Bradley C

I’ve owned every Apple TV since the original one. I’ve also been a “cord cutter” for many years. I’m the ideal Apple TV owner in a lot of ways. I subscribe to all of Apple’s services (iCloud Storage, Apple Music, etc). I’m all in on HomeKit as well. We actually own five Apple TVs (1 of the 4K models, and 4 of the previous generation ones). I’d say that I’m as big of an Apple TV fan as there is.

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Making The Grade is a weekly series from Bradley Chambers covering Apple in education. Bradley 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.

When I was at the annual ISTE conference in Chicago a few weeks ago, I saw a few booths built around selling Alexa skills for your school. It got me thinking about what Siri in the classroom might look like (specifically with HomePod). Having pondering it for a bit, I came up with a handful of scenarios.

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Newton, one of my favorite third-party email apps, has just launched a new feature called Recap. If you’ve never tried Newton, it reminds me of Mailbox. If you’ve forgotten, Mailbox was an app that Dropbox purchased and shut down a few years later. 
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Password management is something that you often hear a lot about in today’s news. Apple has begun supporting various flavors of password managers through APIs while also offering a fairly decent password manager built right into Safari.

You might be wondering – what is the best place to store your passwords and other information you want to keep secure? There are number of third-party options such as 1Password, LastPass, and Dashlane. As I looked at Apple’s offerings and all of the alternatives, here is how I judged them:

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Making The Grade is a weekly series from Bradley Chambers covering Apple in education. Bradley 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.

Earlier this week, I attended the ISTE 2018 conference in Chicago. If you’ve never visited Chicago, I highly recommend it. This visit was my second this year, and it’s becoming one of my favorite cities.

In years past, ISTE was all about the iPad. It was about iPad accessories, iPad accessories, and iPad accessories. That has certainly changed with the growth of Chromebooks, but Apple still remains a dominant force in K–12 markets.
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I love Apple Maps. No, it didn’t launch well back in iOS 6, but it’s turned out to be an impressive app. I like the overall design, Siri support, and Apple Watch support. My family also makes a lot of dinner reservations through Yelp and OpenTable, so being able to launch it with a single tap is something I find myself often doing.

Like any app, it’s not perfect, and there are things I’d like to see it borrow from some competitors. After traveling a few times this summer, I’ve discovered five things I’d like Apple to add to Apple Maps in the future.

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Making The Grade is a weekly series from Bradley Chambers covering Apple in education. Bradley 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.

I’ve written before about how Apple’s lack of an identity management solution has hurt Apple in the fight for classroom dominance against Google’s Chromebook. This week, I want to run through a little Apple history and explain one of the biggest mistakes Apple made in K–12 education — and it happened way before anyone outside of Apple was thinking about the iPad.
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Apple continues to offer weekly deals for iOS-based shopping when using Apple Pay as your payment method. Apple just sent out a new promotion that will be great if you need some new workout clothes or running shoes. If you pay with Apple Pay, you can get 15% off anything in the Adidas app.

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For the past few months, there seems several stories related to Apple signing a deal with someone to develop original content. While the details of how all of this content comes together in one package remains to be seen, today’s news is certainly interesting.
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Fortnite has become one of the most discussed video games in recent memory. Everywhere you go, someone is playing it, talking about playing it, or watching an ad about playing it. We reported earlier this month that it had grown to 125 million users.

Bringing Fortnite to iOS in March helped the survival game hit 125 million players this month. Epic Games announced the stat as it promised big prizes for a series of upcoming competitions

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Apple’s Reminders app is one of their apps that has the most potential in my opinion. While it didn’t receive much of an update with the announcements of iOS 12 and macOS Mojave, I believe that with some additional features, it could become the go-to GTD/task/productivity system for most people.

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Making The Grade is a weekly series from Bradley Chambers covering Apple in education. Bradley 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.

A question I often get about iPad deployments is whether or not to purchase keyboards. It’s a difficult thing to pick because it’s really going to depend on how you plan on using the iPads in the classroom. Are you doing tasks where the keyboard would make it easier? Then use a keyboard. If not, don’t use a keyboard. With iPad, the default should be touchscreen keyboard unless a student is doing work where the physical keyboard would make it easier.

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One of the key features of watchOS 5 is a native Podcasts app for the Apple Watch. With this new feature, you will be able to stream, download, and play podcast episodes using only your Apple Watch. At WWDC, we also learned that watchOS 5 does bring new capabilities for third-party audio apps.

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