The Next-Generation Classroom AV System

Our classroom AV systems are built out of the standard kit: projectors, interactive whiteboards or projector screens and staff laptops or classroom iMacs. They're all coming to the end of their lives and it's time to re-think what we want and need out of classroom AV.

The current setup has several problems.

Projectors generally stink and the ones that don't stink are unimaginably expensive. Not only do they suck but they produce a soporific fan noise, the contrast ratio is terrible, the colour reproduction is lame to start with and only goes downhill from there. The cost of replacement parts is daylight robbery. Further, unless you buy a really, really good (read: expensive) one, your classroom has to be as dark as the bottom of Jabba's Sarlacc pit to get the image visible.

Next, the interactive whiteboard. Never has so much money been spent so indiscriminately to so little effect as has been spent on interactive whiteboards across education. IWBs are pure skeuomorphism - a digital blackboard - intended to "increase the use of technology in the classroom" without changing classroom practice. We bought them, mostly, just because every other school was buying them and well the entire country can't be wrong, right? They have been a horrible waste of money. I do not have one single good thing to say about them.

Finally, the audio problem has always been difficult. Plug a laptop into this system of audio and video and power cables and you end up looking like you're teaching from inside a life support system. We have never found a good, cost-effective solution for broadcasting the audio. Not to say that one doesn't exist - we just haven't found one we really like.

So, with all of that in the background, I set out to design a new classroom AV system that took advantage of the fact that we have iPads in everyone's hands. I decided to start with what the teachers wanted, so I asked them. The only teacher still using the interactive whiteboard for more than a projection surface was our maths teacher who found the ability to annotate on top of prepared content valuable. Everyone else had basically given up on the device.

So I spoke to the teachers and asked what they were using AV for in their classroom. The answers that came back were as follows:

• To display Keynote presentations - either their own or ones the pupils had produced
• To show a web page
• To show photos
• To show a video to the class
• And, of course, the one we've wanted for a year - to demonstrate an iPad app.

Now, at the same time as we are looking into upgrading the AV, our old iMac desktops (iMac4,1, the first-generation Intel iMacs) are nearing the end of their lives. They've done sterling service since 2006 but they're not going to last much longer. Replacement is definitely on the horizon.

Consider the cost of refreshing our current setup with today's equivalents:

• Base-model 21.5" iMac: £950
• Projector: £390 (average)
• Smart board (64" diagonal): £1256(!)

That's a total of £2596 to refresh an AV system that has no real solution for the A-part. That price is held down by specifying an iMac rather than the MacBook Pro that most teachers would want. I think we can do better, where "better" is defined as: cheaper, more flexible, neater, more reliable and enabling new classroom practice around the 1:1 iPads.

So I came up with the following parts list:

• Sony Bravia KDL40EX401U 40" TV: £399
• Base model Mac Mini w/4GB RAM: £650
• Apple Bluetooth Keyboard & Mouse: £105
• AppleTV: £100

That's £1254, or, one SmartBoard and a cup of coffee. Here's what it looks like:

Why is this system good? Well, I'll report back after some use, but here are my ideas:

There's a computer in there. We still need this for syncing iPads at the moment and staff will still want to present full-power Keynote presentations from a Mac. Keynote/iOS is coming along nicely but I don't think it's quite there yet. With a BlueTooth keyboard and mouse, we can control the Mac mini from anywhere in the classroom. Better than that, though, we can open up the Mac mini to VNC control and deploy a VNC client on our iPads to allow anyone to control the classroom computer from their iPad. I personally like iTeleport but there are many, many options for this.

The Sony TV has 4xHDMI input and one VGA. Two are given over to the Mac mini and the AppleTV and we currently have the iPad VGA adapter on the VGA port. As and when we get iPad 2 and the HDMI adapter, this system will accept that on another HDMI port, so we have some spare capacity.

You can have any student take control of the AppleTV from their iPad over AirPlay to share videos or photos. I personally use a lot of YouTube videos to teach automated systems in Computing. When pupils are researching content, they can share what they've found wirelessly. Secondly, you can send photos to AppleTV from the Photos app. Our Art teacher, Jenny Oakley, is desperate to have this in her classroom to allow pupils to present their artworks on a large display.

AirPlay is just getting started. iOS 4.3 just opened up the APIs to third party developers so we're anticipating that more software will acquire the capability to share content over AirPlay. Looking at you, iPlayer, Sky News, et al.

This solution solves the "audio problem" because the audio is routed through the TV for both the Mac mini and the AppleTV, both of which are connected over HDMI. It's also a dramatically neater solution with fewer trailing cables.

