Apple's Plan to Improve Siri's Reliability and Transparency

Apple has announced that it will soon introduce changes to its Siri system, aimed at improving its reliability and providing more transparency to users. The company has acknowledged that there have been instances where Siri did not respond as intended, resulting in recordings being made without user consent. To address this issue, Apple is introducing a new opt-in system for users who want to help the company improve Siri's performance.

The plan involves collecting small samples of audio from Siri requests, which will be less than 0.2% of all requests. These samples will be used to measure how well Siri is responding to user queries and identify areas where improvements are needed. Additionally, Apple has set up a system to review computer-generated transcripts of Siri conversations, in order to gauge the accuracy of the responses. This will help the company refine its algorithms and provide more accurate results.

However, it's worth noting that some users have raised concerns about the potential misuse of these recordings. For instance, some individuals have reported that their HomePod has picked up on voice commands even when they are not in close proximity to the device. In such cases, Siri may respond inaccurately or incorrectly, leading to unintended consequences.

To alleviate these concerns, Apple will work to delete any recording determined to be an "inadvertent trigger" of incorrect responses. However, it's unclear what this means in practice, and some users are still uncertain about how this process will work. Nevertheless, the company has emphasized that only Apple employees will have access to the recordings, and that no contractors or third-party companies will be involved.

The plan also includes a human review component, where Apple will review the collected audio samples and transcripts to ensure accuracy. However, users will not be required to participate in this process if they prefer. The company has stated that users can opt-out at any time and have full control over their data.

In related news, Apple has announced that it will be donating funds directly to local nonprofits and emergency service organizations working to fight the Amazon fires in Brazil. These efforts are part of the company's commitment to giving back to the community and addressing environmental issues.

The plan has been met with mixed reactions from users, with some expressing concern about the potential misuse of their data while others have welcomed the opportunity to contribute to improving Siri's performance. As always, Apple is working to balance user privacy with innovation and improvement, a delicate task that requires careful consideration.

For those interested in learning more about Apple's efforts to improve Siri, Victor (founder of Apple Insider) has been vocal about his concerns and suggestions for improvement. He believes that the company can do better and is willing to share his insights on Twitter @VictorAppleInsider.

William Gallager, another prominent figure at Apple Insider, is also working on a new episode of the show, which promises to be an interesting and thought-provoking discussion about the latest developments in technology.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome back my friends to the show that never ends this is the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is William Gallagher hello who cares about William Gallagher you've got an interview I want to hear this interview who's the interview exciting before we get into our interview with Fraser Spears I want to talk to you about the September 10th Apple event now the name of this event on September 10th is called by Innovation only which is of course play on the words By Invitation Only but it's it's it's sort of a playful form in kind of ways makes me think of when Phil Schiller said years ago talking about a MacBook Pro along about 2012 2013 Can't innovate my ass but here we are and I think this one is going to be good I'm I'm really optimistic buy Innovation only is a neat title for an event now obviously we've been talking about this in the past and we're going to get ios 13 and iPad OS 13 and Catalina and TV OS and watch OS and that's going to be epic we're also going to get new iPhones which could be iPhone 11 or they could be iPhone Pro they could be named all kinds of things but the important detail is that every single phone model is going to get an additional camera to the amount of cameras it has now that is the OLED models the 10s and 10s Max are going to have three cameras and the 10r model is going to have two cameras the utility here is probably adding a wide angle lens and probably adding a telephoto lens to the 10r so that we can get that kind of depth there's also been some speculation around computational photography because obviously that's one of the things that Google Prides themselves on and Google users love about uh about the pixel the things you can expect are going to be CPU upgrades they're going to be specification upgrades they going to be performance for video they going to be performance for machine learning things like this uh probably better face ID one of the rumors suggested that we would have Touch ID under the screen I personally don't really count on that one happening another rumor suggested that you could wirelessly charge your airpods with your iPhone which would be interesting but I don't know if it's going to happen the the thing to think about here is we've had all these rumors there also been rumors about updated iPad pros and regular iPads and rumors about a MacBook Pro 16in I'm not convinced we're going to see those kinds of devices at this event I think what will happen is that we'll have this event followed by an event in October or so to cover the rest of these devices whatever happens we're going to be here and have all the information for you whatever happens we're going to be here and have all the information for you we'll be live streaming the event and you can see it right here on Apple Insider this is we we were fortunate enough to get time with Fraser Spears Frasier is the uh the head teacher or principal if you will of um Cedar school of excellence and what's unique about this is that in in years past he's done one toone rollouts of iPads to students and this year for the first time ever they have they have they have mothballed all those iPads and and historically they move them on to people who can make good use of them and they've shifted to Chromebook I know you're staggered I'm just a Gog I've actually heard this guy often over the years think he's really interesting but I thought he was particularly interesting on how he used iPads in education so I'm really s I'm Keen to hear his reasons for this well I just just to tease it a little bit I've been following him even since we've had the interview he's been posting on Twitter about how it's gone and one thing that he posted this morning was that he had had a number of students uh submit their maths and decimal problems and answers through Google classroom and Google Classroom Auto marked it for him so he didn't have to go through manually and grade all of the math questions and that alone he's like sold done good right that's impressive as long as it's with an if if actually doing math was torture as a kid right imagine how much torture it was for the teacher had to go through and try and grade the thing well so here we are I think it's interesting let's let's get on because there's a lot more interesting about that so without any further Ado Fraser Spears so welcome to this segment of the apple and cider podcast joining me is Frasier Spears uh head teacher or principal as we' say in North America of the uh the cedar School of Excellence thanks for having me for for years for ages I've watched you on Twitter and on your blog talk about technology in schools and the role that it can play and uh you know for for many years you had a onetoone iPad roll out going on can you tell me a little bit about how you began that and and uh really what led to that yeah so I'm happy to go into that detail it was we started in 2010 so 10 as you know was the year that the iPad came out in the first place and for years before that honestly I had been looking for some kind of tool that would enable us to increase access in the school classroom to computers you know access to the internet access to you know creative tools like even just like word processors presentation tools you know drawing tools whatever and obviously at that time laptops were both you know very heavy very expensive um the battery didn't last very long and you know they didn't have a lot of capacity for the things we wanted to do so you know doing a onetoone laptop program was out the question financially for our school and it we had looked at things like uh going oneto one with say an iPod video for example that was a thing that some people were doing uh back in the sort of early days of iTunes U where universities were recording videos of lectures and putting them out on iTunes through iTunes at the time uh so people 2005 2006 time frame I think 056 that that kind of time yeah so we we looked at that and disregarded that possibility we had also been looking at netbooks if you remember netbooks um and those were sort of small PC laptops that sometimes ran Linux other times ran Windows uh which cost around about2 200 to $250 250 uh and we looked at them but they were so small and so cramped we didn't feel that was the right tool either so Along Came the iPad and that was we were kind of in the way of looking for something and that was a tool that seemed to make the most sense both financially and in terms of the feature set as well so we we we rolled out a on toone iPad program in August of 2010 and as far as I know we were the first school in the world to do a whole school onetoone iPad program back then and we kept that going from 2010 through to this summer and in summer 2019 we made the decision to switch to Chromebook from iPad so we've we've finished our one to one iPad program for the moment and we have purchased a set of Chromebooks for the school and we're going to be on Chromebook for the next four years all right and I'm going to ask some questions about that in just a moment but just sure pedagogically what are the kinds of things that students learn uh or or learned using the iPads I I think what something really changed over the course of that time for us with the iPad when we began and nobody knew what an iPad was and the first job that we had with the iPad was to explain to people that the iPad was a valid computer and that you know that that job continued for the whole time we were doing iPads to be honest with you but we we were looking at um just not not so much that there was something necessarily new that the students would learn with the iPad but it was more that they had access to tools right so sometimes when you're going to schools and they're doing iPad programs you'll see that they're very focused on content so they've maybe purchased iPads and they've also probably usually done a deal with Pearson or some other company like that to to get a specific curriculum onto their iPads whereas for us it was never really about putting putting content out to the children through the device it was more that we were still teaching what we were teaching but we were now teaching it with another tool in the classroom as well so the computer it was available it wasn't mandatory we didn't say okay everybody's got to use the computer all the time the rule the Only Rule we ever had was you use the computer where it's useful and when it's not useful you do something else and that was pretty much all we had um as a rule in our school so that was that was kind of the pedagogy behind it and I suppose in a way what we were looking for was we were looking for um how can I sort of explain this does it help or or how how do we change the way we learn things like history if we also have access to computers and a lot more information than we would normally have does it enable us to uh increase the amount of resources we can look at or the variations we can look at or the amount of source material that we can look at and there's some interesting observations to be made about our experience of that over 10 years but that was kind of the core idea it wasn't just that we were trying to change the teaching and learning or put out specific content but more just to put an extra tool in the classroom you've moved to Chromebook and what were the the reasons that led you to that decision well I I think there was there was one thing that really began the process and there was a number of kind of extra weight that came in after after we started thinking about it I I had been tracking Chromebooks for pretty much as long as we had been doing iPads now the the original Chromebook the cr-48 Chromebook only came out in the December of 2010 so when the iPad first was one of the computers we were looking at the Chromebook didn't even exist so there's there's just a slight timing issue there in terms of why didn't we do Chromebooks at the start well the answer is Chromebooks didn't exist when we started doing this program um but over the years we we had obviously invested very heavily in apple Technologies we had we had Lo had Apple TV in the classroom we had but more more than just the hardware we had spent a lot of time building on iTunes U and iTunes U had as we talked about earlier had started off as a a video distribution service for University lectures and then later on it became a kind of courseware product so you could make courses you could put materials and assignments into itunu and so on but what seemed to have happened over the last three or four years is that Apple's investment and efforts in those kind of education software applications has just stopped dead and if you look at if you go back to the uh the iTunes U page on the app store for example you can look at the version history of iTunes U you can see that over the last three three and a half years iTunes U has had virtually no feature updates and I think I'm right in saying even today iTunes U still doesn't support iOS 9 style split screen multitasking and we're about to get ios 13 so it's clear to me that whatever Apple's doing in education they're not investing in iTunes you and that was something that well first of all we started to notice it and then it started to become a major paino in our deployment and all the time we were looking over the over the fence if you like at Google classroom and saying I wish we had this feature I wish we had that feature and you know it started off with things like I wish you could put uh an assignment to your class on a schedule in Google Classroom you can do that and hun you can't and then uh we started looking for other features you know being able to put out a post to some students in the class but not all being able to automatically send emails to parents about homework and and these features were just not coming to iTunes but they were all there in classroom and eventually there just kind of came such a weight of things that we wanted that we couldn't couldn't or weren't getting through IU that that became the impetus to start really thinking seriously about switching over to Chromebook and once we started looking at it uh the reasons kind of just started to snowball from there and there's more to it than just uh classroom is better than iTunes U at this time but that was that was how we kind of got started with thinking about it really I guess the way that I've sort of thought about it is that apple to encourage the use of specific tools for creation and things like this and they're less focused on on classroom management where Google Classroom is is strongly focused on the things that you said about assignments and turning things in through classroom and and getting those kinds of messages sent out yeah I agree with that and I think over the past few years since uh since I CH you maybe was starting to become deemphasized a little bit Apple has gone heavily into creating material and essentially promoting a kind of pedagogical approach that you know reasonable people might agree or disagree as to whether it's the right thing to do in schools but I I think that Apple has they very much looked at you know what are we already good at and and they've put all their wood behind what they're already good at rather than trying to expand to support everything that schools need and what I mean by that is they they created um Swift playgrounds which is a great application and they learn to code 1 and two programs which are also wonderful documents and excellent teaching materials and then they start they went into this material called everyone can create and what this was was instead of um instead of an engineering effort shall we say it was more of a kind of documentation and materials effort so they were creating lesson plans and resource guides for teachers and so on and to a certain extent to be fair um putting features into pages and keynote that schools wanted and need and I think they've done quite a good job of that but they they just were not addressing the kind of school administration aspect of it so how do you move files around how do you without having to copy them how do you collaborate with people all of those kind of things that you see are very strong in the Google World Apple had made some efforts towards them but they were missing the kind of overall picture I think which was the idea that um you know in in G suite for schools you've got a whole situation where it's a um you know the data is all there and the identity is all there and it's all one system that people can work within whereas with iTunes U and and iCloud as a whole it never quite got to that point for schools it was it was always a lot more fragmented than that yeah and collaboration for the the ior applications has always been kind of an afterthought yeah I mean the the feature works right but the problem is that they don't own your identity in the way that Google does and I don't mean that in the Sinister sense of owning you that people talk about gole but I just mean where does the corporate directory live and I'm sort of speaking Enterprise talk here at the moment but you know if I type in my name or or a colleague's name does their email address just pop up there automatically and in G Suite that kind of thing does happen because they're all members of the same domain whereas with apple it's never quite gotten to that level of integration so it's always been a little bit clunky to try and get those kind of things set up yeah way back in 2005 was using sub EA edit in my classes so that people could collaboratively edit and when Google came in with with with Google Docs that was such a revelation for us at the time yeah but you you mentioned how people talk about Google in a sinister fashion and I I feel like there's a lot of apprehension around Google in education um can we talk about that a little bit sure yeah I mean I think there's a lot of apprehension around all technology companies at the moment but I think if I may be so bold as to venture this that I think a lot of it's politically motivated and it's nothing to do with the technology itself that you know the Fallout of the the Trump election in America I think there's an element of um you know Twitter enabled Donald Trump therefore all technology is bad and we're really really in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water and a lot of this stuff um now of course there have been I'm not here to defend Google's privacy practices or anything like that but I think we as a as a world to be honest with you have to make a decision as to like do we want computers to do stuff for us or do we want everything to be private and and that's a trade-off that different people can make different ways and I think it's probably fair to say that reasonable people might reasonably disagree about whether or not Apple stance is the right one or Google stance is the right one or there's maybe a middle ground in between uh I personally think that Apple stance in a K12 setting is perhaps a little too restrictive that I think there are perfectly legitimate grounds for a school to be able to access and monitor more of the computer experience than Apple maybe enables and allows uh whereas in the Google world we get access to a whole lot more stuff and it's that becomes a matter of policy for every school as to exactly what they do with that but there is certainly more straightforward access in a managed situation with Google than with Apple um however the thing that since we moved to Chromebooks and I started talking about on Twitter the one thing that has become very sort of clear and obvious to me is that absolutely nobody understands that g suite for education is under a completely different set of privacy polic and practices than the Consumer Google account if you like so you know G accounts are not tracked for advertising for example um you have a lot of insight into and control into what happens to student data and advertising isn't shown alongside um alongside the Google products in school and it's you know it's it's just handled in a different way and and it's worth having a look at that there if you can you can search for you know G EDU prives policy and you can find there's a whole mini site about how how data is handled in the education product yeah and that is something I was going to bring up I'm so glad you did um one of the things that I found when I was looking to it is that Google has committed to having a third party audit them to to ensure that they're honoring that policy yeah I was going to say that's also part of gdpr um the the data Protection Law in the EU is that in principle organizations that use these companies as processors should be able to audit them in some way and the only sensible way that's doable at scale is for for a third party that's trusted by both sides to do it I mean no no school that I know of has got the technical understanding or capabilities to go and audit at Google data center for example it's just there's a much less the employee resources to dedicate to it exactly I mean how how would my little school go and audit a Google data center to the point where we could uh you you know so so there are these structures in place to sort of manage that and I think um