Unifi Wifi

In the summer of 2012, our excellent technician spent a happy few days installing a Unifi wifi system. We needed a decent wifi system in the school, but weren’t happy paying oodles of money for a super amazing controller managed system where each access point cost hundreds and then you had to buy a managed switch and then pay for extra licences when you want to extend the network.  Instead, the Unifi system lets you use any old computer to ‘manage’ your network and you are free to add as many access point as your heart (and budget) desires (and allows).  We found that it generally worked really well, particularly when you factor in that each access point was only about £80 +VAT.  Joy!  And they look pretty as you can stick them on ceiling tiles and  power them via PoE.

The initial wifi deployment was initially designed for a low-density spread of iPads, with access points installed in every other classroom.  Our first iPad deployment had sets of 6 iPads in some classrooms, and then just a couple of sets of 15 iPads used across the school.  It even coped fine when we gave Year 6 a class set of iPad minis.

Come the new financial year and the purchase of another two more class sets of iPad minis and we started to have wifi issues.  In my mind, the iPads minis were to be allocated so that each phase (e.g. Y1/2, Y3/4, Y5/6 etc.) had a class set to use as they wished.  As these year groups were at different ends of the building, the load would be balanced and one access point would, at the most, have to cope with those devices.  However, I had not anticipated the desire of the iPad to be used as a 1-to-1 device…  As soon as I had set up the iPads and released them into the school, teachers started booking out all three sets at the same time for one year group, meaning that all of the iPads were trying to run off one or, at the best, two access points.  This wasn’t pretty. “The Internet seems to be broken on these iPads…”

Thankfully, due to the easy expandability of the Unifi wifi system, we just had to buy some more access points so that each classroom could have its own access point.  And then our trusty technician had to spend another happy summer installing them!

Hopefully, this should result in a much happier wifi time for everyone.  And the moral of the story is you can never quite predict how iPads are going to be used by teachers.

Thoughts on WWDC

It’s been a couple of weeks since Apple’s WWDC, so here are some of my thoughts.

The opening video

I really liked the ‘Designed by Apple in California’ video which opened the keynote. It’s clearly setting out what Apple is about and where it’s going, but it definitely feels more like an Ives/Cook vision rather than a Steve Jobs one.  Jobs’s Apple was about changing the world (as spelt out in the Think Different ad), whereas the ‘Designed by Apple’ video shifts the emphasis over to design –- changing the world one device and one happy customer at a time.  I like it, but it is slightly different.  It’s Apple finding its voice again, demonstrated too in the iPhone photos ad.  Apple is aiming at the heart, aiming at making every day lives ‘happier’ by the power of design. Or something.

Apple Stores

Apple Stores are clearly now Cook’s baby, and he seems to be doing well with them.  The creepy over-the-top store opening videos are a bit much though.

OSX Mavericks

I like the new name, picking a famous place from Apple’s home, California.  It ties into the whole ‘Designed by Apple in California’ thing as well, which is nice.  Sea Lion would have a been a good name though…

It didn’t seem like a dramatic update sort of release, but has a nice set of new features.  I’ve never heard Apple being quite so rude about their previous release (with all the jokes about not harming any cows in the making of ‘Calendar’), but they do have a fair point.  Maps and iBooks are obvious but great additions, and Finder Tabs and Multiple Displays make a lot of sense.

However, it’s the interesting stuff in the Core Technologies Overview, buried deep in the Advanced Technologies page, that I like.  Like how SMB2 is the default protocol for file sharing. This is (hopefully) going to make having Macs on a Windows Active Directory (even) easier and reliable.

