This year at the Apple Education Summit, I've had the pleasure of teaming up with Coby Reynolds to deliver a workshop we've called On Your Device, On Your Terms: Shortcuts, Privacy, and the Power of On-device Apple Intelligence. It's a session we've both been looking forward to: a hands-on look at how much educators can do with the tools sitting on their devices.
This post is a quick companion to the session: what we covered, and where you can go to try the tools yourself. And for the nerds out there like Coby and I, here's another article on Apple’s On-Device and Server Foundation Models. 🤓
Why this session
So much of the AI conversation in schools runs into the same wall: what happens to sensitive information, student data especially, when we hand it over to a cloud service? Our workshop leans right into that question. The answer we explore is that a surprising amount of useful, everyday work can happen entirely on-device, staying inside whatever restrictions your school has in place.
The tools we shared
LM Studio: a free app you can download and run on your Mac that lets you work with a large language model locally. You get much of what you'd expect from a cloud AI tool - drafting, summarising, planning - but nothing leaves your machine. For anyone who's ever paused before pasting something sensitive into a chatbot, that changes the calculation a fair bit.
Download LM Studio for Mac here
Shortcuts: this is Coby's domain, and he makes a strong case that Shortcuts is one of the most underused tools on our devices. He walks through building your own to handle routine jobs like recording and summarising a staff meeting, without uploading a single transcript to Gemini, ChatGPT, or anywhere else.
Coby has shared two Shortcuts Sidekick series you can download and adapt for your own setting. Make sure you check them out!
- For teachers: Teacher Shortcuts Series - Mr. Coby
- For students: Student Shortcuts Series - Mr. Coby
Over to you
Our hope is that everyone leaves with at least one Shortcut of their own - and, more to the point, the confidence to spot the next everyday problem worth solving.
So here's the ask: if you're already using Shortcuts in your school, tell us how. Drop a comment with the one you can't do without - the more specific, the better. The best ideas in this space nearly always come from a colleague who quietly worked something out and shared it.
Attach up to 5 files which will be available for other members to download.