Google is very straightforward about their levels of compliance and you know I think a lot of this what happens a lot is that a lot of loose language is used right so people will will now sort of attack me online and they'll say things like oh you know are you are you are you therefore happy with Google selling all your children's data to advertisers and if you break that down you say like what exactly does that phrase mean you know is it the case I if I wanted to advertise on Google could I go and ask them um for a download of a copy of some random individual's contents of their Google Drive obviously not right Google's in terms of actual security I I feel that Google's very highly incentivized to ensure that um people don't just get random access to your data now there's legal aspects to that as well in terms of what governments are enabled to do and that's a whole complicated story that's probably worth going into at some point but maybe a little more detail and we want to talk about tonight but in terms of um letting advertisers have access to data it's not that's obviously not what happens right you can't just you can't just buy the contents of somebody's Google Drive it's not it's not as simplistic as that and I think people need to just speak a little more precisely when they talk about privacy and and security and not confuse those two things because they are different as well so they are one of the things that I was concerned about that it wasn't exactly clear to me about maybe you have some more insight into is you know I I feel reasonably certain that a student's email and a student's Google Drive docs slides sheets things that will reside within that Google suite for Education are fairly private and fairly secure yeah but I I start to be concerned when there are other services that use Google single sign on and students use their Google account their student account to to single sign on to other services within education because I'm not sure that their privacy policies are nearly as good or ar stringent as what Google might offer no you're you're absolutely 100% right there and that that's a a major area I think of training for schools and also of for control for school admins so when you deploy a Chromebook Suite it is actually possible to control that so I believe you can um you can Whit list Individual Services that you want to allow uh you can Blacklist Services there there are controls for that um we're not using a lot of those kind of services just yet but it's certainly something that I do at data protection training with our staff is to say look you need to and again in the EU under gdpr one should actually complete what's called a privacy impact assessment if you want to use additional services so we've completed some of them for for various things that we use um but I'm I'm always very cautious to say to our teachers look if if you want your kids in the class to sign up for some other account you need to check that out separately from just the the Google core you know it's not it's not the same thing by any means you're absolutely right right and even if it has sign on with Google yeah it's not the same it's it's got its own policy and yeah you have to look in decide if that policy is right if there's even auditing for that absolutely yeah um my other question I think in this kind of area comes down to extensions that people add on you know one of them that that was used in my daughter's school is called haara highlights yeah are you familiar with it at all I'm not specifically familiar with it but I suspect it's pretty similar to one we use called go Guardian which is uh there's a go Guardian teacher which allows sort of classroom monitoring and then there's a goguardian admin which is a web filtering product as well it it sounds similar so the the way that apara was used in my daughter's school is uh for monitoring student behavior and Stu what what browser Tabs are open on the Chromebook mhm and also to assign quizzes and inclass assessments yep and and sort of monitors as those are being taken and um I was I'm a little I'm I'm a little scared about that one personally just because it also has among its admin options the ability to monitor the microphone and camera for each Chromebook okay Y and uh you know of course the ability Once you turn that on you also have the ability whether or not you want to be able to view them when the student is not at school right if the Chromebooks go home yeah and uh I've I've never gotten answers that satisfied me from the school when I've asked about this um you know it it feels to me as though there's something about a school provided Chromebook versus a personal provided Chromebook where we're providing a personal one and being asked to load this this surveillance wear onto it um go ahead yeah I I I agree with your concern there I mean our our model is that the school owns the Chromebook we provide the Chromebook and we install in our case go Guardian on it now just because a school is buying into a particular technology stack doesn't mean that a school themselves don't have to have a very serious reflection process about um about what they're doing with the technology and how that's all working out and in go Guardian for example one of the things you can do there is you can monitor a people's screen and you can actually do it remotely across the internet as well but as a matter of school policy I set up you our teachers have control of that but you can actually go Guardians quite nicely designed and that the school administrator can limit the hours of operation of that so I've said it and I've clearly made this known to the students as well that that only operates between 8: am and 4m the hours in which you would reasonably be in school and not at the weekends so they can have a degree of confidence that um when they go home they're not going to be monitored constantly however the web filtering component um the web filtering component does operate 24/7 so whatever they're searching at home uh that will be filtered and obviously there's a there's a positive aspect of that which is protection against inappropriate content but then it's all there's also an element of um uh you know we can call it surveillance where if we want you know it's interesting that the balance is maybe you know 10 years ago everybody wanted School web filtered completely so that no nothing bad could ever be seen and now we're talking about that is is that does that constitute surveillance or is that a school's appropriate oversight if you like pastoral oversight on on computer use and I think there's there are good arguments either way but having having dealt with situations in the past where you know um people have intervened on cases potential cases of online abuse I've in myself not in my school but through other organizations identified situations of people potentially being groomed online all of these young people being groomed online um and I'm not just throwing those out as as bogey men to say it's okay to do anything you want but these are real situations and that this really happens this isn't just made up and and I I can't be a fundamentalist on this in the same way a hard balance to strike oh it is it is and you know in some ways I would I would like to give young people more privacy however I think the world has changed since we started this conversation and it's really important to think about this because if you if you want to wind back the clock to 2010 or 2005 or a time like that it was often the case that a computer provided or access to a computer provided by a school was often a Young Person's only access to the internet and the one and only way to get on the internet was through school whereas today many many many of those kids have got smartphone access multiple computers at home uh and and the landscape has very much changed so I'm not naive in this and I don't think that because we are we're watching what the young people are doing or filtering their internet that they are in no way ever seeing anything bad on the internet in fact I no they're not you know it's what we're doing is we're displacing the questionable activity from the the the supervised computer to the unsupervised computer and that's that's something that parents need to be aware of as well you know I can only make guarantees about that one computer and in times past that was the only computer in a young person's life and today it's not and it's something we're always given a message about at our school is you know parents have to take responsibility for the other devices you know we'll help with this one and we'll teach about behavior and we'll look for people to be supportive of each other online but there are other computers and that's just the reality of the world there what do you think is the role of the school in in sort of teaching these boundaries or expectations about about privacy and about uh security and what secure practices are uh yeah there's a couple of good questions there you know there's there's a privacy question and then there's a security question and I think we we can be very clear about what the security questions are you know we can teach about good password we can teach about firewalls we can we can teach and we should teach about all these things blocking your screen having encryption turned on in your device and I I teach all of these things because I'm a computer science teacher and I teach all these things from a from a technical perspective but I also try and as much as possible also teach them from a kind of Ethics perspective as well um and what I mean by that is that often I I feel that if I teach about the techniques that are being used to manipulate you it really eliminates a lot of their power if that makes sense and quite often I'll pull back the curtain it really reveals and defuses what's going on yeah I'll quite often teach you about you know the psychological tricks that are used to get you addicted to video games or social media or something and once people know that that's happening to them they can start to see you know behind the curtain if you like and and I think just teaching that way is often quite helpful yeah and as with many other things you know if you think about all the all the other areas of risk that young people get involved in we have as Western societies I suppose we have often taken the line that education is better than uh prevention so if you think about drugs education for example or alcohol or sex education or even Road Safety you know we we don't we don't prevent children from walking across the road I mean I I say that but you know there's a whole body of work being done now to say that actually we are preventing young people from from walking across the road and it's causing them severe problems in terms of their General resilience towards life as well so actually maybe we maybe we have taken it too far but that's a that's a conversation for another day I suppose this this roll out was probably a massive undertaking because you you're coming from one whole system of managing and setting up user accounts and cloning devices and having devices be charged and things like that just the Practical issues involved with changing over um you've only doing this for about you know a week right this is this is a new operation yeah um what are the things that you're encountering so far what are you finding um well we're noticing a number of things uh one is that uh I'm noticing a change in in people's attitudes towards the device and I sort of explain what I mean by that like I said when we started in 2010 nobody knew what an iPad was and nobody knew what it was good for so we very much took I personally really ra I say we but really I took the view that the iPad is a computer we should use the iPad for computer type things so we use it for pages and Kino and all these different tools and what happened in those 10 years was that children went from having no other iPad in their life except the one that we gave them to having the one that we gave them Plus at least another one at home if not sometimes two and those iPads at home were being used more or less exclusively as entertainment devices so I have always been really influenced by that Steve Jobs quote which I I believe is not apocryphal which is when he talked about making the computer a bicycle for the mind and that was that was always kind of what I wanted to do with the computer in school and for some people that absolutely happened you know I I saw some of our young people who you know were were curious and able young people and I give them a computer and it's like Rocket Fuel to their intellect and their their level of you know Global Knowledge and cultural understanding and and insight and the ability to just know new things is incredibly powerful but at the same time I gave the the iPad to other people and they just saw it as a TV in a games device and why that distinction is the way it is I'm not sure I I suspect it probably has something to do with sort of levels of IQ perhaps that more able people you know the phrase in the Bible it says uh to those who have more shall be given and from those who have little everything they have should be taken away you know I that sort of sticks in my mind as as a thought about the impact of the computer on people and for some of those younger people or or those people who sort of Saw as a TV and a games machine what I've noticed is that the Chromebook having gone away from the iPad towards the Chromebook we've started to see more of a work orientated attitude towards it and I think that's partly you know on the configuration I've done that I've I've blocked a number of entertainment type services that we didn't quite have access to block before because again if you think about that aspect web filtering on the iPad is a privacy issue for Apple you know you don't quite have the same access there and and Apple's privacy stance is not necessarily helping everybody and it's not it's not an unalloyed good thing that I can't fil out um effectively and precisely web services that I don't want people to get access to on right on the iPad device I have to do it at the network level and that doesn't always carry the same weight so that's an interesting issue but I think also we're just not giving them the same kind of tool that they use for at home for entertainment so I think there's a bit of confusion particularly with younger users is the iPad for work or is the iPad for fun CU we are saying it's for work and home is saying it's for fun and I think now that we've got a clear distinction between the the fun device which is the iPad and the work device which is the Chromebook I'm starting to see a distinction in how children approach it and they approach it in a more business-like manner at least for now and I'm not saying that necessarily going to continue I can also already see in my filtering logs people trying to turn it back into a games machine but you know what I'm equal to the task so we'll see how that goes I was I was sort of wondering how much the physical keyboard played a role in that you know just by the virtue of having a keyboard it feels feels like this is a work device I certainly noticed that with younger users so we're talking sort of 9 10 11 years old that they felt extremely growing up to be getting a laptop and the older kids they looked at that you know our 15 16 year olds they looked at it more as an efficiency thing they thought right you know I've got a lot of writing to do for my exams uh this is going to help me get that writing done great fine whatever but the younger kids they sort of felt like they were sort of stepping into Daddy's Shoes a little bit and getting a shot of a a grown-ups computer because they've got proper keyboard and it's black and it it's sort of busy you know which is kind of fun to see well this this mirrors my own experience with my own daughters you know I they they've had iPads from 2010 thereabouts and uh when I had to get one of them them Chromebook it it really took off and then of course I I graduated her to a Mac and the other one has the Chromebook now and they're both they're both the the second daughter really still does use her iPad quite a lot um years and years and years ago I had a G4 iMac set up that she would just type into and uh it was a wondrous thing for me because she was non-verbal at that time she didn't speak at all but we discovered that she was typing these these long long documents into the iMac and uh and she kept doing that with the iPad that's an interesting effect that we we've also seen that kind of thing where a a a given developmental stage children can offer type more on the computer produce more on the computer than they could if they were writing or speaking it and I don't quite know what to do with that but I think is true well I think one of the things that you're already doing addresses that really well you know I had to negotiate and and plead with the schools to allow that daughter to type in school and you you've just obviated that whole problem by making sure everyone has that resource yes and it takes away the stigma of being the the ch who has the computer you know if you were to go into many other schools you know you you would know the children who had additional support needs by the fact that they had a computer and everybody else doesn't and and you know the standardization aspect of it I think is important for for that point of view as well and we're able to you know do exams on on computer and things as well so that's that's something that really helps does this change your whole uh roll out for for other devices around it you know you had Apple TVs in the classrooms are they becoming chomecast uh no we have actually gone back we've abandoned wireless display technology entirely and we've gone back to wires um we we actually we' actually done that before we decided to go Chromebook because Apple TV on a busy Network just never achieved the level of reliability that teachers need and teachers need a very high degree of reliability and if you uh as a technologist cause a teacher's lesson to fail because the technolog is not up to it then and you're going to hear about that pretty quickly and um I always remember my first job I worked with an older guy who was a sis admin and had been for years and he he said this one thing to me that I've never forgotten he said you've got to drink coffee with the people that use your systems and I've never forgotten that because he said you know if you don't meet these people socially and in other situations you're never going to hear about the pain that you're causing them and you need to know what's going on because otherwise you're going to be your name is going to be trashed and you're not going to hear about it in time so I've always thought about that in school and that was the problem we had with Apple TV was that we just never got the level of reliability that you could just go through your presentation the convenience was great but the reliability was poor and we never got it right so even before we went Chromebook we we had pretty much retired all of our Apple TVs I think we have one or two still in the school but most of them are gone now well this has been delightful I have really enjoyed having you speak with me yeah it's it's been my pleasure I think it's this is kind of the first opportunity I've had to speak to anybody about it since we since we started the Chromebook roller I think the the the overall sentiment I think is has been pretty positive um certainly very positive in our school and I think that um a lot of people who have looked at my blog and have looked at things that I've read and said about it not a lot of people have come back at me with either um pedagogical arguments or um really even technical arguments and what a lot of people just thrw at me is is you know a half-baked privacy argument you know and I think that I spent a lot of time on Twitter just typing out you do realize that the edu system is under a different privacy policy and and leaving it at that but I think I think it's going to be a significant change and there's one thing if I can just add that we didn't quite get to with with what we were seeing about the transition was that it's not just that the sort of lack of features in iTunes U that caused us to change but there's also a forward-looking aspect to it as well and and what I think one of the things that influenced my thinking about this was that as teachers in our school we have really adopted Google Drive and and um document sharing and collaboration and all these kind of things and for maybe the past three or four years we've really been going very hard in that direction and we found it to be an incredible efficiency saving the kind that you could never go back from and I was thinking to myself you know we do all this as teachers but we don't do any of it with the students the students are stuck in this world where you've got your iPad and on your iPad is your files and if something goes wrong with that computer your files are at risk and we as teachers we're working in the cloud doesn't matter what computer we're on you know we're getting this great collaboration there's a lot of efficiency and it's going really quickly and it's working really well why are we not doing that for the kids because if that's already part of our job surely it's going to be the future of theirs and that's the other side of of making the switch from the Apple world to the Google world is that I think Apple has kind of I think perhaps missing the boat is too strong a word but certainly lagging behind in terms of being Cloud first uh and in my more cynical moments I feel that sometimes Apple's privacy stance is a little self-serving in that it's a form of sort of fear and certainty in doubt targeted against people who are good at something that Apple aren't good at and that's that just grats a little bit with me and I've been an Apple guy since you know the mid 80s but some of the things I hear and the way I look at what Apple are doing versus what other companies are doing but also the way Apple then start to talk about it it's not always clear to me that what they're saying and what they're doing and what they're actually working on are all matching up in the same way so so that's just another aspect that's worth thinking about in terms of what motivated us to change just from from the iPad to the