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!

Managing without the Mac server

A few weeks ago, we discovered that the second hard drive on our Mac mini server was failing.  Which isn’t good.  It’s still under warranty though so won’t cost anything to fix, apart from the inconvenience of having it taken away from our school for a few days.

And an inconvenience it certainly has been!  The Mac server has been brilliant for managing all the little settings and preferences on the Macs and I’ve made much use of Workgroup Manager for tweaking this and fixing that.  This makes it all the more painful when it is removed, especially with a large school full of an ever-increasing number of Macs.

All the Macs are bound to two servers: the Open Directory (OD) on the Mac server and the Active Directory (AD) on the Windows server. The AD manages usernames and passwords and serves up all the network drives, but the OD tells the Macs what to put in the dock, what drives to mount on login, and where Microsoft Office can put all its first-run registration windows (i.e. not on my screen!). Without the Mac server, the Mac will still let users login, but the dock will be empty, network drives won’t be mounted and everyone will come running to find me and demand access to their shared folders.

After some very helpful support from our wonderful reseller Toucan, I settled upon this plan:

  1. Make a local account and set it up just how I wanted it, i.e. applications in the dock and network drives mounted on login with credentials on the keychain.
  2. Log in as root and copy this home folder to all the Macs using Apple Remote Desktop.
  3. Tell teachers to login with the local account only.

The first part was fairly straightforward.

The second part was a little more tricky as it involved logging in as root, something I had not done before.  But Apple give some easy-to-follow instructions how to do it.   This gives the user unlimited powers to look in any folder and move anything anywhere, without running into permission errors all the time.  Once logged in as root, I used Apple Remote Desktop to copy the home directory of the local user to all the Macs. I had already set up a local user previously, so I just reused that name and didn’t have to go to each machine and add a local account.

The annoying problem I ran into was that some Macs were still remembering all their managed preferences, even though the Mac server was unavailable.  This would have been fine if every Mac was doing this, but it was inconsistent across the school and gave an uneven user experience.  Thankfully, I found an article explaining how to flush the MCX cached settings. Et voilà, everything working fine.  Or at least good enough.

I hope the Mac server gets fixed quickly!

It does make me realise why Apple is moving to profiles for managing preferences on a Mac, just like with iOS.  That way, the client machine remembers the settings it’s been given, rather than relying on a continuous connection to a server.  It’s just a shame that Profile Manager isn’t quite up to the job as of yet, particularly with OSX.

Wineskin: running Windows apps without Windows

Over the last few months I’ve been making use of an app called Wineskin, which lets you run Windows applications on a Mac without running Windows.  It utilises Wine, an open-source project which attempts to duplicate all the functionality of Windows libraries thereby enabling Windows executables to run on Linux/OSX/etc.  This doesn’t work with everything, but definitely with enough titles to make it useful.

The particularly cool thing about Wineskin though is that it installs all the Wine binaries inside a normal .app OSX application package.  You then install the software you want within this ‘wrapper’, thus enabling it to run on any Mac without requiring Wine or anything else to be installed first.  This is very handy in a school, as I can create wrappers for all the different Windows applications I want to run and then just drop them into the Applications folder of various Macs, via Apple Remote Desktop.  The user then just launches the app and starts using the program.  This makes for a much smoother experience that clicking on a VMWare Fusion shortcut, waiting for the virtual machine to start, clicking through the various ‘Download update!’ and ‘Buy the new version of Fusion!’ messages and then finally getting to your application.  Well I think so anyway.

Today I tried getting it to work with a BBC Active CD-ROM about ‘Rites of Passage’ in RE. It seems to function ok, although I’m having trouble moving the Wineskin ‘wrapper’ between computers.  The weird thing is that you can preview the whole piece of software online using Flash, which makes me just a little bit annoyed why they didn’t make a Mac version while they were at it.  I guess it can’t have be worth their while. And if they’re making and selling CD-ROMs, they are clearly not trying to be at the cutting edge of technology, especially as you would be increasingly hard-pressed to find a Mac with an optical drive anyway…

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!

Photos won’t sync

Just been updating some photos on my home iPad and discovered that a lot of them weren’t syncing.  Very annoying!  After much Googling and poking around in preference files, I decided to try syncing a small iPhoto event across and seeing which ones didn’t sync.  It turned out that some of my photos didn’t have a title (‘untitled’) and it was these photos which weren’t syncing.  After a quick Photos>Batch Change and then changing the title to the filename, this seemed to fix the problem.  Phew!

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.

Thoughts on iPad mini

I’m really excited about the iPad mini although I have yet to actually hold one in my hand. They’ve been out for barely a week, but they appear to be selling like hot cakes. I think they hold great potential for doing a 1:1 deployment in a school. Here’s why:

  • Cost. It’s only about £50 less that the iPad 2, but that’s nearly a 20% saving. Which is not to be sniffed at, especially if that nudges a bulk purchase into the realms of affordability.
  • Screen size. It is quite diddy (I’ve made a paper mock-up of the screen size already!) but not unusuably so. And because there’s the same number of pixels as an iPad 2, you can still do as much on i. I use an 11″ MacBook Air every day, which has a poky screen compared to a retina display MacBook Pro. But because it has such a dense display, you’ve still got plenty of pixels to play with. I’m guessing the same applies with an iPad mini.
  • Better camera. Always good, especially in a school where making movies and taking photos has so many uses.

Maybe once I get to hold on in my hand I might change my mind, but at the moment I’m pretty hopeful about their usefulness.