AppleTV Revisited

Today I helped run some iMovie training for teachers at school, which was fun. Part of that involved rigging up a MacBook Pro to a projector in our training room, which also has an AppleTV connected to it. I was presenting Keynote slides, but also wanted to occasionally mirror an iPad to demo how to use apps like Educreations to do basic storyboarding. I was using Reflector to set up an AirPlay receiver, but it struck me that I should just use the AppleTV instead. After all, Mountain Lion lets you mirror your Mac’s screen to an AppleTV.

My problem with AppleTV from before was that the aspect ratios seemed to go a bit wrong when mirroring 4:3 content vs 16:9. I tried fiddling with the projector’s aspect ratio and putting it on some sort of widescreen zoom mode made a difference. However, I then installed an update on the AppleTV and set the projector to good old 4:3 (rather than ‘auto’) and it all seemed to work! Mirrored 4:3 iPads filled the screen, but also Keynote slides too!

So maybe AppleTV works better than I originally thought!

Weird iPad mini charging problem

Hmm. Today a Year 6 teacher told me that the iPads weren’t charging. The ISIS charging cabinet is basically some 10 and 8-way power adapters plugged together with iPad power adapters plugged in. But yet it seemed that all the iPad power adaptors didn’t work that were plugged into one of the 10-way power bars. I checked with a different adaptor, and the 10-way adaptor was definitely still working. I then took out the iPad charger and plugged it directly into a wall socket. That seemed to make it work again! I had to do that with all the iPad adaptors affected, but they now seem to work ok.

This is a little bit worrying. It could be an issue with the iPad mini design, with the lightening cables or with the fact I’m using lots of power bars. I’ll keep an eye on it. It’s worked fine up until now though, which is what is particularly confusing. Maybe there was a power surge which affected the iPad power adaptors?

The demise of Flash

I was talking to someone today about their job and they told me that they were a web developer. Nothing remarkable about that. Only that they used to be a Flash web developer but now they’ve had to retrain to build stuff in HTML 5.0 because there are something like a tenth of the Flash jobs out there than there were a year or so ago.

The iPad really has killed Flash.

If only education content providers would realise this!

Mail + iTunes

In my music lesson today, we were listening to different songs about the environment (with classics such as Leave them a Flower and 3 Rs) in preparation for making a radio show. Children worked in pairs on iPads, listening to each track and deciding which ones they liked.

In previous years, I had got children to search for songs on the iTunes Music Store, but with the iPad I instead just emailed a list of iTunes URLs to each iPad. I was expecting this to open up in the ‘iTunes’ app, but instead it opened up a preview panel within the Mail app and allowed children to listen to a good minute and a half of each song.

Emailing URLs is a very low-fi way of guiding children to different web resources, but it’s remarkably simple and easy! The only problem is when one child deletes the email, but this is easily fixed by fishing around in the trash.

BETT 2013

BETT this year was held at the EXCEL centre, a truly ginormous exhibition hall in docklands, London. It was a much better venue than Olympia, with much more space to go and get a coffee and sit down, as well as space in one big hall for all the exhibitors. The transport links are also great – it was just a short DLR ride from my school.

It was also a much better event. There seemed to be a lot more on offer, rather than just loads of options for interactive whiteboards. The mobile revolution was also being consciously acknowledged, with most people offering some sort of iPad solution to their product.

One particular find of the day was bit of school furniture which could charge 16 or 32 iPads. It is only a slightly more engineered version of what I’ve been doing with IKEA cabinets and 8-way power adapters, but it does have a more robust locking mechanism and also prevents people walking off with USB charging cables (which seems to be happening quite a bit at the mo!). It’s from a company called ISIS and you can have a look at it here. And they quoted me a bargain price of £450!

It was also fun to watch some Apple Distinguished Educators talk through some different ways of using iPads. It was good to hear them talk about the innovative apps but also the more mundane ‘write up your science experiment in Pages’. You’ve got to start somewhere!

This year at BETT there was also a big arena where you could go and listen to different speakers presenting in the middle. We went to see a presentation on the ‘Flipped Classroom‘. It’s an interesting idea really, where instruction is given by video to the students at a different time (maybe at home) and then the lesson is used to support students in the learning they have already been doing. Something to look into more.

All in all, I left BETT feeling like it had been a very useful day, which was a nice change from last year!

Reflector vs. Apple TV

One of the really cool things about an iPad in the classroom is how you can mirror your iPad’s screen to any AirPlay-receiving device. Like an Apple TV. I use this functionality all of the time, basically using my iPad as a replacement for the notorious ‘smart’ board, particularly when using Explain Everything. It’s very handy and means I can have my iPad sitting on the piano whilst I’m teaching and easily change slides, annotate things, move things around etc.

Apple TV is Apple’s preferred way of doing this, which is their little black box of goodness which you then plug into your widescreen TV by HDMI and go from there. If you have a widescreen HDMI TV, then this is the simplest solution. However, most schools are instead running some sort of fangled VGA projector+computer+monitor+speakers+amp, without an HDMI input or output in sight and projecting onto a 4:3 interactive whiteboard.

