It’s fascinating how revealing it can be to ask kids to select and design their own sneakers. I love this quick activity for the first few days of a new school year - it introduces some Keynote skills, emphasizes creativity, and gives students space to be individuals and share who they are with the class. This template includes 18 different sneaker styles, all in fully editable .svg format. Send a copy of the deck to each student and let them go to town.
Is “Apple Creator Studio” coming?
Design is everywhere. It’s the alarm that woke you up. The news app on your phone. The tea bags used for your morning brew. The card you tapped on the bus. The glasses perched on your nose. And the words you’re reading right now. So embedded in our lives we almost forget it’s there. Design. Humanity’s Best Friend.
Download the 30 Creative Activities for Challenge Based Learning to explore activities that are easy to bring to the classroom with Mac and iPad. Designed for learners of all ages, these activities showcase how Apple tools foster creativity throughout the Challenge-Based Learning process. Discover engaging activities including mind mapping your big ideas, synthesizing your insights, promoting solutions with motion graphics, or sharing video stories and more.
Make it big, keep it short, have a point.
“Taking a (boring) tool or platform for one thing and figuring out how to make it do something (ingeniously) different. It’s a practice that allows a creative to focus more on what they’re trying to achieve, rather than just following the default patterns laid out in a dedicated tool.” — Mathew Wilson, Documenteering
Case in point…Keynote, a simple presentation tool, can be used to create mind-bending professional animations.
Watch the full video of Steve Jobs announcing the Keynote app for Mac at the Macworld Conference and Expo on January 7, 2003.
Like so many people in the edtech world, I’ve been thinking a lot about the wide-ranging impact AI is having — and will continue to have — on K–12 instruction. We’re rightly focused on the big stuff: safety and digital privacy, copyright and plagiarism, policy, ethics, environmental impact, and AI literacy (whatever that actually means).
All of that is important, but one idea keeps coming back to me: maybe we first need to focus on something simpler — transparency.
I can’t tell you how many educators I’ve seen just kind of pretend this technology doesn’t exist, only to get frustrated or even punish students who are experimenting with it. What if, instead, we acknowledged that this world-changing technology is here, everywhere, and that it’s fundamentally reshaping how we work and learn?
Maybe it’s time to stop treating AI like some mysterious, magical, or dangerous force floating in the ether — and start seeing it for what it is: a tool. A tool we need to explore, understand, and use thoughtfully. From there, we can be more intentional and pragmatic about adapting our craft to fit the times we’re in.
As part of my never-ending mission to help educators consolidate and simplify their tech stacks, I’m planning to take a big step in a new direction for our next round of interactive classroom displays. And based on what I’m seeing from ViewSonic, Promethean, and SMART, I’m definitely not the only one thinking this way.
These new “OS-less” boards come with no onboard computers — a big change from the usual Android or Windows slot-in models most companies push. No built-in operating system means no internet connection required, which instantly removes a major security risk (especially since those embedded OSes tend to go months between updates). It also means one less system that needs training, maintenance, and ongoing support — which teachers and tech teams alike can appreciate.
With this next purchase, our educators will simply mirror their Macs or iPads using the classroom Apple TVs. And if they need touch control, they can plug in their MacBooks with a single USB-C cable and be ready to go.
I’m excited to see how this shift plays out — fewer moving parts, tighter integration, and (hopefully) a much smoother experience for everyone involved.
Both with students, and while exploring on my own, I love pushing apps to their limits - to see what they can do beyond what they were explicitly designed to do. Keynote is a great example. Billed as a PowerPoint/Google Slides competitor, Apple’s presentation tool is, as expected, simple, elegant, and powerful. Over the years, I have found so many uses for it that may not be readily apparent - GIF builder, app prototyper, journal, collaborative workspace, etc.
Presentation tools are particularly useful for visual communication due to their simple animation tools. In the case of Keynote, it’s Magic Move that is the game changer, allowing you to morph elements from one slide to the next. While this on it’s own is pretty powerful, I have discovered a simple hack that sends it to the next level - the ability to enable and customize acceleration curves for those animations. Check out how to set it up and what you can do with it in this quick video: Enable Custom Acceleration curves in Keynote.
I have always been impressed by those who could look at raw data - rows and rows of numbers and text organized into tidy cells - and find within that data, a compelling story. Even more impressive is the ability to communicate that story in a visual, compelling, and entertaining way.
The Pudding does just that. They have built dozens of incredible, web-based visual stories to communicate ideas and information in unique and creative ways. My favorites are Middle School Sucks and Loneliness Epidemic.