Tablets in teaching: mirroring your tablet
As I posted recently, we’re embarking on a project looking at tablets in teaching, particularly with respect to how they can be used as ‘presentation’ devices. One of the issues here from a technical perspective is how best to go about mirroring the display of your tablet on the projector.
We started off looking at a combination of iPad AirPlay functionality with AppleTV. This is very easy to set up on your home wifi network – but less straightforward on Eduroam. (It turns out that it may also infringe Eduroam rules.) There is also the factor that the AppleTV box costs around £100, so it isn’t a cheap option.
We then looked at some of the iPad / iPhone apps that support mirroring, including Reflector and AirServer (pictured on the left). In fact, both these products are not apps as such but desktop applications that allow your iPad screen to be mirrored over wifi using the standard AirPlay feature. The issue we had here was that while your iPad can easily be configured to connect to Eduroam (see the IT Services webpages on this) , podium PCs are of course on the wired network. There are two ways around this: (1) use your laptop instead of the podium PC as the receiving device; (2) connect a USB wifi adapter to the podium PC and this should connect to Eduroam without installation.
USB wifi adapters only cost a few pounds so, given that it’s much less hassle than taking both an iPad and a laptop into the teaching room, this looks the better bet. And with AirServer only costing $3.99 when more than 20 licences are ordered, installing it on podium PCs looks pretty cost effective. Teaching Support are now looking into this.
But what about Android, you might ask. There are several equivalent services to AirServer and Reflector for Android, but all have the disdvantage that they required the Android device to be ‘rooted’ – a sort of hack which many users will be reluctant to do to their tablets.
There is also an emerging wireless video sending standard emerging called Miracast which may eventually offer competition to AppleTV but for the moment it has been adopted by very few tablets, and the currently available receivers do not seem to work as well as AppleTV.