This results in the following problems:

you’ll need to buy a HDMI to VGA converter. Kanex do the very cool little adaptor that does the trick, but the problem with this (so I’ve been told) is that it can’t cope with a really long VGA cable to the projector as isn’t powered. Most schools have the VGA cable running up the wall and along the ceiling, adding a good 5 metres of cabling. You can buy powered HDMI to VGA converters, but this adds another little box, another power lead and all sorts of other tangles.
screen ratio issues. The Apple TV assumes you are going to a 16:9 output, so it just adds black bars to the left and right of the image when mirroring the 4:3 iPad. When you are projecting to a 4:3 screen, this results in either a weirdly stretched image or a rather small image.
you’ll need to switch between displays. If you’re already running a smartboard computer, the teacher will have to switch displays on the projector to the Apple TV input. Not difficult, but still a bit of a bother.

Enter Reflector (formerly Reflection). It’s a Mac (and PC) app that turns your computer into an AirPlay receiver. It’s only $15 and you can buy multiple licences slightly cheaper. All you have to do is start the app running, and then you can mirror your iPad to your Mac’s display.

The advantages are as follows:

true 4:3 mirroring. If your computer is already running a 4:3 display, then the iPad mirroring will fill the whole screen. Yay!
no display switching. It just uses your existing screen and projector.
no extra wires or boxes. Which is always good.
cheaper! £10 vs £85 speaks for itself.

The only downside is that iPad Keynote slideshows don’t fill the screen. This is because the Keynote app assumes it’s mirroring to a 16:9 Apple TV so adds it’s own black bars to the left and right of the image. Swings and roundabouts I guess!

’twas the week before BETT

We’re off to BETT on Wednesday, the annual ICT in Education trade fair. I wasn’t overly impressed with it last year, mostly because it seemed to be mainly about interactive whiteboards. I’ll be interested to see how much of a conspicuous appearance the iPad will make, considering it is revolutionising ICT in schools at a furious pace. Apple have long since pulled out of such shows, but I know that several big Apple resellers will be there. The iPad demonstrations at people like Toucan’s stand were certainly very crowded!

Seriously though, I’m interested to see how iPad storage solutions have developed and if there’s anyone talking about 1:1 iPad deployments. Such fun!

I’d also like to see how the Google chrome book experiment is shaping up the in the UK and if there is much interest in Windows 8 tablets.

Such fun!

The Great iPad Reset

I’ve finally conceded defeat that 6 iPads per class isn’t working. 6 iPad is just not useful in your average classroom as it’s difficult to use as a whole class and involves careful planning to make use of them in small groups. Compared to the daily use in Foundation Stage, the KS2 iPads were just sitting in cupboards. Which isn’t great!

So, we’ve decided to turn those 30 iPads into two class sets, one for upper KS2 and one for KS1. Ideally, I’d love to have a proper sync/charge box, but there isn’t the budget for that at this time of year. So instead it’s a case of wiping (which is easy, thanks to Apple Configurator) and then an old-school iTunes sync. We’re going to charge them in some IKEA lockable cabinets and then sync them with iTunes over wi-fi. We’ll then have a plastic box which teachers can transport the 15 charged iPads to their classes.

Let’s hope that increases their usage!

iPad mini – hands on

Yesterday I (finally) got to try out an iPad mini. The “sorry, we’re sold out” sign outside the Apple Store suggests that it can’t be all that bad. And I don’t think it is.

The size is really nice. It’s small enough to hold in one hand, but the screen is definitely big enough to interact with. It does indeed remind me of the 11″ MacBook Air with its diddy but high density screen, which allows you to get everything done just as well. I don’t think it would work so well as a shared device though, but who’s to say. I’ve done some work with kids using iPod touches one between two and that seemed to work fine.

It does remind me of the iPod touch in terms of portability but without the use restrictions. I’ve heard people talk about using 1:1 iPod touches in schools, but to me there didn’t seem to be so much you could do on it. Whereas an iPad mini suggests many opportunities.

Other pluses:

Better camera
Lovely build quality
Super light
Great price

Anyway, enough of my sales pitch…

Can’t connect to iTunes Store

…is an annoying message.

Whilst trying to install an app on one class’s set of 6 iPads I kept hitting a ‘cant connect to iTunes Store’. Strange and frustrating. I tried using the trick of changing the date to some point in the future but that didn’t work.

What I did do was reset the iPads, wiping all content and settings. It’s a little extreme, but it did seem to do the trick! And restoring off an iCloud backup is super simple.

Except when you’ve only got a 20meg pipe.

This is the major drawback with running a ‘cloud’ setup with iPads. It’s been good up to now, especially with keeping the costs down, but in future getting a sync and charge case and going down the wired iTunes route is probably the best idea.