Dream of using Apple Classroom on iOS to observe multiple Macs

zeilstra_thomas
New Contributor II

I have a dream that a class will start with a laptop cart being rolled into a classroom, the students will all grab a machine and be automatically signed in with a generic local "student" user account, and the teacher will take out their iPad and open the Classroom iOS app, tap the class "Cart A", and see a list of all the computers and have the option to tap the Screens button to view the screens of all 26 laptops simultaneously from the iPad.

I get the impression that this is technically feasible with the proper things set up on the backend but in actual practice, we haven't found a reliable way to allow the iPad to view the Mac screen. It has worked briefly and intermittently but it's never been reproducible. I realize one solution would be to have the teacher create an ad hoc class every time and instructor the students to manually join the new class in System Preferences but come on, let's be serious here...

Has anyone been able to do anything resembling this? It just seems like this is a bleeding-edge feature that hasn't quite been ironed out yet.

2 REPLIES 2

mickgrant
Contributor III

Does it need to be an iPad that the teacher uses. i have a system up and running that similar to what you want but reversed

for instance we use out teachers Mac's to view all our secondary kids BYOD iPads every lesson.

The teacher creates the class once and invites all the students, they accept and now whenever they re-enter the classroom for the rest of the year the teacher just opens up the classroom application on mac and the kids get prompted to allow access. if they refuse, then they put their device away as our BYOD agreement with them states that they must give access when requested in order to use the device in class.

we also have our primary with iPad carts that are managed with ASM as shared iPads, and teacher iPads that are grouped by classes.
the teacher has full control of the kids iPads with the classroom app and they don't get a choice in that.

zeilstra_thomas
New Contributor II

Yeah, that's the equipment we've got so switching it around and giving the teacher the Mac and all the students iPads isn't an option.