Apple's Schoolwork now available, lets teachers dole out homework on the iPad and iPhone

The free Schoolwork app, first announced in March is now available to all teachers. With it, teachers can create assignments, collaborate with students, and use a series of apps for learning, with assessment of student progress. In conjunction with Apple's Classroom app, Schoolwork gives teachers more tools to enhance learning and help both educators and students get more out of Apple technology used in the classroom.

Schoolwork allows creation and broadcast of assignments with a wide range of content, ranging from web sources, to PDFs, and other documents, in conjunction with specific activities in apps. Students can use Schoolwork to stay organized and keep track of the work they need to complete and due dates.

According to Apple, popular education apps including Explain Everything, Tynker, GeoGebra and Kahoot! work directly with Schoolwork. Developers can now update their apps to take advantage of Schoolwork by utilizing ClassKit, a new education framework, to make it easy to assign activities and view student progress.

Classroom has been around for two years on iOS, as a way for teachers to manage iPads used by students in the classroom, automatically connecting to a class' iPads. It can be used to remotely open apps, launch websites, or access books, with educators also able to remotely monitor the student's screen, and to lock all devices to refocus the student's attention.

Classroom lets teachers view student screens during class to help students stay focused, assign shared iPads to specific students for class and even reset a student's password.

Using the pair of apps, teachers are provided a snapshot of class performance and can check on an individual student's progress across all activities. Apple has included its normal privacy and security features to allow students to control the accounts used by their students and decide when student progress information is shared.

Apple will be releasing a Mac version of Classroom, which will provide the same functionality as its iPad-based counterpart. It is presently in beta through the AppleSeed for IT program for Apple's education and enterprise customers.