Tag Archives: mobile

Education, Technology

AppleTV in Educational Settings

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Recently I’ve been experimenting with configuration and use of Apple TV in the classroom as a means of providing teachers and students with wireless projection capabilities for their supported iOS and Apple devices over AirPlay. This came to a head for me when I heard the announcement from Apple in late September that the version of iOS for Apple TV (v 5.1) included support for connecting the Apple TV to enterprise networks that use the WPA2 / Wireless Certificate / Radius methods for authentication. In the ACT, the public school system uses such a configuration, and until this recent update Apple TVs could not be connected to the wireless network.

So I investigated the process and found that is is actually a relatively simple one. The requirements are:

  • A 2nd or 3rd Generation Apple TV;
  • A Mac capable of running the latest version of Apple Configurator (available through the Mac App Store)
  • The certificate file for the wireless network to which you are connecting
  • A Micro USB cable (available from all good retailers, or perhaps as an inclusion with a mobile phone you have had over the past 5 years or so)

With those 5 things, the process became fairly simple to setup. The steps are all essentially laid out in the following three Apple Hot Topics from their support website:

  1. Apple TV: How to configure 802.1X Using a Profile – this can be used for setting up a profile for any iOS device, including iPads, iPods and iPhones so that the user doesn’t have to manually enter configuration details.
  2. Apple TV: How to configure a proxy using profile – again, can be done for any iOS device. You can even set these profiles up using iPhone Configuration Utility, but Apple Configurator may be required for Apple TV support (at least at the moment)
  3. Apple TV: How to install a configuration profile – This is the final step once you’ve built your profile, and ultimately is the way you prepare it for deployment.

There are a couple of gotchas that you ultimately need to be aware of when you do this, and a few steps involved specifically for connecting to the ETD network:

  1. The EDU network uses different settings to the STU network – this is in place at the moment but will, after the move to SchoolsNet, will no longer be in place, making things a bit easier. For this to work at our school, I needed to use STU (since students cannot connect their devices to EDU).
  2. The credentials for connecting to the STU network need to be present on the AD server for your student network – teacher credentials won’t work, so you need to have an account on your student server and use that one.
  3. Proxy settings for STU are required – make sure you use the same settings that are in place on your STU desktops and laptops (I won’t publish these settings here – if you’re a teacher in the ACT ETD, you’ll be able to look them up at school). You should be using the Automatic Proxy settings (not auto-detect).
  4. You will need to get a copy of your wireless certificate off the student server. You can export a copy of the certificate from your server so that you can put it on the Mac that will be running Apple Configurator.
  5. When transferring the profile to Apple TV, you MUST have the power cable plugged in – the HDMI cable isn’t necessary (I found that I couldn’t plug both HDMI and USB 2 in at the same time because the cables I had were a bit fat) but can remain plugged in.
  6. Finally, your STU wireless network needs to be able to support AirPlay – this requires multicast/Bonjour to be active. It is active on our network due to it being used for wireless printing for our Cafe App.

Other than that, it is a pretty painless procedure. Once the profile is installed as outlined in the third Hot Topic, all you need to do is double-tap the home button on your iOS device, tap on the AirPlay icon and select the device from the list of AirPlay devices on the network. If you’re using an AirPlay capable Mac, the AirPlay icon appears in your toolbar at the top of the screen when an AirPlay capable device is present.

There are a couple of settings you’ll want to turn on for your Apple TV:

  1. Consider setting an Airplay password if you want to restrict use of the Apple TV to a few people. This might be something you want to do, but it does limit the way you can have students use the device.
  2. If you want to allow anyone to connect via AirPlay, it is a good idea to turn on the setting that requires you to enter a 4 digit passcode to connect. This way, students or teachers need to be in the room to connect their device, and you won’t get students from the other side of the school throwing their display up without you knowing.

For the cost of a big screen TV that supports HDMI (< $1000) or a HDMI-capable projector (< $1200) and an Apple TV (about $100), you can have the capability in your classroom for anyone with a capable device to display their work to their peers. This gives the teacher the flexibility of demonstrating something from anywhere in the room, and for students to do the same. When you compare this setup to the cost of an Interactive Whiteboard (in the order of $4000-$7000), the potential for deploying this on a large scale is pretty significant if money is tight and doesn’t carry with it the restrictions of having to plug yourself in via cables in a specific place in the room.

I’d be interested to know what you think of this set up, and am happy to help you get yours up and running if it is something you’re interested in pursuing.

Education, Technology

The iPad: What does technology offer to educators?

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Update: I indicated during my presentation that I would add more information based on the questions I was asked at the end of the session. See the headings at the end of this post for more information regarding accessibility issues. Thanks to all who asked interesting questions at the event!

A quick search on the Internet for information about technology in education will give you a myriad of links to information published by educators, theorists, technologists and others who identify the many potential benefits technology could bring to all levels of education. A lot of it focuses on the personalisation of learning, greater access to knowledge (both in and outside of school), and increased interactions with others that helps to make learning more relevant and real to our students. There has also been extensive study done that highlights the importance of quality teaching in harnessing the benefits of technology – the notion that no matter how impressive the technology is, without a good teacher utilising it effectively the realisation of those benefits is hit-and-miss. With so much work going on in this area, it’s no surprise that there has been extensive debate surrounding the iPad and its suitability for use in the classroom.