Another great advantage of this system is that LCD TVs are much, much more durable than projectors. Typical projectors are rated for 1000-2000 hours of operation - and that's operation at all, not high-quality, good-colour operation. I've seen numbers up to 100,000 hours quoted for LCD TVs. Even if 100k hours is an overstatement by one order of magnitude, that's still a huge win over projectors.

What do we lose over the old system? Not much. We lose the interactive whiteboard capability that we mostly don't like and don't use. We save a ton of money and get a more flexible, longer lasting, neater AV system that opens up a new range of capabilities.

Apple Distinguished Educator

I'm more than delighted to announce that I, along with my Cedars colleagues Andrew Jewell and Jenny Oakley, have been selected as Apple Distinguished Educators in the Class of 2011.

As part of the application, each of us had to create a short video about our vision for teaching and learning with technology in the classroom. Here's mine. I'm not very good at video (yet) but a loan of a Canon EOS 7D makes up for a lot of my own shortcomings.

Thanks to Chris Phin of the wonderful Tap! magazine for his support. You can see Andrew and Jenny's videos on Cedars' YouTube channel.

The iPad Project on Tour

The first quarter of 2011 which - can you believe? - is nearly over already, has been a whirl for me. I've done more formal public speaking in the past three or four months than in my entire life put together. It's been fascinating, though, to meet and interact with other teachers, administrators and technologists. People seem to be very interested in what we've done at Cedars and I'm happy to tell the story whenever asked.

I recently returned from a trip to the USA which I found incredibly valuable and interesting. Let me tell you a bit about it.

On February 26th, I flew from Glasgow to Abilene, TX by way of London, an emergency medical stop in Goose Bay, Canada and Dallas/Fort Worth airport. Fortunately, the medical emergency was not me, but I thought I might have had some heart palpitations as our 747 carved its way down a deep valley towards YYR, which is little more than an airstrip and a hangar in the wilds of Labrador. It was -17C outside when we landed, so we didn't get out for a walk around.

We eventually made our way to the town of Abilene, home of Abilene Christian University, who were hosting the bi-annual ACU Connected Summit where I had been invited to speak. As we checked in at the hotel, in walked Steve Wozniak. I don't know about you but I love wrapping up a long and eventful day of international air travel by meeting one of your nerd heroes at a hotel check-in desk. Suffice to say that Woz was as humble and gracious as he is always reported to be.

The Connected Summit was two days long and seven tracks wide. There were some excellent keynotes. In particular, I took a lot from Karen Cator's speech about the future direction of educational technology. There were also TED-style "Connected Talks" sessions interspersed throughout the programme, which was a nice way of giving some stage time to a larger number of people.

I was honoured to give a Connected Talk in the final session alongside Sarah Herrlinger of Apple, Matt Federoff of Vail Unified School District and ACU's Director of Educational Innovation, Bill Rankin. The talk was entitled "The End of the IT Department?" which, I will immediately admit, is fully compliant with Betteridge's Law of Headlines. I encourage you to watch the talk when it becomes available because it's a bit more subtle than the "Users über alles!" pitch suggests. I also spoke at greater length in the K-12 track about our approach to the 1:1 iPad deployment. Again, I'll link to that when the video becomes available.

There were several other talks that I found enlightening. Because of the short-but-wide nature of the conference, there was a lot of content that I didn't see, but I particularly enjoyed the following talks:

• Karen Cator's opening keynote
• Adrian Sannier's keynote
• Don Henderson's connected talk on Challenge-Based Learning
• Maria Andersen's talk "Where's the Learn This Button?" - one of you nerds out there should build her idea. I also loved her title: "Learning Futurist".
• Les Simpson and Steven Zipkes' presentation of the work at Manor New Tech High on Challenge-based learning.

Another part of the conference was a tour of ACU's just-opened Learning Studio. The Learning Studio is a new high-tech space built in part of the ACU library that focuses on providing space for students to focus on three aspects of digital creativity:

• Create
• Collaborate
• Explore

Although the Learning Studio is a $1.8m facility, I was inspired by it because what was so clear to me was that the entire project had been very carefully thought through from start to finish. Anyone can spend a couple million dollars on equipment but the work on designing the space to support learning was so obviously there.

New York

So from Abilene to New York City, by way of my first ever WiFi-enabled flight, I went. I was in the air during the iPad 2 announcement but delightfully didn't miss a thing.

