Apple is Revolutionizing Classrooms with Its New Products

Apple just revealed a school supply-length list of new products aimed at bettering education.

The school-themed event began with a bang, with Apple revealing a specially-priced iPad, at $299, for educational institutions. The 9.7-inch tablet also makes history as Apple’s cheapest iPad to date, with features including a 10-hour battery life, fingerprint scanner, 8-megapixel camera, Touch ID and Apple Pencil support, which was previously only available on the Pro version.

“We’ve always believed that people with passion could change the world. That was on display this weekend in marches in Washington and across our nation,” CEO Tim Cook said of the initiative at Tuesday’s “Field Trip” event in Chicago. “We are deeply inspired by the voices these students are using to bring about change in America.”

It’s not just hardware that Apple is interested in offering students. The tech giant revealed that there are currently 200,000 “education apps” in its App Store. And to go with its classroom theme, Apple is now allowing for more apps to support its Pencil tool. In addition, a whopping 200GB of iCloud storage will be available for schools.

Some fun new products include Garage Band for students and a cheaper Logitech crayon at $49. Apple has also announced classroom planning tools in its initiative to help kick off the upcoming school year. These include Apple Schoolwork, which allows teachers to distribute and collect assignments, an Apple school manager to help create IDs for students](https://twitter.com/JinSooDHuh/status/978656145681371136), and “Classroom for Mac” to manage students.

And what’s an education tech initiative with a coding program? Apple will invest in training students on its native programming language, Swift as well as ensure its ARKit will help anyone learn to code](https://twitter.com/LanceUlanoff/status/978660224356749314).