Every child is born full of creativity. Nurturing it is one of the most important things educators do. Creativity makes your students better communicators and problem solvers. It prepares them to thrive in today’s world — and to shape tomorrow’s. For 40 years, Apple has helped teachers unleash the creative potential in every student. And today, we do that in more ways than ever. Not only with powerful products, but also with tools, inspiration, and curricula to help you create magical learning experiences.
Products for Learning
With free Amazon Kindle desktop app, read your ebooks on your PC or Mac. You can sync up your reading across platforms, including notes and bookmarks, making it easy to read wherever you are.
Technology designed to be as limitless as a child’s imagination.
Apple products put complete freedom of expression in the hands of every student who uses them. iPad is simple enough for anyone to master right from the start, and flexible enough to let students go wherever their ideas take them. Mac provides the power to pursue even the most ambitious projects. And with a full suite of Apple-designed apps made for creation, both iPad and Mac give students a canvas as limitless as their imaginations.
Tools for Teaching
Apps that help you put the power of technology to work. In and out of class.
We’ve developed tools to make it easy for you to guide how your students use devices and apps in the classroom, and to provide valuable insight into each student’s progress. So you can focus on what’s most important: teaching.
Everyone Can Create
Project guides that unleash creativity in every student.
When students have more ways to express ideas, it changes how they think. They see things they wouldn’t otherwise see and make connections they wouldn’t otherwise make. With this in mind, we’ve worked with educators to design a curriculum with project guides to help you ignite creativity and give your students the skills to communicate through drawing, photography, music and video. So your students can put math equations to music, bring an illustrator’s eye to social studies, and make scientific processes come alive on film.
Teaching Code
An immersive program to help you teach the language of innovation.
Coding is essential to help students thrive in a future driven by technology. We created the comprehensive Everyone Can Code curriculum with lessons on iPad and Mac, teacher guides, and apps to make it easy to teach coding in your classroom. Because we believe coding isn’t extracurricular — it’s part of the core curriculum.
We’ve designed curriculum that makes it easy to bring coding and core creative skills to every subject. And programs to help teachers learn from one another, professional learning resources to build skills and confidence with iPad and Mac, and initiatives to recognize pioneers in education. All to empower you to be the best teacher you can be.
IT and Deployment
Apple devices are as easy to deploy as they are to use.
We want every aspect of your school’s experience with Apple products to be as simple and intuitive as the products themselves. That starts with support for IT in each step of your deployment. And now with Microsoft Azure Active Directory support, it’s easier than ever to integrate iPad and Mac into your learning environment.
How to Buy
Rethink the cost of technology in your classrooms.
Best Apps For Students Organization
When you expect more from the technology you use in the classroom and look for what's best for teaching and learning, iPad is the clear winner over other less expensive options. And when you look closely at the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for your deployment, you may find that iPad costs less and gives you more over its lifetime.
Note-taking apps are not all created equal. In fact, the deeper you dig into them, the more you realize how different they all are in terms of what they offer in both concept and abilities. While a solid note-taking app is a necessary piece of any suite of productivity apps, figuring out what to do with it in the first place is half the challenge.
Getting the right note-taking app is as much about finding one that clicks with you as it is about the nitty-gritty details of the service. In general, however, a reliable note-taking app lets you jot down all the things you want to remember quickly, easily, no matter where you are, and likewise lets you refer to all those notes anytime and anywhere.
The giants in the space, namely Editors' Choice Evernote and
Evernote caused a ruckus over the past few years among its paying users for hiking the price and slashing the lower tiers of service. While many people are thinking about leaving Evernote, the sad state of affairs at the moment is that nothing lives up to it. If you use the full gamut of Evernote's features and functionality, there simply isn't a good Evernote alternative just yet. OneNote is a close second, but transitioning to it from Evernote is tough. The two services have structural differences that make it difficult to map one set of notes into the other app.
There are alternatives, of course, and
Pricing and Plans
A huge part of the reason people got miffed at Evernote was its price hike. It costs more than any other note-taking and syncing app. While it does have a free version, nonpaying Evernote members are limited to syncing their notes
Evernote accounts come in four tiers of service: Basic (free), Plus ($34.99 per year or $3.99 per month), Premium ($69.99 per year or $7.99 per month), and Evernote Business. The free tier lets you upload only 60MB of data each month, but the data you use is yours to keep. So technically speaking, the total storage is unlimited because you get more every month ad infinitum. Plus and Premium members can upload more and get a whole host of features that aren't included for free.
Google Keep is free with no upsells or special plans. All it requires is a Google account. The amount of storage space you get in Keep is dependent on your Google Drive storage, which is 15GB by default. You can pay $1.99 per month for 1TB of storage, which will be shared across all Google apps. There is an upload limit for images of 10MB and 25MP.
