The new IOS 15 update has just recently come out and is catching lots of people by surprise. Apple has added so many useful features in the update, some being On-Device and Offline Siri, New safari features, and even Android and Web-Based FaceTime, but there are features that can help students a lot with note taking, focusing, and contacting friends. 

Safari has new useful features for school.  You can now do many things such as tab group syncing, and customizing your start page. Tab group syncing is something that’s very useful for students that have multiple apple devices which they switch back and forth on from time to time. In tab group syncing, you can sync your tabs across devices so you have access to your tabs from anywhere. Students who do work on their phone and iPad will find this very useful. It will aid in keeping them organized because their tabs will be on both devices. If a student were to forget their iPad at school, they could easily go on their IPhone and finish their work where they left off.

Live text is a new feature that acknowledges useful information in your photos & online images, so you can send an email, make calls, or even look up directions by clicking on the highlighted text in an image. Or you could take a picture of something that has text on it. It can be typed text or text that was written by hand, but it tends to work better on typed text because it’s more legible. This is perfect for students that have trouble reading or trouble concentrating. Many students work better when the words are being read out loud to them. It can also help if students are trying to take notes and rather listen to it out loud while they’re doing it.

Focus mode is a new iOS 15 feature which will help you concentrate on a task by getting rid of other distractions. When you need to do something, and you rather not turn off your phone completely, you can just use focus mode. It will for the time being, silence all your notifications, or the ones you marked as silenced. Not only will it do that, but it will also let others know that you’re busy and that your notifications are silenced. You can even label the names of different focus modes. For example you could label a focus mode as “Studying” and when this one is turned on, you could silence specific notifications and only allow message notifications from specific people. This is a great feature for students with iPads because it can help them concentrate while doing schoolwork. Considering focus mode also reminds other people when someone is in focus mode, this will also be useful to the person in focus mode because other people will be aware before texting them.

Drag and drop is another great and effective feature on iOS 15. On most computers, you can drag text from one website or application to another, this is now available to do on your devices that have iOS 15. Considering this, students with iOS 15 on their school iPads will find this feature useful, especially when working in groups for group projects. If a group member were to send you a link, and you didn’t have time to view it at the moment, you could quickly drag the link to your document and leave it there until you’re able to view it. Same with images, if your classmate were to send you a link image that you couldn’t view until later, you could easily drag it onto your document and view it later.

Finally, there are new FaceTime features. FaceTime on iPhone has been limited to strictly apple product users until now.  Apple users are now able to FaceTime non Apple users such as Samsung users. In order to do this, Apple users have to send a link to FaceTime to the person they want and just like a zoom call link, the person joins.  This breaks down that barrier of not being able to FaceTime/ fully contact someone who does not own Apple products. This could affect students by expanding the help they can get out of school.  Another Facetime feature is the screen share option. There is now a way to share your screen on a FaceTime call. The option is in the bar menu on the top of the call. This is a great feature since if there’s ever a time you want to share something with someone while you’re on a FaceTime call, you do not have to take screenshots and send them anymore.

This iOS update has been one of the best updates in terms of features. Although only a few of them were stated, it doesn’t stop there. This update has multiple cool and fun features. With that said, if you haven’t updated your Apple device, do it now!