Using an Ipad to change your life for good

My principal recently gifted us with Ipads and Apple TV’s. Every teacher in our school was wondering the same thing, which budget did this come out of, and how are these going to really change our teaching practices. Well, after playing around for quite some time with both tools, I can never go back. Here are a few ways that you can use these tools to change everything about your classroom, increase student engagement, and make learning more fun for everybody (including you).

1. Connect your Apple TV to your projector with an HDMI cable. Now, hopefully, you have Google slides that you use for many of your lessons. If not, then skip along. Instead of presenting your slideshow through your computer, you can cast it to your Apple TV instead. The HUGE advantage of doing this is that you can see your ‘presenter notes’ on the Ipad, alongside the slide itself. That means that instead of walking around with your lesson plans, you can just add important information to each slide’s presenter notes section and see it while you are teaching. And guess what? Your students won’t see the notes. Magic. This tip is even better when paired with the tip in part two of this article. Here is how to do it: First, swipe down from the top right of your Ipad to open the status icons tray (the ones with Wifi, airplane mode, etc.). Next, click the symbol that looks like two rectangles stacked on top of each other (it may say screen mirroring). Then, select the name of your Apple TV and click on it. Finally, open your slide show and click the play symbol within Google Slides (at the top), and select ‘present onan external device.’ That’s it. It is way easier than it looks but try it at least once without students present to work out the little issues.
2. While casting your Google Slides to your Apple TV, you can use an Apple Pencil to write on your slide. That means that you can draw on pictures of fraction models, correct the grammar of a sentence, and draw little doodles without blocking your students’ view. Don’t worry about ruining your team’s slides either because these drawings disappear forever once you exit the slide.
3. Use your Ipad as a mobile document camera. Take pictures of student work as you walk around the room and instantly display it to the class using the magic of Airplay. This gives kids the chance to see other strategies and avoids wasting time having students write their strategies with a marker on the whiteboard while everybody else falls asleep.
4. Speaking of showing your work on the whiteboard, use a drawing app like Freeform to write ideas that show up on the whiteboard without you needing to stand up front. This lets you walk around and monitor learning while presenting information.

A few extra things that will help you to make the best use of this technology in your classroom:

• Get an Apple Pencil; they are a complete game changer. They let you and your students write on the Ipad to create meaningful learning interactions.
• I suggest getting an Apple TV Mount so that yours doesn’t fall off of the projector and almost hit somebody’s head like mine did. This also helps you to position the Apple TV so that you can see the power light and know if it is off or on without turning the projector on.
• Speaking of mounts, I love my remote control mount in my classroom. It keeps my remotes in one place, especially the particularly expensive Apple TV remote.