Microsoft OneNote handles storage similarly to Google Keep, using OneDrive for storage the same way Keep uses Google Drive. OneNote is also free with no special upgrades for extra features. The max file upload size is 100MB. Free users get 5GB of space, whereas Office 365 account holders get 1TB all told, shared among other Office Online apps. An Office 365 Personal account costs $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year.
Simplenote is a free service with no upgrades or in-app purchases. It has a variety of apps for all major platforms, and there is no limit on storage, so long as you don't abuse it, according to the company's terms. Simplenote doesn't support uploads, multimedia, or even formatting—just text. It's worth noting that you'd have a hard time abusing limitless storage with plain text.
Features Worth Having
A few features worth having
OCR comes in handy when snapping pictures of text. Google Keep can actually transcribe text that's in an image into typed text that you can then copy and paste or edit at will. Evernote Premium can run OCR on all text in images, including handwriting, when you look for words in a search. Microsoft OneNote can also read OCR text from photos. It also has a useful Digital Ink feature that turns your own handwriting into
Study Apps For Students
A Web
In terms of organizational tools, every app is different, but the important thing is you have an interface that makes sense to you and that helps you find what you need when you need it. Evernote uses notes, notebooks, stacks of notebooks, and tags, whereas OneNote has pages, sections, and notebooks. Both Simplenote and Google Keep only use tags, so if you prefer to not think about where you're putting your notes, those tools might be better options.
Take Notes, Sync, and Go
While Evernote remains PCMag's Editors' Choice for note-taking and syncing apps, we did lower its overall rating to reflect its drop in value after the changes in its pricing and services. Hopefully, the uproar caused by Evernote will light a fire under competitors to hurry up and improve their apps. There are a lot of promising apps, but most of them need more time to mature. The read the capsule reviews below, and, if one of them sounds interesting, please be sure to click through to the full review for more details.
Featured Note-Taking App Reviews:
Evernote Review
MSRP: $0.00Pros: Effortless note-taking and syncing. Incredible search. Great features. Flexible.
Cons: Free level of service too restrictive. Expensive Premium plan.
Bottom Line: Evernote has long been one of the best productivity apps. Even though rising costs have lessened the value proposition, long-time users will have a hard time finding a better replacement.
Read ReviewMicrosoft OneNote (Web) Review
MSRP: $6.99Pros: Rich with features. Reliable. Treats all note content as distinct page elements. Familiar interface for Office users. Office 365 users get 1TB of space.
Cons: Slow and clunky. Confusing structural design. Poor search in Web app. Requires OneDrive for some management features. Can only share at the notebook level.
Bottom Line: OneNote is a feature-rich note-taking and syncing app, and it gives away a lot for free. But it's still second best to Evernote.
Read ReviewQuip Review
MSRP: $12.00Pros: Combines team messaging with collaborative document creation and editing tools. Quick to set up. Easy to use. Free version available. Supported by Zapier.
Cons: No team calendar or other apps to add. Interface could be more sophisticated. No rich markup tools. Lacks explicit limits on storage space for free accounts. Limited API.
Bottom Line: Quip is a team collaboration tool for both document editing and group communication. It's quick to set up and easy to use, but it may not scale for fast-growing businesses.
Read ReviewBear (for Mac) Review
MSRP: $14.99Pros: Supports Markdown. Good options for exporting. Can import notes from Evernote and other services. Inexpensive Pro account.
Cons: Extremely light on features. For Mac and iOS users only. No option to selectively sync to iOS devices. Syncing requires paid plan.
Bottom Line: Bear is a lightweight among note-taking and syncing apps, although it could meet your needs if you only use macOS and iOS devices and only take simple notes.
Read ReviewSimplenote (Web) Review
MSRP: $0.00Pros: Simple. Apps for a wide variety of devices. Unique sharing options. Reliable search. Supports Markdown on some devices. Free.
Cons: Lacks notebooks or folders for organizing. Only supports text notes. No formatting tools. No Web clipper.
Bottom Line: For a basic note-taking and syncing experience, Simplenote is a reliable, if stripped-down, choice. If simplicity is what you're after, this free service is worth a try.
Read ReviewZoho Notebook (for Mac) Review
MSRP: $0.00Pros: Great implementation of locked notes feature. Can stack notes. Free.
Cons: No Web or Windows apps. Can't upload documents. Limited sorting and organization features.
Bottom Line: Zoho Notebook is a free Mac app that makes note-taking simple, but to be really useful, it needs a web version and better organizational features.
Read ReviewGoogle Keep (Web) Review
MSRP: $0.00Pros: Fast. Customizable labels (tags). Transcribes image text to typed text. Works well with other Google apps. Reminders are well integrated. Free.
Cons: No audio recording ability in the Web app. No desktop apps. Can't mark up images, PDFs. Weak Web clipper. Preview images not well displayed. OCR feature not automatic nor intuitive.
Bottom Line: Google Keep is a free note-taking and syncing app with a nifty OCR feature, but it lacks the features and mobile apps offered by the competition.
Read Review