I’d like to share a ticket with you about AirPlay (showing an iPad’s screen without cables) in our lecture theatres
I just acquired an iPad, and now realise that this would be a very powerful tool for my presentations in my [removed] lectures. My large first-year undergrad class is entirely based on powerpoint slides, as is my presentation to parents of prospective students. The problem is that using it requires communication with the lecture-hall computer or projector.
My question is whether provision has been made in the lecture halls for this sort of thing? A crude way to do it is to leave access for a PC to connect to an HDMI cable to the projector. That leaves one tethered however, which is deadly for lectures. An ideal solution would be to make a WiFi connection to the lecture-hall computer through AirServer or Apple TV. Then it is easy to do a presentation while walking in front of the podium, as well to carry out annotations on the fly, and to actually draw out by hand graphs or calculations that need to be emphasised.
Hi [removed],
I’d like to let you know what is possible in our lecture theatres at the current time.
Firstly, you are correct that if there is a VGA socket in our 2 year+ old lecture theatres you can use an iPad VGA adapter. If you are in a newer lecture theatre you can use an HDMI adapter.
If you have neither of these things then a very low tech solution is put the iPad under the visualiser.
The Wifi route is a more difficult scenario due to Apple making everything ‘easy’. Currently iPads find AirPlay screens through Bonjour. This is a process where the iPad asks computers around it whether they are printers / airplay / etc. Our Wifi network is not within the same range as our computers, therefore when the iPad asks it gets the answer back ‘no, there isn’t anything here’. Unfortunately the network version of “local” doesn’t extend to the idea of things in the same room.
Now, if we ignore any issues of security or change management for the moment and set our Wifi up so that an iPad could find all the other computers then we end up in a situation where your iPad can (and probably will automatically) connect itself up to one of 150 different teaching spaces. Not only that, but we couldn’t control who is connecting to what. If you ever wondered what sordid things might be viewed on a tablet somewhere within our network, imagine what it would look like auto-appearing fullscreen over your PowerPoint presentation!
So the short answer is
Tethered yes, wifi no, wifi in the future is possible but dangerous.
As is typical, there are a vast array of Android applications that let you screen share by typing in the address of the computer you wish to connect to. These applications all generally work fine, but that doesn’t help you, except to point toward the more flexible and open nature of Android. iPads in this case are more suitable for the home entertainment environment.
August 29, 2013 @ 11:02 am
I would like to pitch in on this conversation as we can protect who can connect to Apple TV’s and we could use wifi but why would we other tethering ? Also why I think Android others more problems.
I know there has been a lot of talk about connecting iPads in Lecture Theatres here at UOS especially since a recent Apple visit. There must have been a few visits as the JISC Mac Supporters group have a long debate on connecting Apple TVs into a Enterprise secure environment. Although I understand this is possible but can be a wobbly experience.
I’ve been connecting an iPad down here at WSA since they came out via a VGA lead and as iOS progressed more become possible (however use of custom fonts in keynote is my biggest hurdle) I’d be happy for a HDMI fly out cable option aswell.
The other option is to use Eduroam (Wifi) and an Apple TV, I have an Apple TV at home and so enjoy the option to push stuff to my TV, however would I trust it in a Lecture Scenario – probably not and I wouldn’t think quality was better than HDMI, I would also be sceptical of being able to do this over a busy University WIFI.
However if you really needed to ‘prance around’ with your iPad or not buy expensive adapters you could.
Once central IT have connected Apple TV to Eduroam the Apple TV could be seen by any iOS Device to use as AirPlay, however you can enable password protection on the Apple TV to only allow connection from devices with the password. The password could be for staff only or it could be given out for a presentation and changed later on perhaps.
I did not attend the Apple event and so I am not sure of what benefits where outlines about using an Apple TV as part of the mix. I assume main benefits would be classroom partciptation with out tethering.
Now as everyone knows I am a big Apple fan but sometime my open data, open source nature battles this love affair, however suggesting Android is more flexible could be true as you can use some basic VNC client I would expect BUT would a peer to peer connection from a device be allowed to a UOS machine? and secondly from a device that has the potential to carry malicious software and Viruses as users have the potential to install apps from Anywhere not just Google Play, which also is not a strict as Apple anyway.
August 29, 2013 @ 1:21 pm
I’m using BBQ Screen on Android: http://screen.bbqdroid.org/ works over eduroam fine.
For screencasts I’m using SCR Recorder: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iwobanas.screenrecorder.pro&hl=en_GB
both cost less than £3.
If I want to send media to tv I use the free XBMC open source media player, with the Yatse Remote app. Using Android Sharing I can send what media from my tablet to a computer running XBMC (linux, windows, mac, xbox etc) from ANY app. It also has a great feature where I could be watching something on XBMC on tv, then press a button on the remote app on Android and continue watching that media on the tablet. Total cost about £2.
Apple TV costs £99.
Chromecast looks good for the beginner/basic user and is out in the US for $35.
August 30, 2013 @ 7:33 am
I’m thinking we could arrange a “lecture theatre devices jam”, book a lecture theatre for a day, take a bunch of devices, and go through as many scenarios as we can think of and experiment. At the end of the day we could write up some best practice as a new blog post. Who is with me?
September 2, 2013 @ 10:58 am
Just to make this clear… This blog post explains what is possible at this precise moment. I realise that we are behind in some ways, but we are investigating what we can do to improve the situation.
This is not how it will be, just how we currently are.It is unfortunate in some ways that a small school with a single wifi point would probably never see these issues.
I also would like to clarify the Apple argument a little. It’s great that a mirroring solution is built into the iPad, the Android platform doesn’t (currently) have an official one at all. My issue is that because Android doesn’t have a solution there are multiple software developers who have brought out solutions, some compatible with our network and some incompatible.
As Apple has a solution already in place the developers have no encouragement to develop a similar software solution. In fact if they did then it would probably be blocked due to Apple’s policies of not duplicating functionality of an Apple application. Due to this there are not 5-10 applications, of which some will work; there is instead one application that doesn’t.
October 2, 2013 @ 3:10 pm
bah over not other tethering – Why would we bother with Wifi mirroring over Tethering… I wouldn’t, its all possible now to present and demo with tethering and works fine.