Mac Pro

Nice. Even the mobile-friendly page that tells you all about it as you swipe down is nice. I wonder how much one of those canisters will set you back though…

iWork for iCloud Beta

Genius.  Hopefully it will work well too!  In some training recently I was showing teachers how to use iWork on the Mac and then how, via iCloud, how the documents can appear on their iPads.  Having the ability to edit these documents on a PC too makes iWork more and more of an Office killer.

iOS7

I’ve been wondering for a while what an Ives’ iOS would look like, and here it is.  It’s quite a big change aesthetically, but structurally iOS remains familiar and just as useable underneath.  The crusade against skeuomorphic design has been taken to a whole new level, and I wonder what will happen when iWork and iLife get an Ives makeover.

I do like the way that the interface is more dynamic.  Seeing the parallax scrolling animation on the home screen was one of those ‘wow!’ moments, making the background have a sort of hologram effect.  I’m pleased that the weather app finally gets some love, making it look as cool as some of the weather apps on Android or Windows Phone.

One thing that will make my life a whole lot easier when managing carts of iPads, is that app updates are now automatic.  Yay!  That’s going to save me hours of my life…

We didn’t really get to see what iOS7 looks like on an iPad, but I guess you can’t have everything.  I wonder if there are any exciting things up Apple’s sleeve for a bigger screen.

Teacher iPads

With great rejoicing, our class teachers all received an iPad 2 last week for use in the classroom for teaching and learning. As we’ve now got some class sets of iPad minis for children (which work really well! The sweet spot between affordability, size and therefore quantity you can put in a classroom. Maybe I’ll post about that sometime…), we had some older iPads that needed to find a new home.

I decided I would completely set up the iPads for the teachers rather than leaving some stuff for them to do. This took rather along time, but I reckon it was worth it in terms of saving precious time for teachers and making sure that everything was set up how I wanted it to be for teachers, rather than hoping they follow my instructions!

The steps were as follows:

  • Follow the setup assistant, entering in the wifi code and agreeing to various stuff.
  • Set up the Apple ID for each teacher using the school email address.
  • Enroll the iPad to our MDM server (the glamorous Mountain Lion Server Profile Manager). This then automatically sets up the email settings (as described in a previous blog). I then could verify the email address for the Apple ID straight from the iPad
  • Begin redeeming VPP codes on each Apple ID. This was a bit time consuming, but was sped up by emailing the URLs found on the VPP spreadsheets
  • Hand to teachers, after pushing out a profile that requires a passcode on teacher iPads

It was a lot of tapping and then waiting, so I tended to try and do several iPads at the same time, swapping between the two whenever I had to wait before tapping the next button.

The results so far have been teachers making use of iPads in lots of unexpected but very sensible ways. Such as taking photos of children’s work, modelling how to use an app whilst reflecting to the big screen, prepping for an iPad lesson, using the iPad to differentiate for SEND children, keeping up to date with emails etc etc. I’m hoping it will help teachers think of more and more creative ways of using iPads as a tool for learning in the classroom.

Apple Configurator Tips and Tricks

Apple Configurator is the tool Apple supplies (for free) for managing large quantities of iPads. It relies on a wired USB connection and can sync with up to 30 iPads at one time (so long as you have the right USB hardware, like a a iPad charge and sync box).

The advantages of using it are:

  • You can update iOS on multiple iPads at the same time
  • You can use it to install VPP app (so long as the iPads are in ‘supervised’ mode), and have the facility to retrieve the app codes at a later date
  • It’s much faster than using iTunes
  • You can specify a bespoke lock screen on all your iPads, including putting the device name on it
  • It can name iPads sequentially (i.e. iPad 1, iPad 2 etc) by the order you plug them in when in ‘prepare’ mode
  • When a device is ‘supervised’, you get all sorts of extra restrictions available to you, such as the ability to turn off Game Centre and Messages
  • You can install enrolment profiles and configuration profiles easily

The disadvantages of it/things to bear in mind are:

  • It can be a bit crashy, especially when you’re plugging in a lot of devices
  • When a device is supervised, you cannot then plug it into iTunes or iPhoto on any computer.  This limits using the USB cable to move data on and off the device, except in Configurator.
  • VPP apps can only be installed with ‘supervised’ mode and have to updated via Configurator
  • It can sometimes come up with cryptic error messages if you’re not quite using it in the correct way

It’s important to understand how Configurator works before trying to use it.  Apple do a useful video, and Fraser Speirs and Bradley Chambers do a great couple of podcast episodes about Configurator.

