Bradley has worked at K-12 independent schools for much of the last 20 years, serving as the head of the information technology department and leading classroom technology integration. He’s well-versed in enterprise Wi-Fi, macOS and iOS system management, school technology, and SaaS tools.
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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In partnership with the Israel Tech Challenge, Apple is co-hosting an event at its Israel headquarters to discuss a new Design Verification Engineering course. This course will be a ten month-long program.
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Timing, the popular time tracking app for macOS, just released a new update for Timing 2. This update will be a game changer for people using multiple Macs.
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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:
Most podcast apps generally work the same way. You find the shows you want to subscribe to, new episodes are retrieved, and then you listen to them.
Scout FM is creating a new type of app for podcasts with a different approach. It’s a podcast radio service that streams a tailored selection of the podcasts and radio shows. When you first launch the app, it shows the top stations. It includes Brain Food, Daily News, True Crime, Progressive/Conservative Talk Radio, and Business Builder. They have countless other stations as well.
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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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Apple continues to offer weekly deals for iOS-based shopping when using Apple Pay as your payment method. Apple just emailed out their weekly promotion, and you can get 20% off from TGI Fridays on pickup orders.
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.
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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Twitter announced yesterday that they had purchased Smyte. Smyte was a San Francisco-based technology company that specialized in safety, spam, and security issues.
For as long as internet shopping has been around, the issue of sales tax has been a hot-button issue. Brick-and-mortar retailers have argued that online retailers have an unfair advantage. Thanks to a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that said states couldn’t force mail-order catalogs to collect sales tax unless that company had a physical location in the state, online retailers have been able to skirt the issue of collecting sales tax.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The WWDC keynote has come and gone. Apple announced a lot of exciting changes to iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. I can’t wait to see what developers can do with all of the new APIs, and how these products are refined ahead of their fall releases. Be sure to stay on 9to5mac.com this summer to follow along with all of the changes.
There was one major disappointment for me, though. iCloud’s free storage tier remains unchanged at 5GB. When Apple debuted iCloud in 2011, they said this:
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.
WWDC was actually light on specific updates for the K–12 environment. One thing that caught my eye was ARKit 2.0, including Apple’s announcement of a new file format called USDZ:
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A lot of viewers were surprised today to learn that many popular apps are going to be returning to the Mac App Store. Over the past few months, it has seemed like app after app has decided to forge ahead with direct to customer sales (see past 9to5mac coverage).
There has been much discussion recently about iPad vs. Macs vs. Chromebooks vs. Surface laptops in recent months. Chromebooks are coming in convertible formats. Microsoft is touting a touchscreen laptop. Apple even had a commercial with the tagline of “What’s a computer?” when talking about iPad.
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.
In the education industry, most people are very transparent about sharing advice. Even in the private school industry, you likely aren’t “competing” for the same kids, so we’ve ended up with a very open group of people that are willing to share best practices, tips, and tricks. One of the most common questions I get is about app selection for iPad deployments. I’ve been researching apps for a long time, so for me, it’s less about what apps are the best and more about what criteria do I use when examining them. Here some of the things I look for (in no particular order).
The popular messaging app, Telegram, hasn’t seen an App Store update since late March. It now appears that ever since Russian authorities ruled that the app was illegal in the country, the company has been unable to release an update to the App Store in any region.
Apple has yet to respond, so it’s currently unclear why a ban on the app in one country is causing Apple to block app updates worldwide.
I’ve used all of the major “folders that sync” services over the years. Dropbox was the original solution, but I’ve also used OneDrive, Box, Google Drive, and iCloud. They all have good points and weak points.
I’ve personally settled on iCloud Drive because it’s built into macOS and iOS, but it’s not without room for improvement. Here are four things that Apple needs to add to iCloud Drive in the very near future.