 Welcome to another ESU8 Wednesday webinar. This week I'm happy to share with you the updates to the new Apple Classroom app. While Apple Classroom was originally released over a year ago, it was version one and starting this fall with version 2.0 we're able to take advantage of its features even without a developed management system or MDM for iPad devices in our classroom. There are some preliminary requirements including that our iPads need to be updated to one of the latest operating systems. They need to be able to be running at least iOS 10.3 or newer and they need to have Bluetooth enabled and wireless capabilities on that allow peer-to-peer sharing. But really that's it. You just go to the App Store, search for the Apple Classroom app and install it for free on your teacher iPad. You only need it on the teacher device and we'll go ahead and launch it here now on the bottom right hand corner of my screen and get you started. The first time you launch Apple Classroom you will need to add in your teacher information and then you can create new classes at any time with the plus button. Here I already have an ESU8 Apple Classroom classroom started and I'll just click the add button to add students. You'll notice there's a code that displays much like when you start a Kahoot quiz or something else that students would need to connect to it from and we'll switch over to the student view on the iPad now to watch how that looks on their end. Alright, so here I am on a student device and this is actually a very clean iPad. It actually doesn't have very many apps on it at all and you'll notice that it doesn't have that Apple Classroom app on it installed as of yet so we don't need it. We're just going to go into our settings. One of the settings here on this device now is underneath of these main menu of settings you have this section for Apple Classroom. If you have it set to join classes automatically you'll see those invitations that appear at the top just like this one does in blue add ESU8 Apple Classroom or we could search for additional classes or join them manually down below. Since we're being invited right now to this classroom I'll go ahead and tap on it and then I'm prompted to enter that four-digit code that appeared on my teacher device. Once a student has done this one time they will remain in that classroom so you really only have to connect the student devices once and you can use it over and over again. This is really helpful for creating classes on the fly. It's also nice if you were to want to separate and maybe you taught a different group of students for science as you did math and you could actually create separate classrooms and have them join those and then start and end those classes when you want to use them with those students. One important thing to notice is that because I'm not managing these or managing the classes with an MDM is that students do have the power kind of unfortunately to have the teacher iPad ask them if it's okay if they lock them into an app or some of the restrictions that we want to be able to use. If I were setting these up for younger students the first time I would switch these oops to always allow them to lock and always allow them to airplane view screen. That way the students won't see that message just as is it okay if the teacher controls your iPad is it okay if the teacher projects your screen or views your screen. Now students that are a little bit older and or that might be picking around inside of their settings can change that but like I said most students won't even know that it's there and if you turn that on for them the first time then it should be set for you and ready to go for the future. So now that we've got that set we're going to switch back over to the teacher device and take it from there. All right so you can see in my Apple Teacher app on my teacher iPad I'm still in that add students screen and I do have one here Katie who was asked to join and so I'm going to go ahead and add her now. By the way the offline one is a different iPad and obviously Tina has joined this class before but currently she's offline and they will show offline your students will if they are out of Bluetooth range. So this requires proximity and it will not the settings whether you're controlling an iPad or locking them down it will only take place when they're in your close proximity and in range of Bluetooth. If the student were to walk to a different classroom and you forgot to unlock their iPad for example it would not be in effect when they leave your proximity. Likewise if a student swipes up from their command center at any time and happens to turn that Bluetooth off well that would be a problem because then Apple classroom would no longer be able to see and control that student device. So some people recommend that if you have the ability to turn to make sure that Bluetooth remains on and Wi-Fi remains on on student devices and take that power away from them that you can avoid any possible complications with that. Again if we just are vigilant usually the first thing that would happen if you can't connect to a student device is that Bluetooth got accidentally switched off. So here we are in the Apple classroom app and our main navigation bar gives me basically all the controls I need across the top. I've already added students with this first button here and the second button is to open an app. So we'll go ahead and do that one. Now right now I'm opening the app for all three students even though only one is connected. If I switch off of that you'll notice that I do have the capabilities of doing it just to that one device. Here we go the one iPad that I'm actually connecting with. So the two students who maybe aren't present today or who have walked out of Bluetooth range I don't even have to mess with sending the commands there and not being able to find them. Let's just do our practice today with the one device that's currently connected to this classroom. So again I'm going to open an app and I can choose from any app on my device however it does not tell me what apps are on the student device and it does need to be on the student device in order for Apple classroom to open it obviously. Like I told you earlier that device is pretty pretty clean doesn't have very many apps so I'm gonna have to stick with one of the basic Apple apps in order to demonstrate this feature and we'll find in here one of the Apple apps. There's keynote I can see it there we go and before I tap the keynote app notice down across the bottom of the screen is the slider to turn on to lock them in that app after opening. Sometimes you just want to open it for a student and that's fine but to me the real power is being able to keep them in that app until you're ready for them to go to use something else and so I wish that that slider would be actually at the top of this menu but it's not so you need to remember to slide that on first if you do want to lock them in the app and now I'll tap on the keynote app and you'll notice on my screen here on my Apple classroom screen that