About a year ago, my principal and I started discussing what it would look like to use Apple Classroom with our class sets of iPads. From what I had read, this was a relatively new tool and although lots of people enjoyed using it, there were still some kinks that needed to get worked out.
My IT director and I began to work on setting up Apple Classroom about 2 weeks before school started. There was a steep learning curve and it took us a while (along with all of our other projects) to get this up and running. If you aren't a tech genius, and you don't have one at your school, this could be a big road block for you. The biggest thing you need is a CSV file with all of the students information. (talk nerdy to me, am I right?) If you don't pull a CSV file (it's just a fancy Excel spreadsheet), then you will have to input each students information by hand - no fun!
**Again, I think that reason that it was so time consuming for us was that we were trying to get 10 class profiles on each iPad. I'm sure that if you were just using them in your one class that it would not be as difficult or time consuming.
Anyways, it did take about 2 weeks to perfect it with all 200 of our students in there. It is also difficult to add students once the school year started, so we waited until a week in to hopefully catch most of the stragglers. Once we got it all set up though, it has worked so wonderfully. We did lock our students down on some of the settings so that they can't do things like use the iPads to text, email, or airdrop (unless it's to the teacher). These are settings that I recommend you think through before you begin this process.
After this ridiculous process, we were ready to take them into the classroom. I was kind of like a little kid in a candy store the first day in the classroom. A whole class set of iPads and a fun cart to carry them in! Best Present EVER! It was so fun to be able to have a program that allowed me to control all of the iPads. I was excited to see how this helped with kids staying on task.
Overall, I would HIGHLY recommend Apple Classroom. It is a fabulous way to see everything that your students are doing on their iPads so that you can make sure they are on task. It is also a great way to quickly push out websites, or to lock them into apps.
I will share more about the features of Apple Classroom later, but wanted to give you the thumbs up or down on it. So definitely two thumbs up.
My IT director and I began to work on setting up Apple Classroom about 2 weeks before school started. There was a steep learning curve and it took us a while (along with all of our other projects) to get this up and running. If you aren't a tech genius, and you don't have one at your school, this could be a big road block for you. The biggest thing you need is a CSV file with all of the students information. (talk nerdy to me, am I right?) If you don't pull a CSV file (it's just a fancy Excel spreadsheet), then you will have to input each students information by hand - no fun!
**Again, I think that reason that it was so time consuming for us was that we were trying to get 10 class profiles on each iPad. I'm sure that if you were just using them in your one class that it would not be as difficult or time consuming.
Anyways, it did take about 2 weeks to perfect it with all 200 of our students in there. It is also difficult to add students once the school year started, so we waited until a week in to hopefully catch most of the stragglers. Once we got it all set up though, it has worked so wonderfully. We did lock our students down on some of the settings so that they can't do things like use the iPads to text, email, or airdrop (unless it's to the teacher). These are settings that I recommend you think through before you begin this process.
After this ridiculous process, we were ready to take them into the classroom. I was kind of like a little kid in a candy store the first day in the classroom. A whole class set of iPads and a fun cart to carry them in! Best Present EVER! It was so fun to be able to have a program that allowed me to control all of the iPads. I was excited to see how this helped with kids staying on task.
Overall, I would HIGHLY recommend Apple Classroom. It is a fabulous way to see everything that your students are doing on their iPads so that you can make sure they are on task. It is also a great way to quickly push out websites, or to lock them into apps.
I will share more about the features of Apple Classroom later, but wanted to give you the thumbs up or down on it. So definitely two thumbs up.
Do you use Apple Clasroom in your class? Do you love it? Hate it?
Tell me about it.
-Hilary
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