Broadcast through Airplay via Bluetooth

This is a post to add to what a colleague, and fellow ADE, Kyle Pearce posted today on creating a WIFI hotspot to allow you to connect your iPad to your MacBook and therefore broadcast through an Airplay enabled app (Apple TV, Reflector App or Air Server).

This is another way to do what Mr. Pearce did. My way is probably not have as fast of a connection but it is a simple way to quick share what you have on your iPad screen. I have found this useful in my school division as our iPads and computers both connect to different wireless network making it difficult to connect the two devices and mirror the iPad screen on your computer and then onto you SmartBoard or IWB.

In my example, I use Airplay to successfully mirror my iPad screen to my MacBook Pro.

Connecting to Air Server

I've been wanting to mirror my iPad and those of students' for a long time. I have always thought it wasn't possible in our system due to our iPads and Laptops being on different networks.

As of today, I have got it to work and am now in a testing phase to see how successful we can make this.

It's not 100% foolproof but will work better than connecting via a cable. This is how I'm trying to connect the iPads in our school to Air Server for Mac. I downloaded the free trial for Air Server. I will try to test it rigorously before purchases the $11 license.

1. First of all you need to have the iPad and the computer connected together. This can be either through the same network (not possible for us) or share an internet connection. I tried both connecting my MacBook Pro to ethernet cable (blue cable) and also through wireless. For this example I used wireless as most of us would not be near a network port when doing this.
2. This screen shot shows how I shared the internet connection (the tricky part is being able to do this - You need administration privileges to start this process).
3. Next, I connected the iPad to my laptop through bluetooth. These are the messages you recieve in order to pair the two devices.
4.  Mirroring the iPad - Next is the fun part and true test to see if it works.

Today I also had to students successfully connect to my computer to share their work. This opens up so many doors for collaborations and reflection.

I have a couple of questions to try and figure out before we purchase the licence.

• Is this going to be OK with our School Tech Support department? Will they be happy with the iPad sharing the Macbook Pro connection.
• Is the connection going to work for long periods of time?

I also have a few good points that I've thought about too.

• This will be very cost effective if we get it working. It will cost about $12 for 3 computers. That would be we could get approximately 25 licences for the price of 1 Apple TV.
• Students will only connect to share and then they can turn back to their CBE LAWN (iPad, students and BYOD network).
• The wireless options allows us to utilize it where the SmartBoard is and it still works
• To save any connection issues, we can try to connect on a 'need to' basis. This will help with timing out connections, hopefully.

I would love any feedback about this post. Especially if you've tried this in any other ways.

CHEERS!