Switching From Smartboard to Apple TV

Our district is a Apple district with 1:1 ipads and AppleTVs (small box connected to projector, not actual TV). One thing we highlighted with the swap was the ability for teachers to teach from anywhere in the room as well as be able to mirror their screens in any room with an AppleTV. The other big bonus was the opportunity for students to share their screens with the class. I think your tech playground on this will help and hopefully put staycationers at ease when they see how simple it is.

Any change is tough. We are leading our teachers through this process too. Here's a resource I've been using to share the change as a positive one for learning and teaching. 😊

Attachments

tv.key

Download  (1.9 MB)

It's helpful to pitch these changes from the perspective of solving problems teachers may face. In my case this was solving the problem of looking for the Lighting - HDMI adapters, being tethered to the screen with short HDMI cables and pupils having to get up and come to the front to plug in to share.

Our recent screen upgrades have built in Apple TV so screen mirroring and the comfort of a screen is a good balance of both worlds :-)

Hi Kacee,

I’m in a 1:1 Apple district and 2 years ago they decided to switch us from our seamless AppleTV/iPad/Macbook environment to ClearTouch boards.

Collage was laggy and forget about viewing videos (in ELA), this is so important.

My department chair purchased AppleTVs and everything has been perfect since.

I’m back in business. I can walk around the room, Airplay from my MacBook or iPad with seamless effort. I can annotate poems on the fly, use all apps from either device and the students can Airplay their work effortlessly.

Each subject teacher has different needs, so I would recommend recruiting your strongest users to make a short PD showcasing how easy AppleTV is to use in the classroom.

I’m happy to assist. Just let me know.

I don't have the experience of using a smart board, by my school is entirely AppleTV based. One of the best things about it in my classroom is that any Mac/iPad/iPhone can connect to it to display something. I am constantly hopping from device to device depending on what I need to show.

We switched from Promethean Interactive boards (which lasted 12-15 years, btw) to our teachers using TV monitors & Apple TVs. Our high school math department was the first group to switch and we demonstrated in a training with that whole department how to use their iPad and apps like Keynote, Numbers, and Explain EDU Basics. I would add Freeform to that now. We were able to convert their old flipcharts to Explain EDU files, so that helped. We also demonstrated how they could use their iPad as a document camera (just with using the iPad on a stand of some kind and the camera app, and that was a big hit. It definitely helps to show how mobile you can actually be in the classroom when you aren't tethered to the front of the room. One thing that is a challenge is that you can't always "point" to something on your iPad when you aren't next to the screen, so giving people time to practice "digital pointing" with things like using Accessibility's assistive touch or the keynote laser pointer is important. And honestly, if you can... just give them time to connect their iPad and try it.