Google world as well it it it seems to me that practically there's so in the old days when you using a computer you had to intentionally save things yeah right and and you know I I was reminded of this again the other day when someone said that the save icon looked more like a vending machine with a coffee cup in where they where the slot is why why is there a vending machine in my icons here because who knows what a FL disc is anymore but indeed the the Google approach is save everything nothing should ever be lost you should have revisions you should be able to go back through revisions and apple in some ways is is still very much in this you have to intentionally save or you have to intentionally back up or if you're backing up to iCloud it happens once when you're connected to power on Wi-Fi and not doing anything where Google's a little bit more forward in in this that that everything is saved all the time so that if you drop the Chromebook at a river which was the example they used at Google IO when they introduced them yeah you just grab another one yeah mean I I did that today in my school you know a boy came in with his Chromebook not charged cuz he'd been ill all weekend and I just said you know okay give me that one plug it in here take this other one go and do your school day and swap them back at the end of the day you know that's a powerful model and the iPad just in some ways you know I I remember watching WWDC this year and I thought they are making the absolute perfect iteration of the last generation of computing you know they're making the best ever local state locally installed applications operating system and Hardware combination and they they're perfecting it to the end degree but my sense is the world is moving on and having uh having a stateful computer a computer where and there's data locally and it really matters what's going on here and there's configuration and there's state that doesn't sync um that's starting to feel really like the past and the experiences we've had even just in the time I've been triing and and deploying Chromebooks that really feels like the future where you as you say data is not getting lost it doesn't you're not actually thinking about where the where the data physically is as such um it's tied to your account it's not tied to the physical device all that is an incredibly liberating model to work with because the devices then become fungible and in a way if you think about what happens when the device becomes fungible is you no longer start to care so much about the device you're not so wedy to one device and and if you think about Apple's model that's potentially quite a problem for Apple because as soon as the the the device doesn't matter so much anymore then you know why am I spending $2,500 on a 15in laptop but I could get one from Acer for500 $100 you know and it's a Chromebook and it's got all my stuff on it already you know you know I've got a really nice Lenovo 15-inch laptop sitting Bes beside me they cost me 600 and if I wanted to get a 15-inch laptop from Apple I'd be paying £2,400 for the entry level model and in a world where the data and your work gets logically separated from the computer where then does that leave a maker of Premium computers and sure you've got your your Mac Pro buyers who obviously need local power and lots of it but then there's everybody else and it's really interesting going forward to see how that's going to work out and whether or not people are still going to put a premium on you know quality build performance all of these things and whether Apple continues to provide all of those things uh that's an open question as well but how that all works out and how it psychologically works out for users I think is going to be a really interesting question you know fantastic well what I'd like to do is check in with you in the future after you've had some time with this roll out and just ask how it's going yeah I'd be delighted yeah in the meantime I think we ought to wrap this up I've kept you on quite a long time is there a URL that that you'd like people to go to and visit to learn more about Cedars um sure uh our website which I have shamefully not updated for the new school year just yet is uh Cedars CED rs. Inver do.uk I'm sure you can pop that in the show for people who want a quick link great thank you so much my pleasure um I should have to cheer it over he makes some really interesting points I had no idea about Google privacy being different for example in education and stuff so I'll be fascinated to see what happens Through The Years with this but terribly interesting yes I'm really pleased you got him Apple in a unique move has released iOS 13.1 betas for testing what's what's unique about that do you know uh they runs on Android no not not yet but do we have 13.0 released yet oh good point I don't know okay uh I'm taking from that we don't right so if we don't have IOS 13.0 released what on Earth are we doing seeing a 13.1 beta it's just very weird and it's fine a few years ago I'd agreed with you but now you know I mean if you watch Doctor Who the Third 13th Doctor is really the 15th doctor uh the 10th was the night we're we haven't got time for all that William the the the problem is this right historically we would get all of the developer vas for iOS 13 and then 13 would be released and then we would get the 13.1 developer betas and and now they're not even respecting history I think the problem is that I think Craig fedi has too much on his plate okay I think Hair Force One has a little too much to worry about I mean look he's got he's shepherding Catalina he's sheering iOS he's shepherding iPad OS he's shepher watch OS and there's also the Apple TV OS that's five different OS releases that have to happen all pretty much at the same time on the same schedule that's a lot that's incredible yes absolutely that this happens at all is amazing I'm always very impressed and I I think what we're seeing I think what we're seeing is the cracks happening Under Pressure because it makes no sense to release 13.1 without a 13.0 released unless 13.0 is gold master and there's nothing left to do to it so they can start working on 131 13.1 vug sixes except that if it were goldmaster they would start saying it's goldmaster so this is very weird that we have these these two beta paths in release at the same time okay I'm less concerned about you than this you've just just offered one possible solution I'm sure there there there's a missing episode somewhere something we don't know but it's fine really it'll all be ready for whatever day in September I mean people are just speculating that 13.1 is actually just a mislabeled developer beta that it should be it should be instead of 13.1 it should be 13.0 beta 9 but going to make a typing mistake anywhere that could be the place to make it rather than deep in the code so it's it's weird it's very weird are you okay about it though well you know what choice do we have we just get to Roll Along until we see what actually gets released but uh make some tea we could have a talk no is that the biggest thing going on thir uh 13.1 I mean it's pretty big news it's we're getting really close to this release date yeah that's exciting we expect the release to be September 10th and so we are getting quite close to it and and uh so yeah it is exciting now we were talking education a little bit ago and I just wanted to point out this piece about a Scottish City uh that's Glasgow city council and a company called CGI they're providing 50,000 school children in the city with iPads as a part of a $69 million or 300 million pound project to modernize and improve the educational prospects for Scottish school children I think this is very interesting especially after someone who's had tons of experience doing that onetoone roll out moving away from it yes it is but Scottish education system is very interesting they do lots of things I mean I'm I'm in the UK and Scotland's part of the UK but I'm in England which has very different systems and there's an awful lot to admire in Scotland I think there's an awful lot to mind scarland in general but the the quote here is that we want our children and young people to be equipped with the skills that will make them shine as digital citizens both now and later in their working lives said Glasgow City councelor Chris Cunningham we're aware that 90% of jobs in Scotland involve digital work and so our pupils will be well equipped for the workplace I think the thing to be careful of here and be mindful of is that the computers of today are not the computers that will be in place in the workplace uh 10 15 years from now when these students will be in the workplace that well some of the tasks will resemble them themselves you know word processing is still probably going to be word processing um spreadsheets are still spreadsheets these kinds of things don't really shift a whole lot but what is a computer and how you use it and and what tasks you do it for and what tasks compose a job change rapidly and and quickly and uh and in large ways right it used to be before the Advent of of lotus 123 that if you wanted a spreadsheet showing you data you would make a request and then the seventh floor of the office building would get to work on that with huge huge blot paper and figuring it out and then they would present you with a spread sheet of paper with all the cells filled in by hand kind of thing about a month later so what FY Cal started yes yeah destruction all over the world yeah right and and so the these things change but it's intriguing to see that they're going iPad um in the face of the things that Mr Spears who just spoke with has learned I suppose it's uh is it the democratization of Technology you pick with what whatever works for you the best and for his case he's found it in Chromebook they're finding it in iPads it's just great that there are these systems available so well what happens in what's happened in the past is that every few years a different School District tries a onetoone program of some kind like early early early on there was the iBook program in enrio County Virginia where where they distributed iBooks to students and it was a complete cluster to be honest because there there was this real problem with managing what students were able to do what students should be doing and and even just how to integrate this thing into the curriculum properly and so you know it's one thing to say we're going to roll out a 300 million pound project for iPads great how are teachers going to use that in terms of curriculum how are students going to use that in ways that Ensure that they're not just using as another entertainment device and that's that's where this comes down is the implementation you know it's it's easy to cheerlead in Fanboy and say iPads oh 50,000 of them out there in the school wonderful that's great for Apple yeah it is it really is great for Apple but what's going to support their use in in a in a real learning environment is a question well let's let's not turn this into a Bad Thing 50,000 iPads in a school is better than nothing in the school yes it has issues of support and it's always always going to be down to the teachers and how they use things how they teach uh but this is a good thing giving teachers some options so well I what I'd like to say is I think we should find out more about it we should try and watch that closely and see if there's something we can learn from what they're doing in their roll out that makes it different from some past experiences we've seen cool that makes sense absolutely let's keep an eye on all of these things yeah now Apple we've talked about Apple before is planning to improve series privacy protections yeah I was particularly interested in this one because they did that thing of uh I think even knew told me about this that there people were listening uh to seral recordings to make it better and then they stopped and they stopped saying they pending a review of their process everybody pending reviewer process they never actually do anything and Apple has actually done it well actually all of the companies that have voice products so far the big ones Google Facebook uh Amazon have said that there's stopping human listening human grading and so they they've said they have done something right they said they stopped Apple said they stopped but before they stopped what they were doing was reviewing a small sample of audio from Siri requests less than 0 2% and the computer generated transcripts to measure how well Siri was responding to improve its reliability did the user intend to wake Siri did Siri hear the request accurately did Siri respond appropriately to the request and and what's happened is that they're going to change things a little bit us will be able to opt in to help Siri improve those who choose to participate can opt out again at any time Apple won't retain audio recordings and will computer use computer generated transcripts when customers do opt in only Apple employees will be allowed to listen not contractors interesting interesting and this one's a little iffy for me Apple will work to delete quote unquote any recording which is determined to be an inadvertent trigger right I'm not clear what that means I mean if you say Syria and Syria goes yeah I'm here that's an intent trigger but but I'm not sure what work to delete means well what about the fact that my homepod has such good hearing that wherever I am in the house it responds to the magic words I could be looking at my watch when I say it and I hear this distant thing from my office yes know it's that's a slightly different problem but still a problem yes it's in in on inadvertent trigger of the wrongs Siri so maybe it's just that it's more finer tuned than uh always deleting it because sometimes the definition of inadvertent might be different yeah so the the good news here is that there is going to be some more clarity involved the you know yes there will still be human review but you don't have to have it you can opt out of that so that's interesting I I think that there's still a lot of room for appal improve here and I think they could do better than this but it's good that they're doing this um I will opt in um if I even think about it I won't bother to opt out I'm not so fussed about this I think when you you say it's something like 0.2% I start thinking that's probably quite a big number whenever they only say a percent they're exaggerating it up or down kind of thing so it's probably huge and they've probably heard me going wrong but you know it's Apple I'm at least convinced they're not going off and selling my uh swearing at Siri to other companies when necessary y apple and other things that they're going to do that are good plans to contribute funds to ongoing efforts in the Amazon so you've heard about this right in in Brazil there are the Amazon forests that are on fire yes astounding yes and those that's the reason why this is dangerous is because those forests produce a decent amount of of uh oxygen which are is necessary for human life yes read about it yes it's really it's not just about you know the the notion that we we like forests and forests and animals are nice and preserving biodiversity is fun it's this is actually like really necessary these are indispensable forests and so it's not exactly clear how Apple intends to assist but it looks like they're donating funds directly to local nonprofits emergency service organizations working to fight the fires I wonder how much you can actually do with fire I mean how quickly you can repair the damage even how quickly you can grow Replacements well the problem is that even if you grow replacement trees that when there there are a couple different things going on here first of all there are indigenous people living within the forests who will be harmed by this and secondly there are animals that will be har Wildlife that will be harmed that doesn't come back there's there's some you know yes you can reforest and if you reforest 20 years later some Wildlife comes back but some of it just goes extinct some of it you just that's it goodness and so this is problematic um it is it is good to see apple using some of their cash largess to do things like this that don't necessarily relate directly to bottom line but do absolutely affect all of us yeah makes uh things meeting deadlines for iOS seem a little bit less uh important doesn't it perhaps perhaps well that's the time we have I I want to make sure that we cut this close so that you've got enough time to listen to the interview thank you so much this has been Victor I'm V marks on Twitter and Victor Apple insider.com William where do people find you still working on cable M9 having a very good time but also on Twitter as William at no hang on Twitter is W gallager email as William Apple insider.com where else would I go uh to Tav te that's what you do all right we will be back next week with more next week's going to be a really interesting episode to pull together but no matter how we do it we're looking forward to having you back then we'll see you thenyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome back my friends to the show that never ends this is the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is William Gallagher hello who cares about William Gallagher you've got an interview I want to hear this interview who's the interview exciting before we get into our interview with Fraser Spears I want to talk to you about the September 10th Apple event now the name of this event on September 10th is called by Innovation only which is of course play on the words By Invitation Only but it's it's it's sort of a playful form in kind of ways makes me think of when Phil Schiller said years ago talking about a MacBook Pro along about 2012 2013 Can't innovate my ass but here we are and I think this one is going to be good I'm I'm really optimistic buy Innovation only is a neat title for an event now obviously we've been talking about this in the past and we're going to get ios 13 and iPad OS 13 and Catalina and TV OS and watch OS and that's going to be epic we're also going to get new iPhones which could be iPhone 11 or they could be iPhone Pro they could be named all kinds of things but the important detail is that every single phone model is going to get an additional camera to the amount of cameras it has now that is the OLED models the 10s and 10s Max are going to have three cameras and the 10r model is going to have two cameras the utility here is probably adding a wide angle lens and probably adding a telephoto lens to the 10r so that we can get that kind of depth there's also been some speculation around computational photography because obviously that's one of the things that Google Prides themselves on and Google users love about uh about the pixel the things you can expect are going to be CPU upgrades they're going to be specification upgrades they going to be performance for video they going to be performance for machine learning things like this uh probably better face ID one of the rumors suggested that we would have Touch ID under the screen I personally don't really count on that one happening another rumor suggested that you could wirelessly charge your airpods with your iPhone which would be interesting but I don't know if it's going to happen the the thing to think about here is we've had all these rumors there also been rumors about updated iPad pros and regular iPads and rumors about a MacBook Pro 16in I'm not convinced we're going to see those kinds of devices at this event I think what will happen is that we'll have this event followed by an event in October or so to cover the rest of these devices whatever happens we're going to be here and have all the information for you whatever happens we're going to be here and have all the information for you we'll be live streaming the event and you can see it right here on Apple Insider this is we we were fortunate enough to get time with Fraser Spears Frasier is the uh the head teacher or principal if you will of um Cedar school of excellence and what's unique about this is that in in years past he's done one toone rollouts of iPads to students and this year for the first time ever they have they have they have mothballed all those iPads and and historically they move them on to people who can make good use of them and they've shifted to Chromebook I know you're staggered I'm just a Gog I've actually heard this guy often over the years think he's really interesting but I thought he was particularly interesting on how he used iPads in education so I'm really s I'm Keen to hear his reasons for this well I just just to tease it a little bit I've been following him even since we've had the interview he's been posting on Twitter about how it's gone and one thing that he posted this morning was that he had had a number of students uh submit their maths and decimal problems and answers through Google classroom and Google Classroom Auto marked it for him so he didn't have to go through manually and grade all of the math questions and that alone he's like sold done good right that's impressive as long as it's with an if if actually doing math was torture as a kid right imagine how much torture it was for the teacher had to go through and try and grade the thing well so here we are I think it's interesting let's let's get on because there's a lot more interesting about that so without any further Ado Fraser Spears so welcome to this segment of the apple and cider podcast joining me is Frasier Spears uh head teacher or principal as we' say in North America of the uh the cedar School of Excellence thanks for having me for for years for ages I've watched you on Twitter and on your blog talk about technology in schools and the role that it can play and uh you know for for many years you had a onetoone iPad roll out going on can you tell me a little bit about how you began that and and uh really what led to that yeah so I'm happy to go into that detail it was we started in 2010 so 10 as you know was the year that the iPad came out in the first place and for years before that honestly I had been looking for some kind of tool that would enable us to increase access in the school classroom to computers you know access to the internet access to you know creative tools like even just like word processors presentation tools you know drawing tools whatever and obviously at that time