Apple updates iTunes U to v3.0
Before going through the new features it’s worth taking a look at iTunes U before the update arrived.
Prior to the updated version, iTunes U performed a very good job of allowing teachers to create private courses on either the iPad or a Mac and submit them to students. It allowed a teacher to create an educator profile, specify the outline of the course they were creating, post materials and create assignments that students would be notified of when enrolling in the course using the code created for that course.
One thing that iTunes U prior to version 3.0 couldn’t do was allow students to digitally “hand in” assignments back to the teacher.
This has now changed in version 3.0 with some additional powerful teacher and student communication tools and these are;
• Assignment submission back to the teacher from the student
• A grading and feedback tool for teachers
• PDF Markup tool for students to annotate PDF assignments within iTunes U
• Private communication per assignment for teachers and students
Assignment Creation and Submission
iTunes U can now support assignment creation and assignment submission for students. The teacher can create the assignment from within their created course as normal but there are now 3 additional switches to either turn on or off in this window.
The “Enable Hand In” switch allows the students enrolled in the course to submit work from the assignment in one of three ways;
• The students can use “Open In” to submit a file from any other app on their iPad to iTunes U and they can use the picker from within this to send the file.
• iTunes U supports the ability for Cloud document providers, such as Google, to allow you to pick a file to submit for the assignment from inside the iTunes U app.
• If the assignment has a PDF file attached, the student can mark up the PDF from within iTunes U and submit this to the teacher.
Students can resubmit or hand in work from assignments as many times as they like.
The “Enable Grading" switch when turned on, opens another field called “Point Value” that will allow the teacher to set a maximum mark for the assignment. When the teacher sets grading in an assignment, they are presented with a grading dashboard where they can see a wealth of information of grades for each student on per assignment basis. These include;
• The progress of an assignment, in terms of how many of your students have handed the work in, how many have been graded and how many have been returned.
• By tapping on a row header, the teacher can focus the row down to a particular student.
• Teachers can tap on a cell in the dashboard which then opens up a private message between the teacher and the student for that assignment, the teacher can also access the assignment from this window to discuss privately with the student.
Private Messaging between Teachers and Students
When teachers create an assignment in iTunes U, they can open a private messaging channel with every student invited into the course. Teachers and students can chat about the assignment and also add pictures,videos and documents between each other.
PDF Mark Up Tool
iTunes U now contains a basic PDF Markup tool for PDF annotations. It lets students annotate using either a pen drawing tool with line thickness and colours and a text entry tool with a choice of fonts, sizes, colours, alignment and borders. All this can be done from within the iTunes U app.
With iTunes U v3.0 Apple have now given the teachers all the necessary additional tools to submit assignments to students and for students to now hand in that work. It has some very powerful communication tools for both students and teachers to discuss and annotate assignments and work both inside and outside of the classroom.
This makes iTunes U the most complete course creation and submission tool available to educators today.
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