Apple Education Event highlights: Affordable iPad, creative study app and more

• Apple brings feature-rich and powerful new iPad (2018) with Apple Pencil support
• Apple also announces new Schoolwork education app and 'Everyone can create', a curriculum with a truckload of learning resources
• Apple also plans to add Classroom support for MacBooks in the coming months

American technology giant Apple unveiled a new affordable iPad, a free creative study app, and curriculum for children and teachers at the company's Education Event on March 27.

Apple Education Event 2018 Highlights:

Apple iPad (2018):

Apple's new iPad 2018 series comes with standard 9.7-inch screen Retina Display technology and it features latest iOS series, 8MP primary camera, FaceTime HD snapper on the front and decent battery capable of running for close to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching a video or listening to music on the iPad.

It is powered by 64-bit class Apple A10 Fusion chip + M10 co-processor, which is capable of running all apps including graphics-rich games and also Augmented Reality (AR) applications without any sign of lags.

What's special about the new iPad is that it is the first generic Apple tablet to support Apple Pencil.

The Pencil was first introduced only for iPad Pro in 2016 and the versatile tool was popular among students, professionals, and creative animation artists and is now available to an even wider customer base.

Apple Pencil is said to be remarkably fluid and offers natural drawing experience. It comes with advanced sensors measure both pressure and tilt, and provide pixel-perfect accuracy and low latency for activities from note taking to the illustration in apps like Notability, Pages, Numbers, Keynote and Microsoft Office. Apple iPad's palm rejection technology even makes it possible to rest your hand on the screen while you use Apple Pencil, the company claims.

"iPad is our vision for the future of computing and hundreds of millions of people around the world use it every day at work, in school and for play. This new 9.7-inch iPad takes everything people love about our most popular iPad and makes it even better for inspiring creativity and learning," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of Product Marketing. 

Apple's new iPad (2018) is coming in sub-categories –Wi-Fi only and Wi-Fi + LTE. Both come with 32GB and 128GB storage options with prices starting at $329 for the 32GB with Wi-Fi model and $459 for the 32GB Wi-Fi+ LTE. It will be available for pre-order in US, Australia and 23 other select markets from March 27 and delivery is scheduled to begin by this weekend. Apple Pencil has to be purchased separately for $99.

In India, new iPad (2018) price start at Rs 28,000 (complete cost details of variants below) and Apple Pencil costs Rs 7,600 and will be available in April.

Creative apps and curriculum:

In addition to new Apple iPad, the Cupertino-based company unveiled new application, Schoolwork for teachers. It lets mentors easily distribute and collect assignments, keep an eye on student progress in educational apps and also collaborate one on one with students from anywhere, in real time.

It is also easy to use for children, as assignments automatically appear on their iPad with due date and priority details. Most importantly, Schoolwork helps teachers keep track of how everyone in the class is doing — so they can tailor their teaching to the needs of each of the students.

Apple also announced 'Everyone can create', a curriculum with a truckload of learning resources and teaching guides that help mentors introduce drawing, music, filmmaking or photography into any lesson, topic or assignment. Apple says the curriculum offers students different ways to express themselves and helps them to discover and develop new skills.

Also,  Apple's popular education tool Classroom, which was available only for iPads, will soon be made be available on MacBooks.

With Classroom, teachers can easily launch apps, books and web pages on all student devices at once or send and receive documents. Classroom lets teachers view student screens during class to help students stay focused, assign shared iPads to specific students for class and even reset a student's password.

However, the Mac version of the app will be available in later in the year with beta testing starting in June.

The company also announced that the free 200GB iCloud storage capacity only for teachers and children starting March 27.

For those unaware, Apple device owners get only free 5GB storage, beyond that they have to subscribe to monthly rentals-50GB: $0.99, 200GB: $2.99 and 2TB: $9.99.

Key specifications of 9.7-inch Apple iPad (2018):

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