laptops were both you know very heavy very expensive um the battery didn't last very long and you know they didn't have a lot of capacity for the things we wanted to do so you know doing a onetoone laptop program was out the question financially for our school and it we had looked at things like uh going oneto one with say an iPod video for example that was a thing that some people were doing uh back in the sort of early days of iTunes U where universities were recording videos of lectures and putting them out on iTunes through iTunes at the time uh so people 2005 2006 time frame I think 056 that that kind of time yeah so we we looked at that and disregarded that possibility we had also been looking at netbooks if you remember netbooks um and those were sort of small PC laptops that sometimes ran Linux other times ran Windows uh which cost around about2 200 to $250 250 uh and we looked at them but they were so small and so cramped we didn't feel that was the right tool either so Along Came the iPad and that was we were kind of in the way of looking for something and that was a tool that seemed to make the most sense both financially and in terms of the feature set as well so we we we rolled out a on toone iPad program in August of 2010 and as far as I know we were the first school in the world to do a whole school onetoone iPad program back then and we kept that going from 2010 through to this summer and in summer 2019 we made the decision to switch to Chromebook from iPad so we've we've finished our one to one iPad program for the moment and we have purchased a set of Chromebooks for the school and we're going to be on Chromebook for the next four years all right and I'm going to ask some questions about that in just a moment but just sure pedagogically what are the kinds of things that students learn uh or or learned using the iPads I I think what something really changed over the course of that time for us with the iPad when we began and nobody knew what an iPad was and the first job that we had with the iPad was to explain to people that the iPad was a valid computer and that you know that that job continued for the whole time we were doing iPads to be honest with you but we we were looking at um just not not so much that there was something necessarily new that the students would learn with the iPad but it was more that they had access to tools right so sometimes when you're going to schools and they're doing iPad programs you'll see that they're very focused on content so they've maybe purchased iPads and they've also probably usually done a deal with Pearson or some other company like that to to get a specific curriculum onto their iPads whereas for us it was never really about putting putting content out to the children through the device it was more that we were still teaching what we were teaching but we were now teaching it with another tool in the classroom as well so the computer it was available it wasn't mandatory we didn't say okay everybody's got to use the computer all the time the rule the Only Rule we ever had was you use the computer where it's useful and when it's not useful you do something else and that was pretty much all we had um as a rule in our school so that was that was kind of the pedagogy behind it and I suppose in a way what we were looking for was we were looking for um how can I sort of explain this does it help or or how how do we change the way we learn things like history if we also have access to computers and a lot more information than we would normally have does it enable us to uh increase the amount of resources we can look at or the variations we can look at or the amount of source material that we can look at and there's some interesting observations to be made about our experience of that over 10 years but that was kind of the core idea it wasn't just that we were trying to change the teaching and learning or put out specific content but more just to put an extra tool in the classroom you've moved to Chromebook and what were the the reasons that led you to that decision well I I think there was there was one thing that really began the process and there was a number of kind of extra weight that came in after after we started thinking about it I I had been tracking Chromebooks for pretty much as long as we had been doing iPads now the the original Chromebook the cr-48 Chromebook only came out in the December of 2010 so when the iPad first was one of the computers we were looking at the Chromebook didn't even exist so there's there's just a slight timing issue there in terms of why didn't we do Chromebooks at the start well the answer is Chromebooks didn't exist when we started doing this program um but over the years we we had obviously invested very heavily in apple Technologies we had we had Lo had Apple TV in the classroom we had but more more than just the hardware we had spent a lot of time building on iTunes U and iTunes U had as we talked about earlier had started off as a a video distribution service for University lectures and then later on it became a kind of courseware product so you could make courses you could put materials and assignments into itunu and so on but what seemed to have happened over the last three or four years is that Apple's investment and efforts in those kind of education software applications has just stopped dead and if you look at if you go back to the uh the iTunes U page on the app store for example you can look at the version history of iTunes U you can see that over the last three three and a half years iTunes U has had virtually no feature updates and I think I'm right in saying even today iTunes U still doesn't support iOS 9 style split screen multitasking and we're about to get ios 13 so it's clear to me that whatever Apple's doing in education they're not investing in iTunes you and that was something that well first of all we started to notice it and then it started to become a major paino in our deployment and all the time we were looking over the over the fence if you like at Google classroom and saying I wish we had this feature I wish we had that feature and you know it started off with things like I wish you could put uh an assignment to your class on a schedule in Google Classroom you can do that and hun you can't and then uh we started looking for other features you know being able to put out a post to some students in the class but not all being able to automatically send emails to parents about homework and and these features were just not coming to iTunes but they were all there in classroom and eventually there just kind of came such a weight of things that we wanted that we couldn't couldn't or weren't getting through IU that that became the impetus to start really thinking seriously about switching over to Chromebook and once we started looking at it uh the reasons kind of just started to snowball from there and there's more to it than just uh classroom is better than iTunes U at this time but that was that was how we kind of got started with thinking about it really I guess the way that I've sort of thought about it is that apple to encourage the use of specific tools for creation and things like this and they're less focused on on classroom management where Google Classroom is is strongly focused on the things that you said about assignments and turning things in through classroom and and getting those kinds of messages sent out yeah I agree with that and I think over the past few years since uh since I CH you maybe was starting to become deemphasized a little bit Apple has gone heavily into creating material and essentially promoting a kind of pedagogical approach that you know reasonable people might agree or disagree as to whether it's the right thing to do in schools but I I think that Apple has they very much looked at you know what are we already good at and and they've put all their wood behind what they're already good at rather than trying to expand to support everything that schools need and what I mean by that is they they created um Swift playgrounds which is a great application and they learn to code 1 and two programs which are also wonderful documents and excellent teaching materials and then they start they went into this material called everyone can create and what this was was instead of um instead of an engineering effort shall we say it was more of a kind of documentation and materials effort so they were creating lesson plans and resource guides for teachers and so on and to a certain extent to be fair um putting features into pages and keynote that schools wanted and need and I think they've done quite a good job of that but they they just were not addressing the kind of school administration aspect of it so how do you move files around how do you without having to copy them how do you collaborate with people all of those kind of things that you see are very strong in the Google World Apple had made some efforts towards them but they were missing the kind of overall picture I think which was the idea that um you know in in G suite for schools you've got a whole situation where it's a um you know the data is all there and the identity is all there and it's all one system that people can work within whereas with iTunes U and and iCloud as a whole it never quite got to that point for schools it was it was always a lot more fragmented than that yeah and collaboration for the the ior applications has always been kind of an afterthought yeah I mean the the feature works right but the problem is that they don't own your identity in the way that Google does and I don't mean that in the Sinister sense of owning you that people talk about gole but I just mean where does the corporate directory live and I'm sort of speaking Enterprise talk here at the moment but you know if I type in my name or or a colleague's name does their email address just pop up there automatically and in G Suite that kind of thing does happen because they're all members of the same domain whereas with apple it's never quite gotten to that level of integration so it's always been a little bit clunky to try and get those kind of things set up yeah way back in 2005 was using sub EA edit in my classes so that people could collaboratively edit and when Google came in with with with Google Docs that was such a revelation for us at the time yeah but you you mentioned how people talk about Google in a sinister fashion and I I feel like there's a lot of apprehension around Google in education um can we talk about that a little bit sure yeah I mean I think there's a lot of apprehension around all technology companies at the moment but I think if I may be so bold as to venture this that I think a lot of it's politically motivated and it's nothing to do with the technology itself that you know the Fallout of the the Trump election in America I think there's an element of um you know Twitter enabled Donald Trump therefore all technology is bad and we're really really in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water and a lot of this stuff um now of course there have been I'm not here to defend Google's privacy practices or anything like that but I think we as a as a world to be honest with you have to make a decision as to like do we want computers to do stuff for us or do we want everything to be private and and that's a trade-off that different people can make different ways and I think it's probably fair to say that reasonable people might reasonably disagree about whether or not Apple stance is the right one or Google stance is the right one or there's maybe a middle ground in between uh I personally think that Apple stance in a K12 setting is perhaps a little too restrictive that I think there are perfectly legitimate grounds for a school to be able to access and monitor more of the computer experience than Apple maybe enables and allows uh whereas in the Google world we get access to a whole lot more stuff and it's that becomes a matter of policy for every school as to exactly what they do with that but there is certainly more straightforward access in a managed situation with Google than with Apple um however the thing that since we moved to Chromebooks and I started talking about on Twitter the one thing that has become very sort of clear and obvious to me is that absolutely nobody understands that g suite for education is under a completely different set of privacy polic and practices than the Consumer Google account if you like so you know G accounts are not tracked for advertising for example um you have a lot of insight into and control into what happens to student data and advertising isn't shown alongside um alongside the Google products in school and it's you know it's it's just handled in a different way and and it's worth having a look at that there if you can you can search for you know G EDU prives policy and you can find there's a whole mini site about how how data is handled in the education product yeah and that is something I was going to bring up I'm so glad you did um one of the things that I found when I was looking to it is that Google has committed to having a third party audit them to to ensure that they're honoring that policy yeah I was going to say that's also part of gdpr um the the data Protection Law in the EU is that in principle organizations that use these companies as processors should be able to audit them in some way and the only sensible way that's doable at scale is for for a third party that's trusted by both sides to do it I mean no no school that I know of has got the technical understanding or capabilities to go and audit at Google data center for example it's just there's a much less the employee resources to dedicate to it exactly I mean how how would my little school go and audit a Google data center to the point where we could uh you you know so so there are these structures in place to sort of manage that and I think um Google is very straightforward about their levels of compliance and you know I think a lot of this what happens a lot is that a lot of loose language is used right so people will will now sort of attack me online and they'll say things like oh you know are you are you are you therefore happy with Google selling all your children's data to advertisers and if you break that down you say like what exactly does that phrase mean you know is it the case I if I wanted to advertise on Google could I go and ask them um for a download of a copy of some random individual's contents of their Google Drive obviously not right Google's in terms of actual security I I feel that Google's very highly incentivized to ensure that um people don't just get random access to your data now there's legal aspects to that as well in terms of what governments are enabled to do and that's a whole complicated story that's probably worth going into at some point but maybe a little more detail and we want to talk about tonight but in terms of um letting advertisers have access to data it's not that's obviously not what happens right you can't just you can't just buy the contents of somebody's Google Drive it's not it's not as simplistic as that and I think people need to just speak a little more precisely when they talk about privacy and and security and not confuse those two things because they are different as well so they are one of the things that I was concerned about that it wasn't exactly clear to me about maybe you have some more insight into is you know I I feel reasonably certain that a student's email and a student's Google Drive docs slides sheets things that will reside within that Google suite for Education are fairly private and fairly secure yeah but I I start to be concerned when there are other services that use Google single sign on and students use their Google account their student account to to single sign on to other services within education because I'm not sure that their privacy policies are nearly as good or ar stringent as what Google might offer no you're you're absolutely 100% right there and that that's a a major area I think of training for schools and also of for control for school admins so when you deploy a Chromebook Suite it is actually possible to control that so I believe you can um you can Whit list Individual Services that you want to allow uh you can Blacklist Services there there are controls for that um we're not using a lot of those kind of services just yet but it's certainly something that I do at data protection training with our staff is to say look you need to and again in the EU under gdpr one should actually complete what's called a privacy impact assessment if you want to use additional services so we've completed some of them for for various things that we use um but I'm I'm always very cautious to say to our teachers look if if you want your kids in the class to sign up for some other account you need to check that out separately from just the the Google core you know it's not it's not the same thing by any means you're absolutely right right and even if it has sign on with Google yeah it's not the same it's it's got its own policy and yeah you have to look in decide if that policy is right if there's even auditing for that absolutely yeah um my other question I think in this kind of area comes down to extensions that people add on you know one of them that that was used in my daughter's school is called haara highlights yeah are you familiar with it at all I'm not specifically familiar with it but I suspect it's pretty similar to one we use called go Guardian which is uh there's a go Guardian teacher which allows sort of classroom monitoring and then there's a goguardian admin which is a web filtering product as well it it sounds similar so the the way that apara was used in my daughter's school is uh for monitoring student behavior and Stu what what browser Tabs are open on the Chromebook mhm and also to assign quizzes and inclass assessments yep and and sort of monitors as those are being taken and um I was I'm a little I'm I'm a little scared about that one personally just because it also has among its admin options the ability to monitor the microphone and camera for each Chromebook okay Y and uh you know of course the ability Once you turn that on you also have the ability whether or not you want to be able to view them when the student is not at school right if the Chromebooks go home yeah and uh I've I've never gotten answers that satisfied me from the school when I've asked about this um you know it it feels to me as though there's something about a school provided Chromebook versus a personal provided Chromebook where we're providing a personal one and being asked to load this this surveillance wear onto it um go ahead yeah I I I agree with your concern there I mean our our model is that the school owns the Chromebook we provide the Chromebook and we install in our case go Guardian on it now just because a school is buying into a particular technology stack doesn't mean that a school themselves don't have to have a very serious reflection process about um about what they're doing with the technology and how that's all working out and in go Guardian for example one of the things you can do there is you can monitor a people's screen and you can actually do it remotely across the internet as well but as a matter of school policy I set up you our teachers have control of that but you can actually go Guardians quite nicely designed and that the school administrator can limit the hours of operation of that so I've said it and I've clearly made this known to the students as well that that only operates between 8: am and 4m the hours in which you would reasonably be in school and not at the weekends so they can have a degree of confidence that um when they go home they're not going to be monitored constantly however the web filtering component um the web filtering component does operate 24/7 so whatever they're searching at home uh that will be filtered and obviously there's a there's a positive aspect of that which is protection against inappropriate content but then it's all there's also an element of um uh you know we can call it surveillance where if we want you know it's interesting that the balance is maybe you know 10 years ago everybody wanted School web filtered completely so that no nothing bad could ever be seen and now we're talking about that is is that does that constitute surveillance or is that a school's appropriate oversight if you like pastoral oversight on on computer use and I think there's there are good arguments either way but having having dealt with situations in the past where you know um people have intervened on cases potential cases of online abuse I've in myself not in my school but through other organizations identified situations of people potentially being groomed online all of these young people being groomed online um and I'm not just throwing those out as as bogey men to say it's okay to do anything you want but these are real situations and that this really happens this isn't just made up and and I I can't be a fundamentalist on this in the same way a hard balance to strike oh it is it is and you know in some ways I would I would like to give young people more privacy however I think the world has changed since we started this conversation and it's really important to think about this because if you if you want to wind back the clock to 2010 or 2005 or a time like that it was often the case that a computer provided or access to a computer provided by a school was often a Young Person's only access to the internet and the one and only way to get on the internet was through school whereas today many many many of those kids have got smartphone access multiple computers at home uh and and the landscape has very much changed so I'm not naive in this and I don't think that because we are we're watching what the young people are doing or filtering their internet that they are in no way ever seeing anything bad on the internet in fact I no they're not you know it's what we're doing is we're displacing the questionable activity from the the the supervised computer to the unsupervised computer and that's that's something that parents need to be aware of as well you know I can only make guarantees about that one computer and in times past that was the only computer in a young person's life and today it's not and it's something we're always given a message about at our school is you know parents have to take responsibility for the