Apple: Spearheading Experience Design and New Use Cases in Classroom

ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) conference came back to Chicago this year. 18,540 attendees from 87 countries and additional 6,000 representatives from companies made this conference almost a festival of the summer.

Apple Inc., as one of the vendors, offered more than 20 sessions at ISTE 2018 conference. I was able to attend 4 of them. Like many other people, I wanted to see what Apple can bring to the table at this moment when 58% of the K12 classrooms in the US have been “conquered” by Chromebook with G-Suite as a bundle. Specifically, with my product person’s hat on, I also care about how Apple is going to show its value to customers and users.

The answer is, by delivering great experiences - as usual.

#1 Wholistic Solution: Hardware, Software, Content

With the mission of “helping teachers ignite the creativity in every student”, Apple introduced its 9.7-inch new iPad together with Apple Pencil, launched several free educational apps (Swift Playgrounds, Classroom, Schoolwork), and released curricula “Everyone Can Code” and “Everyone Can Create” for educators and students to download for free.

Image Source: ars Technica, Eric Bangeman

A whole solution has been presented to the educators. The powerful hardware, the software combo that fulfills user needs in different contexts, the polished user interface, and even the roadmap and script for successful teaching and learning.

Many people take Apple as a successful hardware device provider for too long time just because iPhone, Mac, iPad, and iWatch have been seamlessly integrated into our lives and functioning well, but it might not be correct. Philip Schiller, now Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, once described iPhone as “a piece of glass for Apple to deliver its exciting new software”. I would say, what we’ve been enjoying so much from Apple, is its smooth cross-platform user experience that provided by the apps, interface, and services delivered by the hardware.

#2 Product Demo: Apple Store-like Experience

Remember how Apple redefined the retailing by introducing Apple Store? Which turned the electronic device purchasing place into an open space for experiencing the product, getting technical support, and learning. This time at ISTE 2018 demo sessions, Apple delivered the same standard experience in terms of the physical settings and customer support, the difference is, this time all the audience were put into a dynamic classroom-like space where wood-textured tables were set up for free group talks and sharing. Green plants in the corner brought the breath of life to the venue. The pre-configured new iPads and pencil were lying on the table to be explored. The audience was greeted by the lined-up team and were invited to be students for 1 hour in a mock class with the speaker (a real teacher). There was also a technical support team standing by to offer their help at the audience’s call.

Sounds interesting, isn’t it? It’s smart for Apple to create a consistent experience through space design across contexts, but what’s more, it showed an example of what dynamic a real classroom might want to have. Being a student for 1 hour with other audience made me started to think of how our educational setting needs a revolutionary change just like the retail industry did several years ago. Just like every customer walking into Apple store, students in the classroom should also be able to explore with curiosity, collaborate as they need, get support from experts, and ask questions as much as they want.

#3 Storytelling by Teachers: Great Use Cases in the Classroom

Apple would never come this far if it doesn’t know how to tell good stories. More than a half of Apple sessions at ISTE2018 were given by teachers recruited nationwide. Science teachers, math teachers, English teachers, social studies teachers, all came together to introduce how they use Apple’s products and features to help inspire their students in and out of the classroom.

A quick look into the sessions’ name:

• Teach Serious Code in a Seriously Fun Way on iPad

• A Day in the Life with iPad

• Infuse Creativity into Language Arts and Social Studies

• Discover Schoolwork and Classroom: Powerful Tools for Teaching

• Unleash Student Expression through Video, Photography, Music, and Drawing

• Connect Math and Science through Creativity

I enjoyed a lot in one session where the high school English teacher presenter asked his “students” (us audience) to use Apple Clips to record different people reading out loud an English poem based on our own understanding, then put together the recording and pick a background music to submit as a group’s work. Soon each participant was able to watch peer’s work and digest the different interpretations of one poem and feel the emotion behind it by themselves.

In another session, a math teacher created an experiential hands-on lesson on the most basic app Apple Numbers. In this 40 minute-long class, students got the chance to make their own hypothesis, do little experiments, input the data from their experiments, calculate the average number, make charts out of the data, and finally validate their hypothesis.

These well-designed Apple demo sessions are great use cases of Apple’s products which explored how each feature or a combination of features could be creatively used in teaching & learning. Shifting the center of the narrative to users from the product and have the teachers share successful experiences, Apple connected directly with its audience-the educators, by using powerful storytelling.

#4 Deep Cooperation Between EdTech Vendors and Educators

How can we bring forth innovation in education with the available technologies and tools?

The partnership between Apple and teachers at ISTE2018 can be a good example of deep cooperation between EdTech vendors and educators in finding more scalable successful user cases to make a bigger difference. The educational practice has always been reshaped by new technologies. Portable and remote control devices freed teacher from the platform so that they can go to the students to better facilitate the learning; portable device and learning platform extended the classroom so that more experiential, self-paced, fun learning and homework could be assigned to students out of the classroom.

What could be the next? I bet we can expect a good answer if educators and EdTech vendors can cooperate on a deeper level to envision the future of education.