I’ve been asked to present a brief session at the ACT All Colleges conference on the 1st of February to explore what technology has to offer educators, with a particular focus on the iPad. As an advocate of more personalised approaches to learning, with less reliance on centralised infrastructure and a mandated set of applications/tools that students must use, I was more than happy to provide some insight form my experience and knowledge around the topic. This blog post supports the workshop session I delivered, but in a nutshell the content of the presentation was around:

  • The pervasiveness of technology in our lives and the lives of our students – the world we live in is one where just about everything we do is influenced in some way by technology;
  • The increasing emphasis on mobile technology as a means of accessing information and communicating with others;
  • The lack of a significant investment in high-quality, reliable infrastructure in schools to support the lifestyle and habits many of our students are used to in their everyday lives (which becomes even more important when there are access issues at home);
  • The potential that personal devices that are not managed by the school could have on improving the learning opportunities for students; and
  • The power of the iPad as a mobile, personal device (as demonstrated through a series of useful apps and a brief overview of its technical capabilities).

I don’t intend to go into extensive detail about any of the above here, suffice to say that there is plenty of information about each of the topics I’ve state above scattered all over the Internet and published by reputable educational research organisations. What I will do, however, is provide a brief example of why the arguments made by many that the iPad is not useful in education because it is primarily a consumption device are misplaced.

1. The library of applications available is extensive (over 60,000 and counting). Not all of the Apps are designed to allow you to “create” things, but may do, and what you can create includes music, video, 3d models of houses, diagrams and graphs… just about anything you can think of.

2. The way many of the apps are designed encourages you to consume information in new ways – FlipBoard is one example of how presenting RSS feeds, your tweet streams and your facebook feed in a different format allows you to get more details from each snippet/post being made by your friends. Aweditorium is another example (this time around music) that encourages you to investigate/browse content you otherwise may not. The more you consume – particularly if that information is different to what you would normally interact with – provides you with more information from which you can construct your own knowledge and understanding of the world.

3. iPads are personal – they are not meant to be deployed as a “class set” or in place of a laptop trolley, and I don’t think there is any real benefit in managing them at the school level (such an approach de-personalises the device). That doesn’t mean they don’t fit in education, it just means that the model of schools providing the hardware for learning isn’t relevant when considering the power of mobile technologies. What is the point of a mobile device that you can’t use the way you want to?

The whole point of this post is to get you thinking about the approach you take towards technology in the classroom – to perhaps reconsider the outlook you might have on mobile phones and/or student-owned laptops/tablets in your classes. With so many powerful and interesting applications available, it seems a shame to be telling students what they can and can’t use to learn. Technology gives us, as educators, a real means to empower students to discover the best way they learn; to encourage experimentation and risk as acceptable techniques when learning something new.

For further information:

Managing iPads in the Classroom – Issues and potential solutions

Mobile Learning (Ulearning) – Blog posts from a strong advocate of mobile learning in Qld

The Open Book Scenarios – Exploring possible futures for teaching

iPad Trials in Victoria and NT

The list of Apps I demonstrated, referred to or had installed on the iPads during my presentation:

Organise

  • Underscore Notify
  • Things for iPad
  • Evernote
  • Instapaper
  • DropBox

Consume

  • Shakespeare in Bits
  • The Elements
  • Molecules
  • Solar Walk
  • Star Walk
  • Geo Walk HD
  • Beautiful Planet HD
  • Pulse
  • Shakespeare
  • Louvre Museum
  • 3D Cell Simulation and Stain Tool
  • Nature: The Human Genome at 10
  • Houzz
  • Melbourne Museum Please Touch
  • Zinio

Connect

  • Aweditorium
  • Flipboard
  • Magic Piano
  • CourseNotes
  • AskPhil(osophers)
  • ArtHD
  • SCVNGR
  • TweetDeck

Create

  • Ideate
  • Brushes
  • ASketch
  • SketchBook Pro
  • iBand
  • iDesign
  • Home 3D
  • ReelDirector
  • Or, in IT classes, you could have students write their own!

Collaborate

  • Inkling
  • Popplet
  • Maptini
  • Google Docs (use in Safari – no App required)
  • Whiteboard HD
  • Skype (and other IM tools)
  • Box.net
  • Fuze

Accessibility and the iPad

The iPad has a number of accessibility features built into iOS, making it reasonably friendly to users with special learning needs out of the box. That said, the accessibility of some apps will be dependent on the features included in the app by the developer, so I’d recommend exploring those apps that you’re considering to investigate the accessibility features and whether or not they suit your needs before shelling out for a paid version of the app.

Treetops.org.au has plenty of resources surrounding Apple products and their accessibility features.

Technology

Is Android really as free as Google like to make it sound?

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I just saw an article on TechCrunch that pointed to a (seeingly well-rehearsed) Keynote delivered by Vic Gundotra, VP at Google, that argued why Android is going to be so important for the mobile world. He sold it well, I have to admit, but it got me thinking a little more about how most of use the Internet and connected devices, and what sort of implications his ‘ideal future’ may have for us.

I find it interesting that he talks about the device that would lead to a 1984 type situation. I think he misses something vital – that the device is ultimately only a gateway to the world as we know it now. There’s something to keep in mind here – Apple may (with the iPhone ecosystem) dictate what we can and can’t do with our mobile devices in terms of the Apps we can install and the functionality we can tap into as developers, and yes, you could argue this is draconian, particularly given the App store approval processes and other thing.

However, when you access the Internet, what do you and millions of others probably do when you’re looking for something? I’d say most people hit Google. And what determines the results that appear when you search the Internet? The Google search algorithm. So, ultimately, who has the power to dictate what information you are most likely to see when you use the Internet? Google. And with that information, and the information you give them through services such as Gmail and everything else Google build and encourage people to use, they can tweak that algorithm to present you with what they want you to see.

Android on every phone may make the device and applications you can use on it “free and open”, but it also gives them even more information about you and how you use the Internet. And, in this world, information is power. Just think – if we all had Android on our phones, and we all used Google to search the Internet, imagine the power the men at the top of Google would have over you. What if they decided that ‘not being evil’ wasn’t any fun anymore?

Thoughts?