However, here are a few of my tips and tricks:

  • Don’t try setting up 30 iPads at the same time.  When Configurator ‘supervises’ a device, it wipes iOS and reinstalls this. If you’re doing this with 30 iPads, I’ve found that Configurator crashes and quits.  About 8 seems to work fine.
  • Updating apps on multiple iPads seem to work fine.  Bradley Chambers has a great tip on easily finding those updated apps.
  • When installing enrolment profiles, make sure that you install a wifi profile first, otherwise it won’t work.  Then just check the iPad is awake and connected to wifi before installing that profile.
  • If you install a profile which restricts installing apps (thus removing the App Store off the iPads), you won’t be able install updates via Configurator.
  • Never ever have iTunes and Configurator open at the same time.  Otherwise you’ll end up with an iPad in recovery mode and will have to restore it in iTunes before using it in Configurator.

Fixing slow SMB shares in Finder

Hmm.  That’s quite a geeky title.  Maybe I should expound a little bit…

SMB stands for Server Message Block, which is a networking protocol used for accessing files and stuff on a Windows server.  It’s proprietary to Microsoft, so the rest of the world has developed their own ways of using it, more specifically with a technology called Samba.  Apple made use of Samba in OSX until 10.7, where they replaced it with their own version.  The good thing about all this is that, basically, a Mac is able to connect to a Windows file share right out of the box.  The bad thing is that Apple’s implementation of SMB is not altogether nor entirely wonderful.  In fact, it has the tendency to be a bit slow and unreliable.

At school we are still using a Windows server for file sharing, which means that all the Macs access the shared drives using SMB.  But recently the unreliability has become increasingly annoying: taking ages just to browse the contents of files, being unable to delete or move files (because Finder kept complaining that the file in question was already in use by someone else), and not being able to edit files.  Not great.

The options were to buy another Mac server and use that for file sharing (because it could share via SMB, AFP and WebDAV)).  Or try and find a solution on the Internet.

Thankfully, the Internet (via macosx.com) has answered.

I found that if I edited the /etc/nsmb.conf file as follows:

echo notify_off=yes >> /etc/nsmb.conf

it seemed to fix it.  Yay!

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!

Network drives on wifi

Back in 2010, when we were considering getting some Macs in school, one option we considered was getting a set of MacBooks for use by kids. As we already had some PC laptops which connected to the server via wifi, I thought we could do the same with some Macs. However, our reseller strongly advised putting in wired network connections if you are binding a Mac to an Active Directory as performance would be poor on wifi. I didn’t think much further about this as we ended up getting lots of iMacs instead, which all ran off wired Ethernet connections.

However, I recently tried adding a MacBook Pro to our domain, running it just on wifi, and this cautionary advice all came flooding back. Because we’re a big school, we make a lot of use of shared drives for saving work on. Working on a document off of a network drive requires a constant connection, which can become a little tiresome on wifi (particularly if the access point has a couple dozen iPads on it as well!). Having had enough of the spinning beach ball of death, I found a long network cable and plugged myself in.

Running documents off a server does feel a bit like living in the dark ages though. Admittedly, it is handy to be able to log onto any computer in the school and have all your document just there, but you do pay for it with a performance hit. Storage read and write is the last great bottle neck, which is why Apple is aggressively moving towards flash storage (Flash? We love flash!) wherever it can. The iCloud document model also makes a lot of sense: your documents live on your iPad/Mac/iPhone, but any changes are pushed to your other devices so that the same document is ready and waiting when you get there. That way you get the speed (and non-reliance on a permanent network connection) of a local document with the convenience of network storage.

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.