it shows that Katie's iPad now is in the keynote app and I can actually tap on Katie's little icon here and view her screen full screen to see more specifically what she's doing in keynote now as I manipulate that app and it is about a half second delay it's not an instantaneous viewing of student screens but it's not too delayed at all but I can see as the students are interacting with the app on their screen and I can watch that in pretty close to real time now if I tap done and the student continues to work I'm gonna still see and still monitor the Katie's in keynote but watch what happens if I go to view screen again here and I'm gonna do a test keynote slide here and then I decide oh I've had enough of this I'm gonna go visit another app and I on my student device try to press the home button and you won't notice anything happened and that's because nothing does students are truly locked in that app and if they try to navigate out in any way they are not able to so that's pretty awesome to be able to do that especially for young learners maybe we can lock them in an app in a in a station or in a rotation or in a small group and essentially allow for a little bit more supervised use of the iPads before we're finished with that locking them in keynote then I can hit the unlock button I could do that from this small menu or I could do it back out on my main menu and of course I could do that with all iPads or just the one group that I'm currently focused on using the lock button at the top this would do the same thing and it allows me to lock and unlock pretty easily by the way if I don't worry about locking them in a certain app and I just want to get a student's attention let's say I just want them to stop what they're doing no matter what they're working on and give me their eyes that lock button in the main menu allows me then to do just that and if we view the student screen right now I'll just go to view screen you can see what they see is the padlock and I can ask for their eyes and their attention and then go back and unlock that screen when I'm ready for them to go back to work and you'll notice that they then go back to that app and it just shows that they're still working in keynote and now I'm going to hit the home button and you can see that Katie's in the home screen alright so pretty straightforward pretty simple doesn't take a lot of know-how to send an app to students and lock them in that app or just lock their screen and get their attention let's talk next about navigating and being able to send them to a website and that's our third button up here in our main navigation bar or main toolbar again I'm going to apply this command just to the one student device that I have selected in the subgroup here and unlike an app unfortunately you cannot lock students in a website and you can take them to a website but they can use the home button and they can navigate away from that website so maybe that's at least a start we can also send them to a particular book title or a place in an iTunes U course but for most of us the majority of us will utilize the feature with a website I'm going to go ahead and find a website from our Safari bookmarks and you can make these bookmarks on your Mac laptop or on your iPad and just save them so you know you're going to use them later on let's go to internet safety here and let's send them to a sting safe online song on YouTube and we just tap that and you'll notice instantly that one iPad has been navigated let's view that student screened there and and verify that indeed the student device is visiting the YouTube internet safety song and it is it's just a little loading is a little bit slowly here and also another thing that's nice to know that as soon as that that video starts playing you can also if the students have forgotten to mute their devices you can control the audio by muting those devices as well it does just mute it temporarily and they still have the volume controls on the side of their iPad to turn that volume back up but it might be a good reminder to plug in those headphones or those earbuds and continue to watch it without disturbing the rest of the class so here I've taken them to a website by putting it into a bookmark there's also in iOS 11 if all your devices are updated that far there's a way to drag and drop websites and navigate to them through Apple Classroom by just dropping the URL on top of the button but the traditional way here is to again use that navigate button and have something saved ahead of time in your bookmarks so we've taken care of the lock button which is the fourth button and we also just briefly mentioned to the mute button so now let's take a look at screens and this is really no different than earlier when we were looking at the student screen full screen except this gives us the whole class at one time and you'll notice that when I was not in that screen view it still said the name of the app but when I am in the screens view it actually shows me a thumbnail of each student's screen you can imagine my class of 20 or 25 devices and all of their screens are showing at once this is really ideal in my mind for projecting onto a wall not necessarily to sit and monitor screens the entire time you're teaching but just to keep kids a little bit more accountable even amongst their peers so they're able to at a quick glance check on each other and make sure they're all on task or maybe even if they're working out a problem a math problem or doing a drawing of a concept in a drawing app you can easily see all the students ideas on one screen in little tiny thumbnails and then each one that you want to show in a little more detail you could bring up larger screen with the view screen button so the thumbnails view of the screens is handy for for many things and you can toggle back and forth between those two views pretty easily and finally our last button is a group button and this one allows me to make a new subgroup and this might be my reading group maybe I want a group of iPads that are just for the girls in the class or whatever you want to call them maybe I want a group of one and one students going to get some different commands and some different controls in the rest of the class when I add the group I can name it whatever I want and then I add the devices in this case I only have one but I'm going to add that one to my reading group and then I'll tap done in the top right and now I can still go back and forth between my other groups my all and then that new group that I created I can edit that group and add more devices to it I can also delete it entirely by pressing and holding on the icon for that group and then tapping the remove pop-up message that appeared there so there you have it the last and final feature that I want to show with show you Apple Classroom 2.1 is the ability to share files both via myself my teacher iPad to my students and from my students back to my classroom so to do that I'm going to first show you how a student might share something with you and so we'll go back over to the student