Apple TV In The Classroom – The New Smart Board

An iPad and Apple TV can combine to provide an advantageous alternative to more expensive, traditional interactive white boards.

Guest writer and High School Principal David Mahaley is using this approach and offers his insights, and observations from educators in his school.

With the integration of the iPad into the instructional environment, teachers and students have discovered many new ways in which the device can expand and enhance the learning environment. With the iPad, the Apple TV can offer a flexible, complete, and cost efficient alternative to the traditional interactive boards populating our classrooms.

As a school administrator and teacher, I have explored the Apple TV and its offerings as an alternative to one of the many types of interactive whiteboards currently available to instructors. We have committed our school to issuing every high school student and instructor an iPad. All instructors are expected to explore and integrate the device in their instructional setting to maximize the learning experience and student/professional productivity.

Image by K.Walsh, Apple TV logo source: www.apple.com/appletv

Historically, we have relied upon the interactive boards as a way to infuse the technology of the computer and software to the learning objectives found in the various content areas of our curriculum. Married to this idea is the use of the laptop, that is tethered to the projection device for the board. This inherently ties the teacher to one location or space in the classroom. Immediately, this presents some problems when professional educators are asked to circulate and monitor student activity around the room.

The use of the Apple TV in combination with an iPad in the instructor’s hand provides a mobile platform from which classroom activities can be initiated. Through the use of several apps, teachers can provide notes, display steps and processes to problems, initiate the display of media (pausing and resuming as needed from any location in the classroom), and allow students to participate from their own seats in a variety of interactive activities. This is different than the remote control of a connected teacher laptop to a traditional interactive board. Movement within and between apps is measurably better than the laptop interface, and navigation on the iPad screen directly to the Apple TV is visually more intuitive.

I am not looking to marginalize and discount the various software applications that can connect your mobile device to a laptop and thus to an interactive board.  Interactive whiteboards are a solution, however, through my experiences, a much more cumbersome one than our exploratory use of the iPad and Apple TV. We should explore the instructional and budgetary implications of a move towards this new option.

Any administrator who is charged with the responsibility of observing and commenting on teacher performance in the classroom finds themselves looking for moments throughout the class period where the instructor demonstrated their ability to circulate and monitor the students as they participate in the lesson. Freeing the instructor from the string of cords is a step in the right direction. With the Apple TV, the teacher connects wirelessly to the device and can be in any location in the classroom – in fact, they can be anywhere that they can continue to be connected to the network. Secondly, you now offer the teacher the opportunity to switch quickly and efficiently between applications via the iPad without having to dash to the front of the room to manipulate the programs on a laptop tied to a stationary location. With applications available today, and more coming around the corner, students have the capabilities to connect to the Apple TV configuration from their own device in order to share and present their own work.