have changed a lot. Between Amazon Alexa, HomeKit, and Google Assistant, it couldn’t be easier to build a smart home that’s easy to manage, easy to interact with, and easy to upgrade in the future. The topic I want to look at today is whether or not Apple is doing a good job at managing and marketing its HomeKit platform, how its Home strategy is working, and the risks for the future.
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Starting on Monday, I kick off year two of teaching Swift Playgrounds at my school. I teach this class once a year (for a quarter) to our 4th and 5th-grade students. Last year, I started with Learn to Code 1, and I had hoped to get to Learn to Code 2 by the end of the quarter, and then move on to Learn to Code 3 this year. I wrote about my experiences in year one in an article in May so you may want to read that as well. In short, the learning curve for students ramps up very quickly in Learn to Code 1. Follow along for the changes I’ll be making for my second year of teaching Swift Playgrounds and what I think Apple could do to improve the program.
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One of the more interesting news items of 2018 was Apple discontinuing the AirPort lineup. From the first Airport product to the last final AirPort Extreme, Apple was selling premium Wi-Fi hardware devices at a time when most people I knew were content with a $30 router from Walmart. Since they released their final AirPort product, the market has finally shifted up.

As end-users are starting to load their home networks with more than a single laptop and a few smartphones, people have realized that having a high-quality router (with whole house coverage) is not a luxury. If you want to load your house up with smart home products, multiple iOS devices, Apple TVs, etc., you have to invest in the infrastructure. Plain and simple, Apple exited the home networking business at the exact wrong time.

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As I touched on previously, the concept of a device supporting dual iCloud accounts on iOS is something I had not thought of until recently, but I do think it’s something enterprise customers would like to see from Apple. One of the benefits of iCloud is how heavily it’s tied into Apple’s iOS devices, but for enterprise and education customers, this means they won’t usually be able to use their device for anything personal. This week, I want to look at this in depth and discuss why Apple should offer a “dual iCloud account” setup for managed devices.
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