iPad so back on our students device you can see how easy it is for them to share things with you as far as files and attachments and evidences of learning I'm going to ask my student here on this iPad to visit the notes app and start a new note if there isn't already a space for them to do so when they get their cursor on that new note then they can bring up their keyboard and in the top right hand corner of the keyboard if your app is updated enough you'll notice the little marker icon that allows students to mark up the note or draw I'm just going to ask them to work out the problem that I've mentioned which is finding the area of this triangle and this triangle might be on the board and we're going to say that the base is four and the height is six and when we show our work here we know that our our formula is one half base times height and so I can work that out and obviously show all the great thinking that is happening for this student even without being over there individually so once the student gets the answer they've got their note and now they're just going to use the share arrow they want to send this to me so that share arrow here comes up with typically the airdrop settings this is the cool feature the airdrop doesn't even have to be turned on and always automatically you'll see the option to share back to that apple classroom of which the student device is connected to so I can just tap on the name of my teacher Mrs. Maro in ESU 8's apple classroom and I have just sent her my work let's go check it out on the teacher device now if you look real closely at the toolbar across the top you'll notice we now have a new button this only becomes available when we've shared a file with our students or our students have shared a file with us and it's called sharing it has a little one icon to alert us that there is a new document and you can see here that student Katie has shared a notes document I can tap on it and view that note just as Katie sent it you can see the work from the student device there had she continued on you would be able to see even more that's pretty awesome and pretty easy to collect things from all of your students if any of you have used airdrop in the past it's it's handy however it's a one-to-one experience so I can only have students handing in one thing at a time to me and with a classroom full of iPads that have airdrop turned on it's it's very easy to get confused which ones have I received from and which ones haven't I and which ones accepted my file and which ones didn't so this is a all at once type of experience which is handy I'll show you a little bit more about that when we go to the report at the end but for now let's talk about how the teacher can send out a document to the students and to demonstrate this I'm going to and obviously I could go to that share arrow on my teacher device just like I did on the student device but I want to show you another way you can share files with the newest version I'm using drag and drop so to do that I'm going to put my iPad into split view so I'm going to pull up my dock by swiping my finger from the bottom up and I get my open apps just like I would on a dock on a Mac I'm going to share this screen both with Apple Classroom and with photos so I'm going to take the photos app drag it and drop it on the right hand side so that they can share the screen and I can slide this divider over and share it more or less if I want to view one of those apps larger or smaller but this is plenty I can navigate through all my camera roll here and I can find the photo that I want to share which just happens to be a PDF that I want my students to complete it's it's just a way to do a digital worksheet honestly I'm going to take this picture of this internet safety PDF and drag it and drop it right on top of my student device or I could put it on top of my all I'm just going to go right on top of my one student device for right now and send it to Katie and now Katie can do whatever she wants with that PDF handout she could accept it and read it she could definitely mark it up we'll take a look at her device here as we view her screen I can see that she's received the document and we'll just view her screen here so we can see what she sees it opened up in photos she's going to hit continue here in advance to the next screen and just by clicking in the top right corner of her photos menu she can edit that PDF using the markup tools in photos to gain back the rest of my screen here I'm just going to swipe to the right to get rid of my split view and bring up that student device screen full screen here the student can just like any image in photos they can annotate it or mark it up they'll just tap the edit button they'll find the markup three little dots in the bottom of the menu and then use the markup marker icon tap that now I have those traditional drawing tools that we've seen even in notes we now see them in the photos on any any device and they're able to use those tools to mark up on top of the PDF that I just sent them show their work mark their answers they could save it back and send it back to me or I could just watch the students doing it live by viewing their screens in the Apple classroom app so this ability to share documents and files with my students back and forth is by far the most powerful feature of Apple classroom really facilitates even though it's not a full-fledged LMS it really facilitates a lot of great interaction in my classroom one final feature of the new Apple classroom 2.1 app only shows when you hit the end class button in the top left hand corner and this is a class summary report in it you can see all the apps that were used during this class session any items that were shared and what individual students actually did on their iPad whether you were viewing their screens or not so here we can tap on an individual student and see which app she used when we can use this to just kind of review what if they use their time well what they were supposed to be doing for upper elementary students this would be a great reminder of allowing them to have some freedom and make some choices and yet still be productive students in the classroom this is a great report you can pull up at the end of each class it is gone the next time you start the class so you might consider saving it by screenshotting it or printing it off or maybe just using it as a spot check from time to time but that is of course a new feature that you might want to take advantage of so there you have it the free Apple classroom app if you haven't gotten enough confidence by watching this Wednesday webinar to try it out on your own feel free to contact me or anyone here at ESU8 and we can come out and be that extra set of hands the first time you try it I'm sure you'll find that it'll make your teaching and learning even more productive within your iPad classroom and hopefully you'll find great uses to share with all of us here at ESU8 and in the whole entire learning community thanks so much for listening and have great happy learning with Apple classroom