other devices you know we'll help with this one and we'll teach about behavior and we'll look for people to be supportive of each other online but there are other computers and that's just the reality of the world there what do you think is the role of the school in in sort of teaching these boundaries or expectations about about privacy and about uh security and what secure practices are uh yeah there's a couple of good questions there you know there's there's a privacy question and then there's a security question and I think we we can be very clear about what the security questions are you know we can teach about good password we can teach about firewalls we can we can teach and we should teach about all these things blocking your screen having encryption turned on in your device and I I teach all of these things because I'm a computer science teacher and I teach all these things from a from a technical perspective but I also try and as much as possible also teach them from a kind of Ethics perspective as well um and what I mean by that is that often I I feel that if I teach about the techniques that are being used to manipulate you it really eliminates a lot of their power if that makes sense and quite often I'll pull back the curtain it really reveals and defuses what's going on yeah I'll quite often teach you about you know the psychological tricks that are used to get you addicted to video games or social media or something and once people know that that's happening to them they can start to see you know behind the curtain if you like and and I think just teaching that way is often quite helpful yeah and as with many other things you know if you think about all the all the other areas of risk that young people get involved in we have as Western societies I suppose we have often taken the line that education is better than uh prevention so if you think about drugs education for example or alcohol or sex education or even Road Safety you know we we don't we don't prevent children from walking across the road I mean I I say that but you know there's a whole body of work being done now to say that actually we are preventing young people from from walking across the road and it's causing them severe problems in terms of their General resilience towards life as well so actually maybe we maybe we have taken it too far but that's a that's a conversation for another day I suppose this this roll out was probably a massive undertaking because you you're coming from one whole system of managing and setting up user accounts and cloning devices and having devices be charged and things like that just the Practical issues involved with changing over um you've only doing this for about you know a week right this is this is a new operation yeah um what are the things that you're encountering so far what are you finding um well we're noticing a number of things uh one is that uh I'm noticing a change in in people's attitudes towards the device and I sort of explain what I mean by that like I said when we started in 2010 nobody knew what an iPad was and nobody knew what it was good for so we very much took I personally really ra I say we but really I took the view that the iPad is a computer we should use the iPad for computer type things so we use it for pages and Kino and all these different tools and what happened in those 10 years was that children went from having no other iPad in their life except the one that we gave them to having the one that we gave them Plus at least another one at home if not sometimes two and those iPads at home were being used more or less exclusively as entertainment devices so I have always been really influenced by that Steve Jobs quote which I I believe is not apocryphal which is when he talked about making the computer a bicycle for the mind and that was that was always kind of what I wanted to do with the computer in school and for some people that absolutely happened you know I I saw some of our young people who you know were were curious and able young people and I give them a computer and it's like Rocket Fuel to their intellect and their their level of you know Global Knowledge and cultural understanding and and insight and the ability to just know new things is incredibly powerful but at the same time I gave the the iPad to other people and they just saw it as a TV in a games device and why that distinction is the way it is I'm not sure I I suspect it probably has something to do with sort of levels of IQ perhaps that more able people you know the phrase in the Bible it says uh to those who have more shall be given and from those who have little everything they have should be taken away you know I that sort of sticks in my mind as as a thought about the impact of the computer on people and for some of those younger people or or those people who sort of Saw as a TV and a games machine what I've noticed is that the Chromebook having gone away from the iPad towards the Chromebook we've started to see more of a work orientated attitude towards it and I think that's partly you know on the configuration I've done that I've I've blocked a number of entertainment type services that we didn't quite have access to block before because again if you think about that aspect web filtering on the iPad is a privacy issue for Apple you know you don't quite have the same access there and and Apple's privacy stance is not necessarily helping everybody and it's not it's not an unalloyed good thing that I can't fil out um effectively and precisely web services that I don't want people to get access to on right on the iPad device I have to do it at the network level and that doesn't always carry the same weight so that's an interesting issue but I think also we're just not giving them the same kind of tool that they use for at home for entertainment so I think there's a bit of confusion particularly with younger users is the iPad for work or is the iPad for fun CU we are saying it's for work and home is saying it's for fun and I think now that we've got a clear distinction between the the fun device which is the iPad and the work device which is the Chromebook I'm starting to see a distinction in how children approach it and they approach it in a more business-like manner at least for now and I'm not saying that necessarily going to continue I can also already see in my filtering logs people trying to turn it back into a games machine but you know what I'm equal to the task so we'll see how that goes I was I was sort of wondering how much the physical keyboard played a role in that you know just by the virtue of having a keyboard it feels feels like this is a work device I certainly noticed that with younger users so we're talking sort of 9 10 11 years old that they felt extremely growing up to be getting a laptop and the older kids they looked at that you know our 15 16 year olds they looked at it more as an efficiency thing they thought right you know I've got a lot of writing to do for my exams uh this is going to help me get that writing done great fine whatever but the younger kids they sort of felt like they were sort of stepping into Daddy's Shoes a little bit and getting a shot of a a grown-ups computer because they've got proper keyboard and it's black and it it's sort of busy you know which is kind of fun to see well this this mirrors my own experience with my own daughters you know I they they've had iPads from 2010 thereabouts and uh when I had to get one of them them Chromebook it it really took off and then of course I I graduated her to a Mac and the other one has the Chromebook now and they're both they're both the the second daughter really still does use her iPad quite a lot um years and years and years ago I had a G4 iMac set up that she would just type into and uh it was a wondrous thing for me because she was non-verbal at that time she didn't speak at all but we discovered that she was typing these these long long documents into the iMac and uh and she kept doing that with the iPad that's an interesting effect that we we've also seen that kind of thing where a a a given developmental stage children can offer type more on the computer produce more on the computer than they could if they were writing or speaking it and I don't quite know what to do with that but I think is true well I think one of the things that you're already doing addresses that really well you know I had to negotiate and and plead with the schools to allow that daughter to type in school and you you've just obviated that whole problem by making sure everyone has that resource yes and it takes away the stigma of being the the ch who has the computer you know if you were to go into many other schools you know you you would know the children who had additional support needs by the fact that they had a computer and everybody else doesn't and and you know the standardization aspect of it I think is important for for that point of view as well and we're able to you know do exams on on computer and things as well so that's that's something that really helps does this change your whole uh roll out for for other devices around it you know you had Apple TVs in the classrooms are they becoming chomecast uh no we have actually gone back we've abandoned wireless display technology entirely and we've gone back to wires um we we actually we' actually done that before we decided to go Chromebook because Apple TV on a busy Network just never achieved the level of reliability that teachers need and teachers need a very high degree of reliability and if you uh as a technologist cause a teacher's lesson to fail because the technolog is not up to it then and you're going to hear about that pretty quickly and um I always remember my first job I worked with an older guy who was a sis admin and had been for years and he he said this one thing to me that I've never forgotten he said you've got to drink coffee with the people that use your systems and I've never forgotten that because he said you know if you don't meet these people socially and in other situations you're never going to hear about the pain that you're causing them and you need to know what's going on because otherwise you're going to be your name is going to be trashed and you're not going to hear about it in time so I've always thought about that in school and that was the problem we had with Apple TV was that we just never got the level of reliability that you could just go through your presentation the convenience was great but the reliability was poor and we never got it right so even before we went Chromebook we we had pretty much retired all of our Apple TVs I think we have one or two still in the school but most of them are gone now well this has been delightful I have really enjoyed having you speak with me yeah it's it's been my pleasure I think it's this is kind of the first opportunity I've had to speak to anybody about it since we since we started the Chromebook roller I think the the the overall sentiment I think is has been pretty positive um certainly very positive in our school and I think that um a lot of people who have looked at my blog and have looked at things that I've read and said about it not a lot of people have come back at me with either um pedagogical arguments or um really even technical arguments and what a lot of people just thrw at me is is you know a half-baked privacy argument you know and I think that I spent a lot of time on Twitter just typing out you do realize that the edu system is under a different privacy policy and and leaving it at that but I think I think it's going to be a significant change and there's one thing if I can just add that we didn't quite get to with with what we were seeing about the transition was that it's not just that the sort of lack of features in iTunes U that caused us to change but there's also a forward-looking aspect to it as well and and what I think one of the things that influenced my thinking about this was that as teachers in our school we have really adopted Google Drive and and um document sharing and collaboration and all these kind of things and for maybe the past three or four years we've really been going very hard in that direction and we found it to be an incredible efficiency saving the kind that you could never go back from and I was thinking to myself you know we do all this as teachers but we don't do any of it with the students the students are stuck in this world where you've got your iPad and on your iPad is your files and if something goes wrong with that computer your files are at risk and we as teachers we're working in the cloud doesn't matter what computer we're on you know we're getting this great collaboration there's a lot of efficiency and it's going really quickly and it's working really well why are we not doing that for the kids because if that's already part of our job surely it's going to be the future of theirs and that's the other side of of making the switch from the Apple world to the Google world is that I think Apple has kind of I think perhaps missing the boat is too strong a word but certainly lagging behind in terms of being Cloud first uh and in my more cynical moments I feel that sometimes Apple's privacy stance is a little self-serving in that it's a form of sort of fear and certainty in doubt targeted against people who are good at something that Apple aren't good at and that's that just grats a little bit with me and I've been an Apple guy since you know the mid 80s but some of the things I hear and the way I look at what Apple are doing versus what other companies are doing but also the way Apple then start to talk about it it's not always clear to me that what they're saying and what they're doing and what they're actually working on are all matching up in the same way so so that's just another aspect that's worth thinking about in terms of what motivated us to change just from from the iPad to the Google world as well it it it seems to me that practically there's so in the old days when you using a computer you had to intentionally save things yeah right and and you know I I was reminded of this again the other day when someone said that the save icon looked more like a vending machine with a coffee cup in where they where the slot is why why is there a vending machine in my icons here because who knows what a FL disc is anymore but indeed the the Google approach is save everything nothing should ever be lost you should have revisions you should be able to go back through revisions and apple in some ways is is still very much in this you have to intentionally save or you have to intentionally back up or if you're backing up to iCloud it happens once when you're connected to power on Wi-Fi and not doing anything where Google's a little bit more forward in in this that that everything is saved all the time so that if you drop the Chromebook at a river which was the example they used at Google IO when they introduced them yeah you just grab another one yeah mean I I did that today in my school you know a boy came in with his Chromebook not charged cuz he'd been ill all weekend and I just said you know okay give me that one plug it in here take this other one go and do your school day and swap them back at the end of the day you know that's a powerful model and the iPad just in some ways you know I I remember watching WWDC this year and I thought they are making the absolute perfect iteration of the last generation of computing you know they're making the best ever local state locally installed applications operating system and Hardware combination and they they're perfecting it to the end degree but my sense is the world is moving on and having uh having a stateful computer a computer where and there's data locally and it really matters what's going on here and there's configuration and there's state that doesn't sync um that's starting to feel really like the past and the experiences we've had even just in the time I've been triing and and deploying Chromebooks that really feels like the future where you as you say data is not getting lost it doesn't you're not actually thinking about where the where the data physically is as such um it's tied to your account it's not tied to the physical device all that is an incredibly liberating model to work with because the devices then become fungible and in a way if you think about what happens when the device becomes fungible is you no longer start to care so much about the device you're not so wedy to one device and and if you think about Apple's model that's potentially quite a problem for Apple because as soon as the the the device doesn't matter so much anymore then you know why am I spending $2,500 on a 15in laptop but I could get one from Acer for500 $100 you know and it's a Chromebook and it's got all my stuff on it already you know you know I've got a really nice Lenovo 15-inch laptop sitting Bes beside me they cost me 600 and if I wanted to get a 15-inch laptop from Apple I'd be paying £2,400 for the entry level model and in a world where the data and your work gets logically separated from the computer where then does that leave a maker of Premium computers and sure you've got your your Mac Pro buyers who obviously need local power and lots of it but then there's everybody else and it's really interesting going forward to see how that's going to work out and whether or not people are still going to put a premium on you know quality build performance all of these things and whether Apple continues to provide all of those things uh that's an open question as well but how that all works out and how it psychologically works out for users I think is going to be a really interesting question you know fantastic well what I'd like to do is check in with you in the future after you've had some time with this roll out and just ask how it's going yeah I'd be delighted yeah in the meantime I think we ought to wrap this up I've kept you on quite a long time is there a URL that that you'd like people to go to and visit to learn more about Cedars um sure uh our website which I have shamefully not updated for the new school year just yet is uh Cedars CED rs. Inver do.uk I'm sure you can pop that in the show for people who want a quick link great thank you so much my pleasure um I should have to cheer it over he makes some really interesting points I had no idea about Google privacy being different for example in education and stuff so I'll be fascinated to see what happens Through The Years with this but terribly interesting yes I'm really pleased you got him Apple in a unique move has released iOS 13.1 betas for testing what's what's unique about that do you know uh they runs on Android no not not yet but do we have 13.0 released yet oh good point I don't know okay uh I'm taking from that we don't right so if we don't have IOS 13.0 released what on Earth are we doing seeing a 13.1 beta it's just very weird and it's fine a few years ago I'd agreed with you but now you know I mean if you watch Doctor Who the Third 13th Doctor is really the 15th doctor uh the 10th was the night we're we haven't got time for all that William the the the problem is this right historically we would get all of the developer vas for iOS 13 and then 13 would be released and then we would get the 13.1 developer betas and and now they're not even respecting history I think the problem is that I think Craig fedi has too much on his plate okay I think Hair Force One has a little too much to worry about I mean look he's got he's shepherding Catalina he's sheering iOS he's shepherding iPad OS he's shepher watch OS and there's also the Apple TV OS that's five different OS releases that have to happen all pretty much at the same time on the same schedule that's a lot that's incredible yes absolutely that this happens at all is amazing I'm always very impressed and I I think what we're seeing I think what we're seeing is the cracks happening Under Pressure because it makes no sense to release 13.1 without a 13.0 released unless 13.0 is gold master and there's nothing left to do to it so they can start working on 131 13.1 vug sixes except that if it were goldmaster they would start saying it's goldmaster so this is very weird that we have these these two beta paths in release at the same time okay I'm less concerned about you than this you've just just offered one possible solution I'm sure there there there's a missing episode somewhere something we don't know but it's fine really it'll all be ready for whatever day in September I mean people are just speculating that 13.1 is actually just a mislabeled developer beta that it should be it should be instead of 13.1 it should be 13.0 beta 9 but going to make a typing mistake anywhere that could be the place to make it rather than deep in the code so it's it's weird it's very weird are you okay about it though well you know what choice do we have we just get to Roll Along until we see what actually gets released but uh make some tea we could have a talk no is that the biggest thing going on thir uh 13.1 I mean it's pretty big news it's we're getting really close to this release date yeah that's exciting we expect the release to be September 10th and so we are getting quite close to it and and uh so yeah it is exciting now we were talking education a little bit ago and I just wanted to point out this piece about a Scottish City uh that's Glasgow city council and a company called CGI they're providing 50,000 school children in the city with iPads as a part of a $69 million or 300 million pound project to modernize and improve the educational prospects for Scottish school children I think this is very interesting especially after someone who's had tons of experience doing that onetoone roll out moving away from it yes it is but Scottish education system is very interesting they do lots of things I mean I'm I'm in the UK and Scotland's part of the UK but I'm in England which has very different systems and there's an awful lot to admire in Scotland I think there's an awful lot to mind scarland in general but the the quote here is that we want our children and young people to be equipped with the skills that will make them shine as digital citizens both now and later in their working lives said Glasgow City councelor Chris Cunningham we're aware that 90% of jobs in Scotland involve digital work and so our pupils will be well equipped for the workplace I think the thing to be careful of here and be mindful of is that the computers of today