Apple has announced that it is launching its second US-wide cohort of Apple Learning Coach. This resource is a free professional learning program that will enable educators to aid teachers in fully leveraging Apple products. The first US-wide cohort of the program was certified in July. Currently, there are over 1,600 Apple Learning Coaches across 49 states, including Washington, D.C.
The participants will be able to make use of self-paced lessons and virtual workshop sessions with Apple Professional Learning Specialists along with forming connections with peers across the US, getting a coaching portfolio, and an opportunity to apply for continuing education credits from Lamar University.
Apple's Vice President of Education and Enterprise Marketing, Susan Prescott, talked about the free learning program, stating:
For more than four decades, Apple has worked alongside educators to help enable students to create, problem-solve, and express themselves in new ways. We designed Apple Learning Coach to support educators using technology in the classroom. Apple Learning Coach is already making a real impact with educators and their students, helping to build a strong foundation for lifelong creativity and learning.
In addition, the Apple Education Community, built for educators employing Apple technology, and offering Learning Center and a collaborative Forum for educators to connect with each other, is also now available. Everyone Can Create Projects is a new, online series of tutorials and downloadable resources, within the Apple Education Community, developed to help educators enhance their teaching skills.
Educators can find various features within the Everyone Can Create Projects including Design with Shapes in Keynote, Animate with Stop Motion in Photos and Keynote, Create Editing Effects with iMovie, and Write Your First Song with GarageBand, which is also now offering Katy Perry and SEVENTEEN Remix Sessions on iPhone and iPad.
Pages, Numbers, Keynotes, and Swift Playgrounds have also been updated with new features and enhancements such as the ability to automatically remove the background of images, and remove or replace the background of live video objects in Keynote, along with the ability to view recent activity in collaborative files and get related notifications.
Swift Playgrounds is now offering users an opportunity to learn the fundamentals of machine learning by training a model with a rock, paper, scissors game, that shows how computers make predictions from data.
Instructional coaches, digital learning specialists, and other coaching educators across the US will be able to utilize the Apple Learning Coach. The program is accepting applications until November 16, 2022.
