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Robby Burns

November 8, 2020

Original Post

Apple Silicon, Macs in Education, and App-Centric Learning

Robby Burns

November 8, 2020

Original Post

Apple Silicon Macs are likely going to be announced at their upcoming event this Tuesday, November 10th.

Bradley Chambers is incredibly knowledgeable about Apple's relationship with education and he makes some great points in the post below about how this transition could influence the Mac in education.

Making the Grade: What will Apple Silicon mean for Apple's education strategy? - 9to5Mac:

I believe that Apple will have untold flexibility in what kind of laptops they can produce for schools now. Is it possible to build an 11″ MacBook based on Apple Silicon that is $799 when purchased in bulk but still runs extremely fast? I believe so. It might not be in the first year or two of Apple Silicon’s lifespan that we see it, but in a few years, it’s certainly possible that Apple will have reduced the cost on the A14 to put it in a K–12 focused laptop in the future.

I could be way off base on my predictions. Still, I believe that Apple Silicon will unlock a lot of potential in K–12 to produce lower-cost laptops that will run circles around much higher priced laptops running Intel chips. I’d love to see an 11″ Apple Silicon laptop aimed directly at students that could be used for many years.

I really do hope that Apple tries to be creative with the Mac in education again. Still, I fear that anything they do is too little, too late. Apple has has not been aggressive in education. They tend to make huge leaps in certain areas of their business and then let them settle for a long time, sometimes years. This approach works for developing consumer software like note-taking apps, but it is not aggressive enough to compete with Chromebooks and cloud-based education software. I think back to Apple’s education event a few years back where they positioned the iPad as their future in schools and released a bunch of APIs that iOS app developers could use to link into their Classroom app. Years later, what has come of any of that? If you are using iPads in education, and you use Apple Classroom in combination with third party apps, I would love to hear from you!

Chromebooks and web apps have taken off. And a lot of these web apps can talk to each other. For example, third parties like Flipgrid and Noteflight can integrate with LMS software like Blackboard and Canvas. But these connections are often full of frustrating bugs. On top of this, the quality of a lot of this software in ed tech is already so poor. I wouldn't exactly call it a race to the bottom, because most developers are doing their best with the resources they have, but I like to dream about an alternate reality where Apple's vision for an "app-centric" model were the norm instead of the "web-centric" model we have now.

Of course, web software is cheaper and cross-platform. So it makes sense that it has caught on for being most equitable. But in a world where Apple had kept their prices more competitive, maybe school districts would have been more willing to buy students 1:1 Apple products, especially when schools jumped online in March.

Robby Burns

October 6, 2020

Link Post

More Jamboard in the Music Classroom (Testing The New Integration with Google Meet)

Robby Burns

October 6, 2020

Link Post

Google Meet rolling out Jamboard integration for collaborative whiteboarding | 9to5Google:

Last week, Google’s video conferencing tool launched a 49-person grid and background blur. Google Meet is now integrating with Jamboard to add a digital whiteboard for visual and collaborative brainstorming.

Google Jamboard, which I have blogged about here, is indeed a fun tool and all of my students find it engaging.

This new Google Meet integration is awesome. Once you start up a digital whiteboard from within a Meet, Jamboard asks you if you want to create a new one or use an existing file in your Google Drive. If you opt to create a new one, it automatically saves it to your drive and names it using the date and meet code of your session.

Immediately, a dialogue with share permissions for the file pops up, pre-filled with the accounts of all students who are present in the Meet so that you can make sure they all have access in one click.

The integration is very smooth. I tested it today at the beginning of my classes so that they could give feedback to one another on a recent Soundtrap project I had them do.

The students recorded brass duets and trios in Soundtrap projects last week. I played three examples of them for the class today and students posted sticky notes on this whiteboard that took me one minute to set up last night. It was a simple activity that was made even more simple by this new integration.

Robby Burns

August 7, 2020

Link Post

🔗 Using Jamboard in the Music Classroom

Robby Burns

August 7, 2020

Link Post

UPDATE: Listen to Theresa’s appearance on my podcast and subscribe below…

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Theresa Hoover Ducassoux is a band director in Virginia doing awesome work ensuring that her students are engaged and empowered in her band classes, online and in person. She is especially savvy with a lot of the web-based tech tools that are popular in education right now.

Her post, which I have linked and quoted below, explains some ways you might use Google's Jamboard app in the music classroom to engage students.

Getting Started with Google Jamboard - Off the Beaten Path:

Jamboard is one of the newer and lesser-known G Suite tools, but it’s one that I love and am excited to use this school year! Jamboard is a collaborative whiteboard that be accessed by an app or web browser. The simplicity of the tool makes it great for education. Jamboard is a great way to have all students in your class share their voices.

Jamboard is indeed excellent. I used it for a number of things last spring. One way we used it was to communicate and share what we had been up to in our free time when school started online.

CleanShot 2020-08-06 at 11.18.02@2x.png — I used this Jamboard our first day of online learning to ask students how they had been spending their extra time at home. Each section of the band had a page of the digital whiteboard to edit.

Another way we used it was as an adjudication tool for providing ourselves feedback on our virtual ensemble video progress. You can see a brief snippet of that process in the middle of my How to Make a Virtual Band video, below.

Go and check out Theresa's post, and all of her fine work at Off The Beaten Path Music. Spoiler: She is my podcast guest this week. Jamboard is just one of the many awesome tools and online teaching strategies we talk about. I learned a ton from her. That episode should be published tomorrow. Stay tuned!