are not the computers that will be in place in the workplace uh 10 15 years from now when these students will be in the workplace that well some of the tasks will resemble them themselves you know word processing is still probably going to be word processing um spreadsheets are still spreadsheets these kinds of things don't really shift a whole lot but what is a computer and how you use it and and what tasks you do it for and what tasks compose a job change rapidly and and quickly and uh and in large ways right it used to be before the Advent of of lotus 123 that if you wanted a spreadsheet showing you data you would make a request and then the seventh floor of the office building would get to work on that with huge huge blot paper and figuring it out and then they would present you with a spread sheet of paper with all the cells filled in by hand kind of thing about a month later so what FY Cal started yes yeah destruction all over the world yeah right and and so the these things change but it's intriguing to see that they're going iPad um in the face of the things that Mr Spears who just spoke with has learned I suppose it's uh is it the democratization of Technology you pick with what whatever works for you the best and for his case he's found it in Chromebook they're finding it in iPads it's just great that there are these systems available so well what happens in what's happened in the past is that every few years a different School District tries a onetoone program of some kind like early early early on there was the iBook program in enrio County Virginia where where they distributed iBooks to students and it was a complete cluster to be honest because there there was this real problem with managing what students were able to do what students should be doing and and even just how to integrate this thing into the curriculum properly and so you know it's one thing to say we're going to roll out a 300 million pound project for iPads great how are teachers going to use that in terms of curriculum how are students going to use that in ways that Ensure that they're not just using as another entertainment device and that's that's where this comes down is the implementation you know it's it's easy to cheerlead in Fanboy and say iPads oh 50,000 of them out there in the school wonderful that's great for Apple yeah it is it really is great for Apple but what's going to support their use in in a in a real learning environment is a question well let's let's not turn this into a Bad Thing 50,000 iPads in a school is better than nothing in the school yes it has issues of support and it's always always going to be down to the teachers and how they use things how they teach uh but this is a good thing giving teachers some options so well I what I'd like to say is I think we should find out more about it we should try and watch that closely and see if there's something we can learn from what they're doing in their roll out that makes it different from some past experiences we've seen cool that makes sense absolutely let's keep an eye on all of these things yeah now Apple we've talked about Apple before is planning to improve series privacy protections yeah I was particularly interested in this one because they did that thing of uh I think even knew told me about this that there people were listening uh to seral recordings to make it better and then they stopped and they stopped saying they pending a review of their process everybody pending reviewer process they never actually do anything and Apple has actually done it well actually all of the companies that have voice products so far the big ones Google Facebook uh Amazon have said that there's stopping human listening human grading and so they they've said they have done something right they said they stopped Apple said they stopped but before they stopped what they were doing was reviewing a small sample of audio from Siri requests less than 0 2% and the computer generated transcripts to measure how well Siri was responding to improve its reliability did the user intend to wake Siri did Siri hear the request accurately did Siri respond appropriately to the request and and what's happened is that they're going to change things a little bit us will be able to opt in to help Siri improve those who choose to participate can opt out again at any time Apple won't retain audio recordings and will computer use computer generated transcripts when customers do opt in only Apple employees will be allowed to listen not contractors interesting interesting and this one's a little iffy for me Apple will work to delete quote unquote any recording which is determined to be an inadvertent trigger right I'm not clear what that means I mean if you say Syria and Syria goes yeah I'm here that's an intent trigger but but I'm not sure what work to delete means well what about the fact that my homepod has such good hearing that wherever I am in the house it responds to the magic words I could be looking at my watch when I say it and I hear this distant thing from my office yes know it's that's a slightly different problem but still a problem yes it's in in on inadvertent trigger of the wrongs Siri so maybe it's just that it's more finer tuned than uh always deleting it because sometimes the definition of inadvertent might be different yeah so the the good news here is that there is going to be some more clarity involved the you know yes there will still be human review but you don't have to have it you can opt out of that so that's interesting I I think that there's still a lot of room for appal improve here and I think they could do better than this but it's good that they're doing this um I will opt in um if I even think about it I won't bother to opt out I'm not so fussed about this I think when you you say it's something like 0.2% I start thinking that's probably quite a big number whenever they only say a percent they're exaggerating it up or down kind of thing so it's probably huge and they've probably heard me going wrong but you know it's Apple I'm at least convinced they're not going off and selling my uh swearing at Siri to other companies when necessary y apple and other things that they're going to do that are good plans to contribute funds to ongoing efforts in the Amazon so you've heard about this right in in Brazil there are the Amazon forests that are on fire yes astounding yes and those that's the reason why this is dangerous is because those forests produce a decent amount of of uh oxygen which are is necessary for human life yes read about it yes it's really it's not just about you know the the notion that we we like forests and forests and animals are nice and preserving biodiversity is fun it's this is actually like really necessary these are indispensable forests and so it's not exactly clear how Apple intends to assist but it looks like they're donating funds directly to local nonprofits emergency service organizations working to fight the fires I wonder how much you can actually do with fire I mean how quickly you can repair the damage even how quickly you can grow Replacements well the problem is that even if you grow replacement trees that when there there are a couple different things going on here first of all there are indigenous people living within the forests who will be harmed by this and secondly there are animals that will be har Wildlife that will be harmed that doesn't come back there's there's some you know yes you can reforest and if you reforest 20 years later some Wildlife comes back but some of it just goes extinct some of it you just that's it goodness and so this is problematic um it is it is good to see apple using some of their cash largess to do things like this that don't necessarily relate directly to bottom line but do absolutely affect all of us yeah makes uh things meeting deadlines for iOS seem a little bit less uh important doesn't it perhaps perhaps well that's the time we have I I want to make sure that we cut this close so that you've got enough time to listen to the interview thank you so much this has been Victor I'm V marks on Twitter and Victor Apple insider.com William where do people find you still working on cable M9 having a very good time but also on Twitter as William at no hang on Twitter is W gallager email as William Apple insider.com where else would I go uh to Tav te that's what you do all right we will be back next week with more next week's going to be a really interesting episode to pull together but no matter how we do it we're looking forward to having you back then we'll see you thenyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome back my friends to the show that never ends this is the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is William Gallagher hello who cares about William Gallagher you've got an interview I want to hear this interview who's the interview exciting before we get into our interview with Fraser Spears I want to talk to you about the September 10th Apple event now the name of this event on September 10th is called by Innovation only which is of course play on the words By Invitation Only but it's it's it's sort of a playful form in kind of ways makes me think of when Phil Schiller said years ago talking about a MacBook Pro along about 2012 2013 Can't innovate my ass but here we are and I think this one is going to be good I'm I'm really optimistic buy Innovation only is a neat title for an event now obviously we've been talking about this in the past and we're going to get ios 13 and iPad OS 13 and Catalina and TV OS and watch OS and that's going to be epic we're also going to get new iPhones which could be iPhone 11 or they could be iPhone Pro they could be named all kinds of things but the important detail is that every single phone model is going to get an additional camera to the amount of cameras it has now that is the OLED models the 10s and 10s Max are going to have three cameras and the 10r model is going to have two cameras the utility here is probably adding a wide angle lens and probably adding a telephoto lens to the 10r so that we can get that kind of depth there's also been some speculation around computational photography because obviously that's one of the things that Google Prides themselves on and Google users love about uh about the pixel the things you can expect are going to be CPU upgrades they're going to be specification upgrades they going to be performance for video they going to be performance for machine learning things like this uh probably better face ID one of the rumors suggested that we would have Touch ID under the screen I personally don't really count on that one happening another rumor suggested that you could wirelessly charge your airpods with your iPhone which would be interesting but I don't know if it's going to happen the the thing to think about here is we've had all these rumors there also been rumors about updated iPad pros and regular iPads and rumors about a MacBook Pro 16in I'm not convinced we're going to see those kinds of devices at this event I think what will happen is that we'll have this event followed by an event in October or so to cover the rest of these devices whatever happens we're going to be here and have all the information for you whatever happens we're going to be here and have all the information for you we'll be live streaming the event and you can see it right here on Apple Insider this is we we were fortunate enough to get time with Fraser Spears Frasier is the uh the head teacher or principal if you will of um Cedar school of excellence and what's unique about this is that in in years past he's done one toone rollouts of iPads to students and this year for the first time ever they have they have they have mothballed all those iPads and and historically they move them on to people who can make good use of them and they've shifted to Chromebook I know you're staggered I'm just a Gog I've actually heard this guy often over the years think he's really interesting but I thought he was particularly interesting on how he used iPads in education so I'm really s I'm Keen to hear his reasons for this well I just just to tease it a little bit I've been following him even since we've had the interview he's been posting on Twitter about how it's gone and one thing that he posted this morning was that he had had a number of students uh submit their maths and decimal problems and answers through Google classroom and Google Classroom Auto marked it for him so he didn't have to go through manually and grade all of the math questions and that alone he's like sold done good right that's impressive as long as it's with an if if actually doing math was torture as a kid right imagine how much torture it was for the teacher had to go through and try and grade the thing well so here we are I think it's interesting let's let's get on because there's a lot more interesting about that so without any further Ado Fraser Spears so welcome to this segment of the apple and cider podcast joining me is Frasier Spears uh head teacher or principal as we' say in North America of the uh the cedar School of Excellence thanks for having me for for years for ages I've watched you on Twitter and on your blog talk about technology in schools and the role that it can play and uh you know for for many years you had a onetoone iPad roll out going on can you tell me a little bit about how you began that and and uh really what led to that yeah so I'm happy to go into that detail it was we started in 2010 so 10 as you know was the year that the iPad came out in the first place and for years before that honestly I had been looking for some kind of tool that would enable us to increase access in the school classroom to computers you know access to the internet access to you know creative tools like even just like word processors presentation tools you know drawing tools whatever and obviously at that time laptops were both you know very heavy very expensive um the battery didn't last very long and you know they didn't have a lot of capacity for the things we wanted to do so you know doing a onetoone laptop program was out the question financially for our school and it we had looked at things like uh going oneto one with say an iPod video for example that was a thing that some people were doing uh back in the sort of early days of iTunes U where universities were recording videos of lectures and putting them out on iTunes through iTunes at the time uh so people 2005 2006 time frame I think 056 that that kind of time yeah so we we looked at that and disregarded that possibility we had also been looking at netbooks if you remember netbooks um and those were sort of small PC laptops that sometimes ran Linux other times ran Windows uh which cost around about2 200 to $250 250 uh and we looked at them but they were so small and so cramped we didn't feel that was the right tool either so Along Came the iPad and that was we were kind of in the way of looking for something and that was a tool that seemed to make the most sense both financially and in terms of the feature set as well so we we we rolled out a on toone iPad program in August of 2010 and as far as I know we were the first school in the world to do a whole school onetoone iPad program back then and we kept that going from 2010 through to this summer and in summer 2019 we made the decision to switch to Chromebook from iPad so we've we've finished our one to one iPad program for the moment and we have purchased a set of Chromebooks for the school and we're going to be on Chromebook for the next four years all right and I'm going to ask some questions about that in just a moment but just sure pedagogically what are the kinds of things that students learn uh or or learned using the iPads I I think what something really changed over the course of that time for us with the iPad when we began and nobody knew what an iPad was and the first job that we had with the iPad was to explain to people that the iPad was a valid computer and that you know that that job continued for the whole time we were doing iPads to be honest with you but we we were looking at um just not not so much that there was something necessarily new that the students would learn with the iPad but it was more that they had access to tools right so sometimes when you're going to schools and they're doing iPad programs you'll see that they're very focused on content so they've maybe purchased iPads and they've also probably usually done a deal with Pearson or some other company like that to to get a specific curriculum onto their iPads whereas for us it was never really about putting putting content out to the children through the device it was more that we were still teaching what we were teaching but we were now teaching it with another tool in the classroom as well so the computer it was available it wasn't mandatory we didn't say okay everybody's got to use the computer all the time the rule the Only Rule we ever had was you use the computer where it's useful and when it's not useful you do something else and that was pretty much all we had um as a rule in our school so that was that was kind of the pedagogy behind it and I suppose in a way what we were looking for was we were looking for um how can I sort of explain this does it help or or how how do we change the way we learn things like history if we also have access to computers and a lot more information than we would normally have does it enable us to uh increase the amount of resources we can look at or the variations we can look at or the amount of source material that we can look at and there's some interesting observations to be made about our experience of that over 10 years but that was kind of the core idea it wasn't just that we were trying to change the teaching and learning or put out specific content but more just to put an extra tool in the classroom you've moved to Chromebook and what were the the reasons that led you to that decision well I I think there was there was one thing that really began the process and there was a number of kind of extra weight that came in after after we started thinking about it I I had been tracking Chromebooks for pretty much as long as we had been doing iPads now the the original Chromebook the cr-48 Chromebook only came out in the December of 2010 so when the iPad first was one of the computers we were looking at the Chromebook didn't even exist so there's there's just a slight timing issue there in terms of why didn't we do Chromebooks at the start well the answer is Chromebooks didn't exist when we started doing this program um but over the years we we had obviously invested very heavily in apple Technologies we had we had Lo had Apple TV in the classroom we had but more more than just the hardware we had spent a lot of time building on iTunes U and iTunes U had as we talked about earlier had started off as a a video distribution service for University lectures and then later on it became a kind of courseware product so you could make courses you could put materials and assignments into itunu and so on but what seemed to have happened over the last three or four years is that Apple's investment and efforts in those kind of education software applications has just stopped dead and if you look at if you go back to the uh the iTunes U page on the app store for example you can look at the version history of iTunes U you can see that over the last three three and a half years iTunes U has had virtually no feature updates and I think I'm right in saying even today iTunes U still doesn't support iOS 9 style split screen multitasking and we're about to get ios 13 so it's clear to me that whatever Apple's doing in education they're not investing in iTunes you and that was something that well first of all we started to notice it and then it started to become a major paino in our deployment and all the time we were looking over the over the fence if you like at Google classroom and saying I wish we had this feature I wish we had that feature and you know it started off with things like I wish you could put uh an assignment to your class on a schedule in Google Classroom you can do that and hun you can't and then uh we started looking for other features you know being able to put out a post to some students in the class but not all being able to automatically send emails to parents about homework and and these features were just not coming to iTunes but they were all there in classroom and eventually there just kind of came such a weight of things that we wanted that we couldn't couldn't or weren't getting through IU that that became the impetus to start really thinking seriously about switching over to Chromebook and once we started looking at it uh the reasons kind of just started to snowball from there and there's more to it than just uh classroom is better than iTunes U at this time but that was that was how we kind of got started with thinking about it really I guess the way that I've sort of thought about it is that apple to encourage the use of specific tools for creation and things like this and they're less focused on on classroom management where Google Classroom is is strongly focused on the things that you said about assignments and turning things in through classroom and and getting those kinds of messages sent out yeah I agree with that and I think over the past few years since uh since I CH you maybe was starting to become deemphasized a little bit Apple has gone heavily into creating material and essentially promoting a kind of pedagogical approach that you know reasonable people might agree or disagree as to whether it's the right thing to do in schools but I I think that Apple has they very much looked at you know what are we already good at and and they've put all their wood behind what they're already good at rather than trying to expand to support everything that schools need and what I mean by that is they they created um Swift playgrounds which is a great application and they learn to code 1 and two programs which are also wonderful documents and excellent teaching materials and then they start they went into this material called everyone can create and what this was was instead of um instead of an engineering effort shall we say it was more of a kind of documentation and materials effort so they were creating lesson plans and resource guides for teachers and so on and to a certain extent to be fair um putting features into pages and keynote that schools