I was spending time at Xaverian High School in Brooklyn who are rolling out about 400 iPads to their incoming freshmen, middle school and special ed programs. We spent a couple of days together chewing over several issues to do with the technical and teaching sides of deployment. I'll be distilling this experience into a couple of later posts but I was really pleased that we were able to plan out a path from "we've got 50 iPads right now" to "iPad for everyone". Xaverian are going to have a great deployment, I'm sure.

While in New York, we also visited with Eric Walters and the team at Marymount School right on Central Park in Manhattan. It's literally right across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is quite a facility to have on hand! Physically, Marymount is not unlike Cedars - both are housed in adapted old townhouse buildings, so we were able to commiserate with each other about how inconsiderate the stonemasons of the 1890s were to the needs of those deploying WiFi.

We discussed many things but one that has remained with me was Eric's comment about their IT philosophy: "we try to be a 'Yes' school". There's nothing more important than that. The actual technical issues of doing anything are trivial compared to the apparent difficulty of getting people to agree to be helpful. I spoke at another conference of Scottish public-sector professionals just before leaving for ACU and the discussion that dominated the entire day was about people locked into a war of attrition with their IT department just to get their jobs done.

At ACU, there was a lot of talk about teachers creating their own textbook resources. When I visited Marymount, I saw that in action. Teachers at several different levels had used Pages' ePub export feature to create their own books containing, variously, focused poetry anthologies, science revision books and to showcase pupil work with images, audio and video. These were wonderful digital artefacts to create in order to wrap up and keep the work of a class in digital form.

TEDxNYED

Late into the trip, Bill Stites kindly DMed me to say that he had figured out a way to squeeze me into an education-focused TEDx event being held in the New York Academy of Sciences.

Well, the view from the 40th floor was stunning:

The talks were fascinating too, and video will be available soon. I particularly enjoyed Alan November, Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Dennis Littky and Diana Laufenberg (whose talk you can already watch online).

On all my travels, I was amazed to realise the reach that this blog has gained. I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to say hello or offer a kind word on this crazy project I'm involved in. I appreciate your interest and encouragement more than you realise.

Some Thoughts from the Classroom on iPad 2

So it's finally here or, at least, announced and there are some interesting things for us teachers.

I spoke at ACU's Connected Summit this week (more on that later) and I wrapped up by saying that whatever Apple announces with the iPad 2, it will only be interesting insofar as it enables better or more powerful apps. Apps are king and that's why any "iPad killer" you may hear about probably isn't.

So what's new? Thinner, lighter and faster are three things nobody will argue against. Not that the original iPad was particularly fat, heavy or slow but the new slimness is welcome.

The inevitable cameras. Ah, cameras, such a two-edged sword in the classroom. I'm glad to have them, I guess. I imagine the uses will be more for AR apps and data capture rather than serious photography and videography but it will be a lot neater in the classroom to have the cameras on the device rather than requiring that you get an iPod touch and the Camera Connection Kit.

My philosophy about school IT includes the determination not to attack imaginary problems. Some pupils will be jackasses with cameras but the idea that you lock everything out "just in case someone might do something bad" is no longer good enough. You can disable the cameras through a configuration profile on the iPhone and I guess you'll be able to do the same on iPad 2.

You cause me a problem with the way you use the camera? You get the special cone-shaped Configuration Profile with the big D on it.

I don't know whether I or my Apple reps in Scotland will be more delighted that iPad 2 supports full video mirroring. I'll be happy to have it, they'll be happy that they no longer have to hear me beg for it. I strongly suspect that this has been, by some distance, the #1 most-requested feature from education markets. Thanks for listening, Apple. Really.

I have wanted iMovie and GarageBand for some time on iPad and I'm delighted that they're finally here. Ars Technica reports that both apps will run on the original iPad but without certain hardware-dependent features like capturing video directly within iMovie. It will be interesting to see how well these apps run on an original iPad but I think these apps put Apple even further ahead of any other tablet manufacturer. The hardware is stunningly solid but the apps matter more than any of that.

So, finally, what about that Smart Case? I think I was perhaps alone in really liking the Apple iPad case. We deployed them at school and they've proven robust and functional. Admittedly the material didn't stay new-looking for long but nothing ever does in a school anyway.

I'm slightly concerned that the magnetic hinge will be easily forced off when an iPad 2 ends up sandwiched between books and other materials in a school bag. I'll have to wait and see how well it holds together.

So what do I think? Not having held one, I'll have to wait and see with some things, but Apple was already ahead of the pack. The hardware alone keeps it ahead of the pack and, with iMovie and GarageBand on iPad, Apple is starting to stretch out of sight when it comes to delivering a hardware and software toolkit for education. Anyone can do a tablet with a web browser and an email client. Most can get a port of Kindle, Evernote and Gowalla.

