Apple CEO Tim Cook focused on education products and initiatives during a day at Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago on Wednesday. While most of the post press conference talk centered around the new, low-cost iPad that is available to schools for $299, the company made another announcement that could have an even bigger educational impact. The California-based company will be collaborating with Chicago Public Schools and Northwestern University to offer teachers free professional development in coding to give them the “tools they need to bring coding and computer science into the classroom."

An example of the iPad's augmented related apps and educational content.

A "Center for Excellence" will be created at Lane Tech, where high school teachers can go to learn Apple’s Everyone Can Code curriculum. Participating educators can also get in-school coaching and mentors and take the App Development with Swift course. Apple was already working with the city of Chicago through the company’s Everyone Can Code program. This is an expansion of that initiative, which aimed to bring coding opportunities to the hundreds of thousands of students in Chicago Public Schools. As for that iPad, it supports Apple Pencil, and is compatible with new versions of Apple’s word processing and presentation apps. It also has a new digital book creation feature. In the rest of its education-related news, Apple has added more educational content to its augmented reality developer program and will offer a new, free app called Schoolwork that is supposed to make it easier for teachers to give assignments and track their students' progress.