Open Apps on Every Student iPad at Once

In the last Apple Classroom video, I created some groups of students in my class based on the tables they’re currently sitting in, and these are really helpful because we can use these to control the iPads in the class.

Now, we can actually control all the iPads in the same way at the same time, but for this example, I’m going to do it group by group. So I’ll tap onto Group One on the left-hand side, and then when I tap the Open button, I can open an app on my student devices.

On the menu on screen, I can select any app from my iPad, and as long as it’s installed on the children’s devices, it will open on their device as well. I’m going to go for AR Maker, and when I tap on that, it will automatically open on all of those devices that I’ve selected in my group. And the nice touch is, with one tap, I can open it on my iPad as well, which makes teaching that a little bit more seamless.

Now, when I go back to all of my students, I can see that three of them are in AR Maker and the other three are not at the moment. So let’s go into Group Two, and we’ll open the app there as well, but this time we’re going to use the Lock in App toggle before we select the app we want to open.

That then means that the students can’t leave the app until I, as the teacher, unlock their devices. When you’ve used that toggle, you’re then going to select the app – and I’ll do AR Maker again – and that will open the app on those students’ iPads, but this time they’ll be locked.

If I go back to All Students, I can now see that all six of my demo students are in AR Maker, but if you look closely, you’ll see that James P. Sullivan, Mike Wazowski and Sheriff Woody have all got the padlock icon next to the word AR Maker underneath their names. That means that those students can’t press the Home button to leave the app like the other three can.

To release this lock, all we need to do is tap the padlock on the top toolbar. When the padlock is showing unlocked, that becomes the unlock button, and by tapping on it, it will unlock any restrictions on the iPads you’ve got selected. So for me, it will unlock all of those devices. So now the students can press Home and do whatever else they need to do in their lesson.

Of course, it’s not just apps that I can control on my students’ devices. I can also send them a website via a link, or I can open up a particular book in the Books app. I’m going to send a website, and the simplest way to do this is to tap on the Safari icon on the top of your Classroom app and then navigate to your Favourites folder.

You need to make sure that you’ve saved your website as a bookmark or into your Favourites folder in the Safari app before you deploy it to your students, otherwise it won’t show up on this screen. I’ve bookmarked my own website, jacobs.tips, and I’m simply going to choose that from my Favourites folder.

Here, I can also choose to lock my students’ devices into the Safari app if I wanted to. Then, when you deploy that website, it will open up in Safari, and it will load on all those devices. For me, this means it’s so much quicker than getting all the students to type in a URL or to find the page through Google. I can simply do it in a couple of taps, and again, just like with the app, I can open it on my iPad as well.

On that last screen, if I tap onto one of those thumbnails, I can then get a new screen of options. And from here, if I tap onto View Screen, I get an almost life-sized version of their iPad screen that I can see in real time, so I can check in on what they’re doing and how it’s working for them.

But I could also AirPlay their screen to my Apple TV or my projector by simply tapping on the AirPlay option here. That then means that we can share excellent learning, or we can share some really interesting discoveries, with the whole class using AirPlay in Classroom.

The ability to open apps, websites and books onto your students’ devices remotely from your own device really gives you a lot of control in your classroom. If you want to see what else Apple Classroom can do, check out the playlist on the end screen now, and I’ve got a complete beginner’s guide to using Classroom.