wanted and need and I think they've done quite a good job of that but they they just were not addressing the kind of school administration aspect of it so how do you move files around how do you without having to copy them how do you collaborate with people all of those kind of things that you see are very strong in the Google World Apple had made some efforts towards them but they were missing the kind of overall picture I think which was the idea that um you know in in G suite for schools you've got a whole situation where it's a um you know the data is all there and the identity is all there and it's all one system that people can work within whereas with iTunes U and and iCloud as a whole it never quite got to that point for schools it was it was always a lot more fragmented than that yeah and collaboration for the the ior applications has always been kind of an afterthought yeah I mean the the feature works right but the problem is that they don't own your identity in the way that Google does and I don't mean that in the Sinister sense of owning you that people talk about gole but I just mean where does the corporate directory live and I'm sort of speaking Enterprise talk here at the moment but you know if I type in my name or or a colleague's name does their email address just pop up there automatically and in G Suite that kind of thing does happen because they're all members of the same domain whereas with apple it's never quite gotten to that level of integration so it's always been a little bit clunky to try and get those kind of things set up yeah way back in 2005 was using sub EA edit in my classes so that people could collaboratively edit and when Google came in with with with Google Docs that was such a revelation for us at the time yeah but you you mentioned how people talk about Google in a sinister fashion and I I feel like there's a lot of apprehension around Google in education um can we talk about that a little bit sure yeah I mean I think there's a lot of apprehension around all technology companies at the moment but I think if I may be so bold as to venture this that I think a lot of it's politically motivated and it's nothing to do with the technology itself that you know the Fallout of the the Trump election in America I think there's an element of um you know Twitter enabled Donald Trump therefore all technology is bad and we're really really in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water and a lot of this stuff um now of course there have been I'm not here to defend Google's privacy practices or anything like that but I think we as a as a world to be honest with you have to make a decision as to like do we want computers to do stuff for us or do we want everything to be private and and that's a trade-off that different people can make different ways and I think it's probably fair to say that reasonable people might reasonably disagree about whether or not Apple stance is the right one or Google stance is the right one or there's maybe a middle ground in between uh I personally think that Apple stance in a K12 setting is perhaps a little too restrictive that I think there are perfectly legitimate grounds for a school to be able to access and monitor more of the computer experience than Apple maybe enables and allows uh whereas in the Google world we get access to a whole lot more stuff and it's that becomes a matter of policy for every school as to exactly what they do with that but there is certainly more straightforward access in a managed situation with Google than with Apple um however the thing that since we moved to Chromebooks and I started talking about on Twitter the one thing that has become very sort of clear and obvious to me is that absolutely nobody understands that g suite for education is under a completely different set of privacy polic and practices than the Consumer Google account if you like so you know G accounts are not tracked for advertising for example um you have a lot of insight into and control into what happens to student data and advertising isn't shown alongside um alongside the Google products in school and it's you know it's it's just handled in a different way and and it's worth having a look at that there if you can you can search for you know G EDU prives policy and you can find there's a whole mini site about how how data is handled in the education product yeah and that is something I was going to bring up I'm so glad you did um one of the things that I found when I was looking to it is that Google has committed to having a third party audit them to to ensure that they're honoring that policy yeah I was going to say that's also part of gdpr um the the data Protection Law in the EU is that in principle organizations that use these companies as processors should be able to audit them in some way and the only sensible way that's doable at scale is for for a third party that's trusted by both sides to do it I mean no no school that I know of has got the technical understanding or capabilities to go and audit at Google data center for example it's just there's a much less the employee resources to dedicate to it exactly I mean how how would my little school go and audit a Google data center to the point where we could uh you you know so so there are these structures in place to sort of manage that and I think um Google is very straightforward about their levels of compliance and you know I think a lot of this what happens a lot is that a lot of loose language is used right so people will will now sort of attack me online and they'll say things like oh you know are you are you are you therefore happy with Google selling all your children's data to advertisers and if you break that down you say like what exactly does that phrase mean you know is it the case I if I wanted to advertise on Google could I go and ask them um for a download of a copy of some random individual's contents of their Google Drive obviously not right Google's in terms of actual security I I feel that Google's very highly incentivized to ensure that um people don't just get random access to your data now there's legal aspects to that as well in terms of what governments are enabled to do and that's a whole complicated story that's probably worth going into at some point but maybe a little more detail and we want to talk about tonight but in terms of um letting advertisers have access to data it's not that's obviously not what happens right you can't just you can't just buy the contents of somebody's Google Drive it's not it's not as simplistic as that and I think people need to just speak a little more precisely when they talk about privacy and and security and not confuse those two things because they are different as well so they are one of the things that I was concerned about that it wasn't exactly clear to me about maybe you have some more insight into is you know I I feel reasonably certain that a student's email and a student's Google Drive docs slides sheets things that will reside within that Google suite for Education are fairly private and fairly secure yeah but I I start to be concerned when there are other services that use Google single sign on and students use their Google account their student account to to single sign on to other services within education because I'm not sure that their privacy policies are nearly as good or ar stringent as what Google might offer no you're you're absolutely 100% right there and that that's a a major area I think of training for schools and also of for control for school admins so when you deploy a Chromebook Suite it is actually possible to control that so I believe you can um you can Whit list Individual Services that you want to allow uh you can Blacklist Services there there are controls for that um we're not using a lot of those kind of services just yet but it's certainly something that I do at data protection training with our staff is to say look you need to and again in the EU under gdpr one should actually complete what's called a privacy impact assessment if you want to use additional services so we've completed some of them for for various things that we use um but I'm I'm always very cautious to say to our teachers look if if you want your kids in the class to sign up for some other account you need to check that out separately from just the the Google core you know it's not it's not the same thing by any means you're absolutely right right and even if it has sign on with Google yeah it's not the same it's it's got its own policy and yeah you have to look in decide if that policy is right if there's even auditing for that absolutely yeah um my other question I think in this kind of area comes down to extensions that people add on you know one of them that that was used in my daughter's school is called haara highlights yeah are you familiar with it at all I'm not specifically familiar with it but I suspect it's pretty similar to one we use called go Guardian which is uh there's a go Guardian teacher which allows sort of classroom monitoring and then there's a goguardian admin which is a web filtering product as well it it sounds similar so the the way that apara was used in my daughter's school is uh for monitoring student behavior and Stu what what browser Tabs are open on the Chromebook mhm and also to assign quizzes and inclass assessments yep and and sort of monitors as those are being taken and um I was I'm a little I'm I'm a little scared about that one personally just because it also has among its admin options the ability to monitor the microphone and camera for each Chromebook okay Y and uh you know of course the ability Once you turn that on you also have the ability whether or not you want to be able to view them when the student is not at school right if the Chromebooks go home yeah and uh I've I've never gotten answers that satisfied me from the school when I've asked about this um you know it it feels to me as though there's something about a school provided Chromebook versus a personal provided Chromebook where we're providing a personal one and being asked to load this this surveillance wear onto it um go ahead yeah I I I agree with your concern there I mean our our model is that the school owns the Chromebook we provide the Chromebook and we install in our case go Guardian on it now just because a school is buying into a particular technology stack doesn't mean that a school themselves don't have to have a very serious reflection process about um about what they're doing with the technology and how that's all working out and in go Guardian for example one of the things you can do there is you can monitor a people's screen and you can actually do it remotely across the internet as well but as a matter of school policy I set up you our teachers have control of that but you can actually go Guardians quite nicely designed and that the school administrator can limit the hours of operation of that so I've said it and I've clearly made this known to the students as well that that only operates between 8: am and 4m the hours in which you would reasonably be in school and not at the weekends so they can have a degree of confidence that um when they go home they're not going to be monitored constantly however the web filtering component um the web filtering component does operate 24/7 so whatever they're searching at home uh that will be filtered and obviously there's a there's a positive aspect of that which is protection against inappropriate content but then it's all there's also an element of um uh you know we can call it surveillance where if we want you know it's interesting that the balance is maybe you know 10 years ago everybody wanted School web filtered completely so that no nothing bad could ever be seen and now we're talking about that is is that does that constitute surveillance or is that a school's appropriate oversight if you like pastoral oversight on on computer use and I think there's there are good arguments either way but having having dealt with situations in the past where you know um people have intervened on cases potential cases of online abuse I've in myself not in my school but through other organizations identified situations of people potentially being groomed online all of these young people being groomed online um and I'm not just throwing those out as as bogey men to say it's okay to do anything you want but these are real situations and that this really happens this isn't just made up and and I I can't be a fundamentalist on this in the same way a hard balance to strike oh it is it is and you know in some ways I would I would like to give young people more privacy however I think the world has changed since we started this conversation and it's really important to think about this because if you if you want to wind back the clock to 2010 or 2005 or a time like that it was often the case that a computer provided or access to a computer provided by a school was often a Young Person's only access to the internet and the one and only way to get on the internet was through school whereas today many many many of those kids have got smartphone access multiple computers at home uh and and the landscape has very much changed so I'm not naive in this and I don't think that because we are we're watching what the young people are doing or filtering their internet that they are in no way ever seeing anything bad on the internet in fact I no they're not you know it's what we're doing is we're displacing the questionable activity from the the the supervised computer to the unsupervised computer and that's that's something that parents need to be aware of as well you know I can only make guarantees about that one computer and in times past that was the only computer in a young person's life and today it's not and it's something we're always given a message about at our school is you know parents have to take responsibility for the other devices you know we'll help with this one and we'll teach about behavior and we'll look for people to be supportive of each other online but there are other computers and that's just the reality of the world there what do you think is the role of the school in in sort of teaching these boundaries or expectations about about privacy and about uh security and what secure practices are uh yeah there's a couple of good questions there you know there's there's a privacy question and then there's a security question and I think we we can be very clear about what the security questions are you know we can teach about good password we can teach about firewalls we can we can teach and we should teach about all these things blocking your screen having encryption turned on in your device and I I teach all of these things because I'm a computer science teacher and I teach all these things from a from a technical perspective but I also try and as much as possible also teach them from a kind of Ethics perspective as well um and what I mean by that is that often I I feel that if I teach about the techniques that are being used to manipulate you it really eliminates a lot of their power if that makes sense and quite often I'll pull back the curtain it really reveals and defuses what's going on yeah I'll quite often teach you about you know the psychological tricks that are used to get you addicted to video games or social media or something and once people know that that's happening to them they can start to see you know behind the curtain if you like and and I think just teaching that way is often quite helpful yeah and as with many other things you know if you think about all the all the other areas of risk that young people get involved in we have as Western societies I suppose we have often taken the line that education is better than uh prevention so if you think about drugs education for example or alcohol or sex education or even Road Safety you know we we don't we don't prevent children from walking across the road I mean I I say that but you know there's a whole body of work being done now to say that actually we are preventing young people from from walking across the road and it's causing them severe problems in terms of their General resilience towards life as well so actually maybe we maybe we have taken it too far but that's a that's a conversation for another day I suppose this this roll out was probably a massive undertaking because you you're coming from one whole system of managing and setting up user accounts and cloning devices and having devices be charged and things like that just the Practical issues involved with changing over um you've only doing this for about you know a week right this is this is a new operation yeah um what are the things that you're encountering so far what are you finding um well we're noticing a number of things uh one is that uh I'm noticing a change in in people's attitudes towards the device and I sort of explain what I mean by that like I said when we started in 2010 nobody knew what an iPad was and nobody knew what it was good for so we very much took I personally really ra I say we but really I took the view that the iPad is a computer we should use the iPad for computer type things so we use it for pages and Kino and all these different tools and what happened in those 10 years was that children went from having no other iPad in their life except the one that we gave them to having the one that we gave them Plus at least another one at home if not sometimes two and those iPads at home were being used more or less exclusively as entertainment devices so I have always been really influenced by that Steve Jobs quote which I I believe is not apocryphal which is when he talked about making the computer a bicycle for the mind and that was that was always kind of what I wanted to do with the computer in school and for some people that absolutely happened you know I I saw some of our young people who you know were were curious and able young people and I give them a computer and it's like Rocket Fuel to their intellect and their their level of you know Global Knowledge and cultural understanding and and insight and the ability to just know new things is incredibly powerful but at the same time I gave the the iPad to other people and they just saw it as a TV in a games device and why that distinction is the way it is I'm not sure I I suspect it probably has something to do with sort of levels of IQ perhaps that more able people you know the phrase in the Bible it says uh to those who have more shall be given and from those who have little everything they have should be taken away you know I that sort of sticks in my mind as as a thought about the impact of the computer on people and for some of those younger people or or those people who sort of Saw as a TV and a games machine what I've noticed is that the Chromebook having gone away from the iPad towards the Chromebook we've started to see more of a work orientated attitude towards it and I think that's partly you know on the configuration I've done that I've I've blocked a number of entertainment type services that we didn't quite have access to block before because again if you think about that aspect web filtering on the iPad is a privacy issue for Apple you know you don't quite have the same access there and and Apple's privacy stance is not necessarily helping everybody and it's not it's not an unalloyed good thing that I can't fil out um effectively and precisely web services that I don't want people to get access to on right on the iPad device I have to do it at the network level and that doesn't always carry the same weight so that's an interesting issue but I think also we're just not giving them the same kind of tool that they use for at home for entertainment so I think there's a bit of confusion particularly with younger users is the iPad for work or is the iPad for fun CU we are saying it's for work and home is saying it's for fun and I think now that we've got a clear distinction between the the fun device which is the iPad and the work device which is the Chromebook I'm starting to see a distinction in how children approach it and they approach it in a more business-like manner at least for now and I'm not saying that necessarily going to continue I can also already see in my filtering logs people trying to turn it back into a games machine but you know what I'm equal to the task so we'll see how that goes I was I was sort of wondering how much the physical keyboard played a role in that you know just by the virtue of having a keyboard it feels feels like this is a work device I certainly noticed that with younger users so we're talking sort of 9 10 11 years old that they felt extremely growing up to be getting a laptop and the older kids they looked at that you know our 15 16 year olds they looked at it more as an efficiency thing they thought right you know I've got a lot of writing to do for my exams uh this is going to help me get that writing done great fine whatever but the younger kids they sort of felt like they were sort of stepping into Daddy's Shoes a little bit and getting a shot of a a grown-ups computer because they've got proper keyboard and it's black and it it's sort of busy you know which is kind of fun to see well this this mirrors my own experience with my own daughters you know I they they've had iPads from 2010 thereabouts and uh when I had to get one of them them Chromebook it it really took off and then of course I I graduated her to a Mac and the other one has the Chromebook now and they're both they're both the the second daughter really still does use her iPad quite a lot um years and years and years ago I had a G4 iMac set up that she would just type into and uh it was a wondrous thing for me because she was non-verbal at that time she didn't speak at all but we discovered that she was typing these these long long documents into the iMac and uh and she kept doing that with the iPad that's an interesting effect that we we've also seen that kind of thing where a a a given developmental stage children can offer type more on the computer produce more on the computer than they could if they were writing or speaking it and I don't quite know what to do with that but I think is true well I think one of the things that you're already doing addresses that really well you know I had to negotiate and and plead with the schools to allow that daughter to type in school and you you've just obviated that whole problem by making sure everyone has that resource yes and