Apple’s launched its initial learning platform for iPad — iTunes U — in 2012, an app and website that allowed educators to build courses, share resources and even collect in work from students. After the introduction of institutionally managed Apple IDs in 2016 with the arrival of Apple School Manager, things got a little hairy, and so in 2018 Apple unveiled Apple Schoolwork and then quietly retired iTunes U in 2021.
Schoolwork has evolved over time, and is shaping up to be quite a powerful and useful tool, but it is very ‘Apple’: it only works on iPad, it only works with institutionally-owned Managed Apple Accounts, and basically is a more automated way of setting up collaborative iWork documents with a class of children. I’ve never seen it really promoted heavily by Apple, perhaps because it’s basically impossible to demo with people outside of your institution and because it heavily assumes you’re in a 1:1 iPad setting.
There is one feature that has piqued my interest lately, and that is of assessments. This allows a teacher to share an assessment (in PDF form, possibly scanned in via the iPad camera) with students, who then complete using markup tools. The unique offering here is that the iPads can be put into assessment mode by Apple Schoolwork during an assessment, meaning that students can’t leave the app and go and use the calculator/search with Google etc. Once completed, the teacher can grade the assessment in various ways, which then produces question-level analysis for the class. Digital assessments seems like an unsolved problem at the moment, requiring bespoke software that can’t easily be used by teachers to create tests, so Apple Schoolwork feels like a bridge between the paper-based assessments of today and the digitised assessments of tomorrow.
What’s it like to use?
I recently trialled it with some Year 4 teachers for their Autumn term maths assessments. Here are my findings:
- The first step was to digitally scan in the existing assessment paper. I was able to do this satisfactorily using the school’s photocopiers, so kept these files ready at hand.
- Next I had to create the assessments in Schoolwork. All of the students already had and were signed into their iPads with Managed Apple Accounts, with all of the ‘roster’ information set up in Apple School Manager, so this was pretty straightforward.
- When it came to the test, students just needed to tap ‘start’ in the app, which then asked the students to agree for the iPad to be put into assessment mode.
- Students would then complete the assessment with markup tools, using either a finger or a stylus. To navigate around the document, students either had to tap the pen icon to turn off markup before they could swipe around, or had to use two fingers. This was a little trick for some children, resulting in lots of random lines across the document as they attempted to scroll down. A couple of students also had issues with getting markup to draw at all, until we realised they they had turned off ‘draw with touch’.
- The app itself was generally stable, although it did occasionally crash. Students were then able to just restart the assessment, although some needed to do a hard restart to get it all working again.
- When students had finished the assessment, they have to tap the ‘submit’ button to turn it in. One rather annoying gotcha with this is that this step is entirely irreversible: once an assignment has been completed (even if by accident), a whole new assignment would need to be created for the student.
Once all this is done, the teacher can then review the submissions within the Schoolwork app. There is a whole range of different ways to mark a paper, such as ‘completion’, ‘letter system’, ‘number system’, ‘points system’, ‘satisfactory scale’ or some kind of custom system. When just awarding points, a single tap on a question adds a tick, a double tap is a cross and a triple tap for a bonus point.
To unlock question-level analysis, the teacher then has to specify which parts of the test paper are which question (so that the marks given can be assigned to a particular question). It does attempt to this via the wonders of machine learning, but not with great success. The teacher then has to tweak exactly how the points are distributed across the paper.
So is it worth using?
On the plus side, it does save the time and money of photocopying. And, with the additional configuring at the end, it gives that question-level analysis that would previously take entering laboriously into a spreadsheet to access.
However, I feel there are just too many ways it can go wrong, when compared to paper assessments: app crashing, issues with assessment mode, fiddly scrolling vs drawing considerations, as well as the ability for a child to sabotage the whole thing by submitting their paper by accident.
I shall continue to follow the development of this app with interest.
Primary ICT 