Last week, Apple released watchOS 4 for the Apple Watch. With the update comes a new available watch face called the Siri watch face. The face pulls relevant data from all of your Apple apps and presents them to you as cards in chronological order based on relevance. Using the Digital Crown, you can scroll through them and see a timeline of your day.

These cards pull data from calendar, weather, reminders, timers, alarms, sunrise, sunset, workouts, and more. My teaching schedule is complex. I teach in five different rooms, and co-teach almost 300 band students. Our programs calendar is shared with one another, our staff, and community via a complex series of Google Calendars. I have these calendars calibrated to show me only the events that display the classes that only I teach, and thus, where I need be and when. The Apple Watch displays this information simply. Until now, I have been using the modular watch face because I like how many custom complications I can fit on it.

With the Siri face, I don’t need all these complications because most of the data I need from them shows up at the topmost card, and only when I really need to see it. The face does allow for two complications. One of the default complications is a button that launches straight into Siri. Even though one of the cards Siri watch face can display has weather, I like this to be constantly visible, so I have opted to put the Carrot Weather complication in its place.

Do you use alarms, timers, and calendars throughout your class day? This Watch face is worth checking out.

The Siri face shows upcoming calendar events.

Combine calendar with alarms, timers, and other app data and this is a powerful watch face.

You can scroll through your day with the Digital Crown.

The modular face is still useful for viewing a lot of complications at once.

This post by Christopher Russel does a great job capturing my feelings about the importance of the Apple Watch in a busy classroom environment.

The surprise Apple Watch feature this week has been a combination of Siri and Alarms. Yes, alarms.

Our Middle School has no bells (other than start of the day and end of the day). We have different schedules all the time. So what I have done is this: at the end of one class, I raise my wrist, say, “Hey Siri, set an Alarm for 10:15” (or whatever the ending time of the next class is).

At 10:15, my watch dings, but more importantly, taps my wrist, and I know that I need to dismiss students.

I cannot overstate the importance of alarms. My school has bells this year and I STILL need alarms to remind me when to let kids pack up in time to be at their next classes. I am usually setting alarms throughout the entire day. In the frantic moments of teaching it absolutely does make a difference to save a few moments asking Siri on my wrist to do it rather than fiddling around with my phone.

The same goes for notifications. I am always on the move at school. And I am able to be attentive to so many things without ever stopping the task at hand. I get notifications from Slack (the messaging service our music department uses to collaborate), iMessage, and important staff emails. This might seem unnecessary, but I love being able to know if one of my colleagues is sending me a troublesome student or if there is going to be a fire drill at a particular time that afternoon without dropping what I am doing. I keep all of my Apple devices on silent or do not disturb mode so I only get notified by the gentle haptic feedback on my wrist. The only exception is when I am sitting in front of my Mac which I also leave in do not disturb mode at work but see the little red badge on various apps to know I need to attend to something. Watch notifications are non intrusive enough that I can easily ignore them. But they are still pretty non intrusive even if I choose to read them. I think the basic clock and notification features of the Apple Watch are so well implemented that they very well may be the "killer apps" everyone is always saying a new and innovative product needs to have. At least they are for me.

That being said, I am curious to see what other kinds of apps can be made when Apple releases watchOS 2 on September 16th. This update is shipping with a native SDK which will allow software developers to make their apps perform a lot faster (all third party apps are garbage slow right now) and take advantage of the hardware of the watch, particularly the digital crown, speakers, and haptic engine. I am desperately awaiting a metronome app for the watch that allows me to change the tempo with the crown and feel the tempo with haptic feedback rather than the speakers.