Nobody else has anything even close to Pages, Keynote, Numbers, iMovie and GarageBand on their platform far less the great 3rd party iOS apps such as OmniFocus, Instapaper, Toontastic, and the Elements. iOS is and remains the only mobile platform worthy of consideration for education.

The "Mingled Content" Model of App Deployment

I wrote in "App Management and Sync" about our current approach to deploying iPad apps to students. I call this the "School Provides" model - we buy the apps in our account and deploy only those apps to our iPads.

Partly for curiosity and partly with a view to increasing flexibility and personalisation, I've been researching other possible models. The model I want to write about today, I call the "Mingled Content" model.

In a "mingled content" deployment, you have content (apps, mainly) on the iPad that have been purchased under two different iTunes accounts. For the purposes of this article we'll call them S for the "school" account and P for the pupil account.

Background

Schools want to deploy specific apps for school use. It's essential that teachers have a predictable baseline capability that they can assume when planning lessons (further reading: Run What Ya Brung).

We have found that flexibility is also important. It's highly desirable for the teacher to be able to stand in front of a class and say "hit the App Store and get this new app I found". At the same time, pupils want to personalise and really own the device - particularly in terms of their own music/video content.

In any 1:1 deployment, it is essential that there is a plan for "rapid return to service" when a device dies. When the entire educational experience is designed around the assumption that there will be 1:1 technology, it's simply unacceptable for a pupil to be without a device for an entire day or more.

My aim is to provide a complete on-campus backup and restore capability that will allow me to back up and restore a user's data to a new device in as short a time as possible. The question is whether I can do this for a mingled content iPad, so I did some research and here are the results.

Mingled Content

It's quite easy to end up with a Mingled Content iPad. You simply sign out of the App Store app from one account, sign in using another account and buy something. The iPad is mostly happy operating in this manner except that, to get updates, you have to sign in with each account and check for updates separately in the App Store.

The problem comes when you want to sync the iPad to a computer for backup.

Setup

Lets assume that the school provides a computer to sync to. The computer is authorised for Account S, the school account. Let's assume for now that we do not want to allow school computers to be authorised for pupils' own iTunes accounts.

Backup

When the iPad is backed up, iTunes will copy all the user data associated with every app on the device into the iPad backup file on the computer. This includes data and files created in apps purchased with Account P. iTunes will not back up the actual application binaries for any app that the computer is not authorised for.

After backing up we have, on the computer:

• An iPad backup file containing the user data for every app that was on the device at the time of backup.
• In the iTunes library, the binaries for the apps purchased in Account S only.

To test this, I took one of our spare iPads and synced it to a computer, installing some apps from Account S, then I installed some additional applications from Account P. I created some files in each app, then I backed the device up again. At that point, I got the familiar warning that the apps purchased from Account P could not be transferred to the Mac because the Mac was not authorised for Account P. Fine.

Restore

As we know, a backup is not a backup without a verified restore process. I took my Mingled Content iPad and erased it in iTunes with the Restore button. When it had finished, I opted to restore the iPad from its last backup.

Recall that this backup contains all the user data for every app that was on the device. When I restored the iPad, the apps I purchased through Account P were not present on the device. The apps from Account S had been reinstalled and their data was intact.

I then reinstalled the same applications as before from Account P. On launching the apps, I found that their data had already been restored to the device, even though the application was not present on the device nor in the iTunes library at the point of restoring it.

This is a useful result. It means that, in principle, the school can provide a full data backup service while letting pupils install their own apps from their own account.

The drawback is that restoring a device is not a one-click affair. School apps can be restored immediately but pupil-installed apps will have to be individually re-downloaded from the App Store on the device. Additionally, the problem of doing on-device updates for content from two accounts remains.

An Improvement

One way to improve the backup/restore situation would be to allow pupils to authorise school computers for their iTunes accounts. If this was done, it would be possible to transfer the application binaries from the Account P applications to the school computer. Then, there would be a complete backup of both user data and application binaries on the school computer that could be used to perform a one-click restore of all content to a new device.

The problem of updating mingled content would be essentially unchanged, however.

Conclusion

Whilst this behaviour is interesting and useful, I feel convinced that this is the most complicated and therefore the most error prone approach to app deployment. To be successful with this model requires a fairly deep conceptual understanding of how the App Store DRM is keyed to individual accounts, how the iTunes backup model works and how to manipulate the App Store application on the device.

Next week, I plan to write about the third possible model of app deployment: every pupil has their own iTunes account.