it takes away the stigma of being the the ch who has the computer you know if you were to go into many other schools you know you you would know the children who had additional support needs by the fact that they had a computer and everybody else doesn't and and you know the standardization aspect of it I think is important for for that point of view as well and we're able to you know do exams on on computer and things as well so that's that's something that really helps does this change your whole uh roll out for for other devices around it you know you had Apple TVs in the classrooms are they becoming chomecast uh no we have actually gone back we've abandoned wireless display technology entirely and we've gone back to wires um we we actually we' actually done that before we decided to go Chromebook because Apple TV on a busy Network just never achieved the level of reliability that teachers need and teachers need a very high degree of reliability and if you uh as a technologist cause a teacher's lesson to fail because the technolog is not up to it then and you're going to hear about that pretty quickly and um I always remember my first job I worked with an older guy who was a sis admin and had been for years and he he said this one thing to me that I've never forgotten he said you've got to drink coffee with the people that use your systems and I've never forgotten that because he said you know if you don't meet these people socially and in other situations you're never going to hear about the pain that you're causing them and you need to know what's going on because otherwise you're going to be your name is going to be trashed and you're not going to hear about it in time so I've always thought about that in school and that was the problem we had with Apple TV was that we just never got the level of reliability that you could just go through your presentation the convenience was great but the reliability was poor and we never got it right so even before we went Chromebook we we had pretty much retired all of our Apple TVs I think we have one or two still in the school but most of them are gone now well this has been delightful I have really enjoyed having you speak with me yeah it's it's been my pleasure I think it's this is kind of the first opportunity I've had to speak to anybody about it since we since we started the Chromebook roller I think the the the overall sentiment I think is has been pretty positive um certainly very positive in our school and I think that um a lot of people who have looked at my blog and have looked at things that I've read and said about it not a lot of people have come back at me with either um pedagogical arguments or um really even technical arguments and what a lot of people just thrw at me is is you know a half-baked privacy argument you know and I think that I spent a lot of time on Twitter just typing out you do realize that the edu system is under a different privacy policy and and leaving it at that but I think I think it's going to be a significant change and there's one thing if I can just add that we didn't quite get to with with what we were seeing about the transition was that it's not just that the sort of lack of features in iTunes U that caused us to change but there's also a forward-looking aspect to it as well and and what I think one of the things that influenced my thinking about this was that as teachers in our school we have really adopted Google Drive and and um document sharing and collaboration and all these kind of things and for maybe the past three or four years we've really been going very hard in that direction and we found it to be an incredible efficiency saving the kind that you could never go back from and I was thinking to myself you know we do all this as teachers but we don't do any of it with the students the students are stuck in this world where you've got your iPad and on your iPad is your files and if something goes wrong with that computer your files are at risk and we as teachers we're working in the cloud doesn't matter what computer we're on you know we're getting this great collaboration there's a lot of efficiency and it's going really quickly and it's working really well why are we not doing that for the kids because if that's already part of our job surely it's going to be the future of theirs and that's the other side of of making the switch from the Apple world to the Google world is that I think Apple has kind of I think perhaps missing the boat is too strong a word but certainly lagging behind in terms of being Cloud first uh and in my more cynical moments I feel that sometimes Apple's privacy stance is a little self-serving in that it's a form of sort of fear and certainty in doubt targeted against people who are good at something that Apple aren't good at and that's that just grats a little bit with me and I've been an Apple guy since you know the mid 80s but some of the things I hear and the way I look at what Apple are doing versus what other companies are doing but also the way Apple then start to talk about it it's not always clear to me that what they're saying and what they're doing and what they're actually working on are all matching up in the same way so so that's just another aspect that's worth thinking about in terms of what motivated us to change just from from the iPad to the Google world as well it it it seems to me that practically there's so in the old days when you using a computer you had to intentionally save things yeah right and and you know I I was reminded of this again the other day when someone said that the save icon looked more like a vending machine with a coffee cup in where they where the slot is why why is there a vending machine in my icons here because who knows what a FL disc is anymore but indeed the the Google approach is save everything nothing should ever be lost you should have revisions you should be able to go back through revisions and apple in some ways is is still very much in this you have to intentionally save or you have to intentionally back up or if you're backing up to iCloud it happens once when you're connected to power on Wi-Fi and not doing anything where Google's a little bit more forward in in this that that everything is saved all the time so that if you drop the Chromebook at a river which was the example they used at Google IO when they introduced them yeah you just grab another one yeah mean I I did that today in my school you know a boy came in with his Chromebook not charged cuz he'd been ill all weekend and I just said you know okay give me that one plug it in here take this other one go and do your school day and swap them back at the end of the day you know that's a powerful model and the iPad just in some ways you know I I remember watching WWDC this year and I thought they are making the absolute perfect iteration of the last generation of computing you know they're making the best ever local state locally installed applications operating system and Hardware combination and they they're perfecting it to the end degree but my sense is the world is moving on and having uh having a stateful computer a computer where and there's data locally and it really matters what's going on here and there's configuration and there's state that doesn't sync um that's starting to feel really like the past and the experiences we've had even just in the time I've been triing and and deploying Chromebooks that really feels like the future where you as you say data is not getting lost it doesn't you're not actually thinking about where the where the data physically is as such um it's tied to your account it's not tied to the physical device all that is an incredibly liberating model to work with because the devices then become fungible and in a way if you think about what happens when the device becomes fungible is you no longer start to care so much about the device you're not so wedy to one device and and if you think about Apple's model that's potentially quite a problem for Apple because as soon as the the the device doesn't matter so much anymore then you know why am I spending $2,500 on a 15in laptop but I could get one from Acer for500 $100 you know and it's a Chromebook and it's got all my stuff on it already you know you know I've got a really nice Lenovo 15-inch laptop sitting Bes beside me they cost me 600 and if I wanted to get a 15-inch laptop from Apple I'd be paying £2,400 for the entry level model and in a world where the data and your work gets logically separated from the computer where then does that leave a maker of Premium computers and sure you've got your your Mac Pro buyers who obviously need local power and lots of it but then there's everybody else and it's really interesting going forward to see how that's going to work out and whether or not people are still going to put a premium on you know quality build performance all of these things and whether Apple continues to provide all of those things uh that's an open question as well but how that all works out and how it psychologically works out for users I think is going to be a really interesting question you know fantastic well what I'd like to do is check in with you in the future after you've had some time with this roll out and just ask how it's going yeah I'd be delighted yeah in the meantime I think we ought to wrap this up I've kept you on quite a long time is there a URL that that you'd like people to go to and visit to learn more about Cedars um sure uh our website which I have shamefully not updated for the new school year just yet is uh Cedars CED rs. Inver do.uk I'm sure you can pop that in the show for people who want a quick link great thank you so much my pleasure um I should have to cheer it over he makes some really interesting points I had no idea about Google privacy being different for example in education and stuff so I'll be fascinated to see what happens Through The Years with this but terribly interesting yes I'm really pleased you got him Apple in a unique move has released iOS 13.1 betas for testing what's what's unique about that do you know uh they runs on Android no not not yet but do we have 13.0 released yet oh good point I don't know okay uh I'm taking from that we don't right so if we don't have IOS 13.0 released what on Earth are we doing seeing a 13.1 beta it's just very weird and it's fine a few years ago I'd agreed with you but now you know I mean if you watch Doctor Who the Third 13th Doctor is really the 15th doctor uh the 10th was the night we're we haven't got time for all that William the the the problem is this right historically we would get all of the developer vas for iOS 13 and then 13 would be released and then we would get the 13.1 developer betas and and now they're not even respecting history I think the problem is that I think Craig fedi has too much on his plate okay I think Hair Force One has a little too much to worry about I mean look he's got he's shepherding Catalina he's sheering iOS he's shepherding iPad OS he's shepher watch OS and there's also the Apple TV OS that's five different OS releases that have to happen all pretty much at the same time on the same schedule that's a lot that's incredible yes absolutely that this happens at all is amazing I'm always very impressed and I I think what we're seeing I think what we're seeing is the cracks happening Under Pressure because it makes no sense to release 13.1 without a 13.0 released unless 13.0 is gold master and there's nothing left to do to it so they can start working on 131 13.1 vug sixes except that if it were goldmaster they would start saying it's goldmaster so this is very weird that we have these these two beta paths in release at the same time okay I'm less concerned about you than this you've just just offered one possible solution I'm sure there there there's a missing episode somewhere something we don't know but it's fine really it'll all be ready for whatever day in September I mean people are just speculating that 13.1 is actually just a mislabeled developer beta that it should be it should be instead of 13.1 it should be 13.0 beta 9 but going to make a typing mistake anywhere that could be the place to make it rather than deep in the code so it's it's weird it's very weird are you okay about it though well you know what choice do we have we just get to Roll Along until we see what actually gets released but uh make some tea we could have a talk no is that the biggest thing going on thir uh 13.1 I mean it's pretty big news it's we're getting really close to this release date yeah that's exciting we expect the release to be September 10th and so we are getting quite close to it and and uh so yeah it is exciting now we were talking education a little bit ago and I just wanted to point out this piece about a Scottish City uh that's Glasgow city council and a company called CGI they're providing 50,000 school children in the city with iPads as a part of a $69 million or 300 million pound project to modernize and improve the educational prospects for Scottish school children I think this is very interesting especially after someone who's had tons of experience doing that onetoone roll out moving away from it yes it is but Scottish education system is very interesting they do lots of things I mean I'm I'm in the UK and Scotland's part of the UK but I'm in England which has very different systems and there's an awful lot to admire in Scotland I think there's an awful lot to mind scarland in general but the the quote here is that we want our children and young people to be equipped with the skills that will make them shine as digital citizens both now and later in their working lives said Glasgow City councelor Chris Cunningham we're aware that 90% of jobs in Scotland involve digital work and so our pupils will be well equipped for the workplace I think the thing to be careful of here and be mindful of is that the computers of today are not the computers that will be in place in the workplace uh 10 15 years from now when these students will be in the workplace that well some of the tasks will resemble them themselves you know word processing is still probably going to be word processing um spreadsheets are still spreadsheets these kinds of things don't really shift a whole lot but what is a computer and how you use it and and what tasks you do it for and what tasks compose a job change rapidly and and quickly and uh and in large ways right it used to be before the Advent of of lotus 123 that if you wanted a spreadsheet showing you data you would make a request and then the seventh floor of the office building would get to work on that with huge huge blot paper and figuring it out and then they would present you with a spread sheet of paper with all the cells filled in by hand kind of thing about a month later so what FY Cal started yes yeah destruction all over the world yeah right and and so the these things change but it's intriguing to see that they're going iPad um in the face of the things that Mr Spears who just spoke with has learned I suppose it's uh is it the democratization of Technology you pick with what whatever works for you the best and for his case he's found it in Chromebook they're finding it in iPads it's just great that there are these systems available so well what happens in what's happened in the past is that every few years a different School District tries a onetoone program of some kind like early early early on there was the iBook program in enrio County Virginia where where they distributed iBooks to students and it was a complete cluster to be honest because there there was this real problem with managing what students were able to do what students should be doing and and even just how to integrate this thing into the curriculum properly and so you know it's one thing to say we're going to roll out a 300 million pound project for iPads great how are teachers going to use that in terms of curriculum how are students going to use that in ways that Ensure that they're not just using as another entertainment device and that's that's where this comes down is the implementation you know it's it's easy to cheerlead in Fanboy and say iPads oh 50,000 of them out there in the school wonderful that's great for Apple yeah it is it really is great for Apple but what's going to support their use in in a in a real learning environment is a question well let's let's not turn this into a Bad Thing 50,000 iPads in a school is better than nothing in the school yes it has issues of support and it's always always going to be down to the teachers and how they use things how they teach uh but this is a good thing giving teachers some options so well I what I'd like to say is I think we should find out more about it we should try and watch that closely and see if there's something we can learn from what they're doing in their roll out that makes it different from some past experiences we've seen cool that makes sense absolutely let's keep an eye on all of these things yeah now Apple we've talked about Apple before is planning to improve series privacy protections yeah I was particularly interested in this one because they did that thing of uh I think even knew told me about this that there people were listening uh to seral recordings to make it better and then they stopped and they stopped saying they pending a review of their process everybody pending reviewer process they never actually do anything and Apple has actually done it well actually all of the companies that have voice products so far the big ones Google Facebook uh Amazon have said that there's stopping human listening human grading and so they they've said they have done something right they said they stopped Apple said they stopped but before they stopped what they were doing was reviewing a small sample of audio from Siri requests less than 0 2% and the computer generated transcripts to measure how well Siri was responding to improve its reliability did the user intend to wake Siri did Siri hear the request accurately did Siri respond appropriately to the request and and what's happened is that they're going to change things a little bit us will be able to opt in to help Siri improve those who choose to participate can opt out again at any time Apple won't retain audio recordings and will computer use computer generated transcripts when customers do opt in only Apple employees will be allowed to listen not contractors interesting interesting and this one's a little iffy for me Apple will work to delete quote unquote any recording which is determined to be an inadvertent trigger right I'm not clear what that means I mean if you say Syria and Syria goes yeah I'm here that's an intent trigger but but I'm not sure what work to delete means well what about the fact that my homepod has such good hearing that wherever I am in the house it responds to the magic words I could be looking at my watch when I say it and I hear this distant thing from my office yes know it's that's a slightly different problem but still a problem yes it's in in on inadvertent trigger of the wrongs Siri so maybe it's just that it's more finer tuned than uh always deleting it because sometimes the definition of inadvertent might be different yeah so the the good news here is that there is going to be some more clarity involved the you know yes there will still be human review but you don't have to have it you can opt out of that so that's interesting I I think that there's still a lot of room for appal improve here and I think they could do better than this but it's good that they're doing this um I will opt in um if I even think about it I won't bother to opt out I'm not so fussed about this I think when you you say it's something like 0.2% I start thinking that's probably quite a big number whenever they only say a percent they're exaggerating it up or down kind of thing so it's probably huge and they've probably heard me going wrong but you know it's Apple I'm at least convinced they're not going off and selling my uh swearing at Siri to other companies when necessary y apple and other things that they're going to do that are good plans to contribute funds to ongoing efforts in the Amazon so you've heard about this right in in Brazil there are the Amazon forests that are on fire yes astounding yes and those that's the reason why this is dangerous is because those forests produce a decent amount of of uh oxygen which are is necessary for human life yes read about it yes it's really it's not just about you know the the notion that we we like forests and forests and animals are nice and preserving biodiversity is fun it's this is actually like really necessary these are indispensable forests and so it's not exactly clear how Apple intends to assist but it looks like they're donating funds directly to local nonprofits emergency service organizations working to fight the fires I wonder how much you can actually do with fire I mean how quickly you can repair the damage even how quickly you can grow Replacements well the problem is that even if you grow replacement trees that when there there are a couple different things going on here first of all there are indigenous people living within the forests who will be harmed by this and secondly there are animals that will be har Wildlife that will be harmed that doesn't come back there's there's some you know yes you can reforest and if you reforest 20 years later some Wildlife comes back but some of it just goes extinct some of it you just that's it goodness and so this is problematic um it is it is good to see apple using some of their cash largess to do things like this that don't necessarily relate directly to bottom line but do absolutely affect all of us yeah makes uh things meeting deadlines for iOS seem a little bit less uh important doesn't it perhaps perhaps well that's the time we have I I want to make sure that we cut this close so that you've got enough time to listen to the interview thank you so much this has been Victor I'm V marks on Twitter and Victor Apple insider.com William where do people find you still working on cable M9 having a very good time but also on Twitter as William at no hang on Twitter is W gallager email as William Apple insider.com where else would I go uh to Tav te that's what you do all right we will be back next week with more next week's going to be a really interesting episode to pull together but no matter how we do it we're looking forward to having you back then we'll see you then\n"