AirDrop to the Whole Class at Once
About this QuickTip
If you’ve ever spent ages tapping every student’s name in AirDrop, this tip will save you a huge amount of time. With Apple Classroom, you can AirDrop to everyone at once and receive student work automatically. Classroom even appends each student’s name to their file, making marking and organising far simpler.
Transcript
When you’ve got your student devices connected to Classroom, it opens up other things that you can do to make your teaching that little bit simpler. For example, here on my iPad I’ve got a Keynote document that I want to share with my whole class, and normally without Classroom you’d have to go on AirDrop and then choose every single student individually.
But with Classroom set up, that changes. When I go on to AirDrop, I now have new options at the top for groups of devices. That means I’ve got my whole class as one option, and any groups that I set up in the Classroom app – maybe table or house groups or whatever it is – I can then simply tap on there and it will AirDrop in bulk to all of those devices.
The students can then accept and open the document just like a normal AirDrop, but it means for you, you haven’t got to tap 30 times onto every single device.
And AirDrop also works back from the student to the teacher as well, in a slightly different way with Classroom. On a student device, when they go to AirDrop, they’ll then see your teacher account at the very top of their AirDrop list before any other devices. And when they send it to you, you don’t have to press accept 30 times and worry about missing any of them, because Classroom will accept all those files for you, and it will put it into your inbox on the top toolbar, which you can find here.
Even better than that though, is when you tap onto the inbox and you open one of those documents, you’ll realise it’s actually appended the student’s name to the file name of every document that you’ve got. You don’t have to worry about the children naming it in the right way so you can work out whose is whose – Classroom does all of that for you based on the device name.
I can simply open them or save them to my Files app straight from the inbox in Classroom. These AirDrop features are a really handy addition to Classroom, and if you want to find out more about Apple Classroom, check out the playlist on my end screen now where I’ve made a complete beginner’s guide to using Classroom with your students.
Technical details: This QuickTip was recorded on an 11″ iPad Pro (2nd Generation) running iPadOS 17.2 in January 2024.
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