Reflection on the ReflectionApp and the AirServerApp and Apple TV

I have been very excited because every year when I get my tax refund back I usually convince my wife to let me buy a new toy. Like my iPad’s or a new kayak. This year I’ve known for a long time that I was going to be buying an Apple TV with the converter from HDMI to VGA with audio. I’ve been using my iPad for two years now every day in class and I wanted to take things to the next level. I want the students to be able to see many of the tools that I have at my finger tips.

I’ve been using the AirServerApp, running on my classroom computer for a year now. That app was the previous version 3. I used it to AirPlay music to my classroom sound system. Of course it has worked flawlessly, with the one exception that there was no security on it. That meant that frequently some kid working out down in the weight room would discover a pretty new icon on his iPod Screen (you know, that one for AirPlay that is never there until you can actually use it!) and in the middle of rehearsal I would suddenly have some pumping jams in the middle of a Michael Sweeney festival piece! Now during a high school rehearsal we would simply enjoy the commercial break. I would dance a bit for the class and then flip the mute switch then back to work we would go. BUT I REALLY tried to leave the mute switch on during middle school class because the rest of rehearsal after an episode like that was usually useless! It was worth it though to be able to wirelessly stream music, at will from anywhere I had my phone, iPod Touch or iPad!

You are probably wondering why in the world I didn’t just buy an AirPort Express and use that. Those have pass codes on them! Well I did! The only thing was that my PC tech guys freaked out! Plus I could not for the life of me get that darned thing to work at the school, on the school network! I even talked to the “big guys”, the ones doing the install on the new wireless servers going into our school to see if they had an answer for making it work, These are tech guys not form our school but instead with a big company whose only job was to install these wireless servers. Their answer was – don’t bring in home network devices, our devices will simply block them! I was in fact afraid I would have similar trouble with an Apple TV. I was hoping though that it would work.

Turns out I might not even try though! This last week of February was a great week! Especially for those of us school teachers in situations like this!

First, the ReflectionApp came out! This is from the same company that makes AirParrot – which puts your mac screen on your AppleTV. ReflectionApp is meant to mirror your iOS device onto your Computer! Of course your iOS device has to be capable of this, the iPad2 and iPhone4s both are. Not only does the mirroring include the picture but it streams the audio as well! So in other words, instead of having to but an AppleTV ($99), a convertor ($45 or more), and get it to work with my school network, I simply bought a $15 app and installed it on a computer I already have hooked up to my classroom projector and I am in business.

Second great thing was that the same day I bought and installed the ReflectionApp an error message showed up on my computer. Getting excited about error message is not normal I know, but this error came from an app called AirServer that I have been running for a year now! The message said that I needed to purchase an upgrade from AirServer in order to mirror my iPad! This startled me! I had not heard, and still haven’t, anything about AirServerApp adding the capability to mirror from an iOS device! So I headed over to their website - http://www.airserverapp.com/ and found it plastered all over the front page of the website! I quickly bought the $3.99 update. I had some issues with the update because when I originally bought the AirServerApp I used an old email that I never use any more. I bought the update with a new email. This really ticked off the AirServerApp and for a day I was in a limbo with the update screen from the app freezing up when it tried to authorize the update. The tech support took a day but considering that it was Friday night that’s probably not bad. They updated their databases of paid people and I was in business. I like their tech support.

So now, the good stuff! I’ve been playing with both apps for all of today and it’s been great fun. Of course I am at home with my MacBookPro and no projector hooked up. My kids walk by and I’ve had one of them do a double take and say – Whoa! Your iPad is on your computer! Then one of the other boys said, Why are you doing that?

Here’s what I’ve discovered. With the ReflectionApp there are more options for you to configure. At first boot the iPad (or iPhone) pops up with a border around it. This looks cool at first but in my case I want the image as big as possible so the students can see it better. It’s easy to take the border off. Another option that helps get the image bigger is to have the app go fullscreen. Now I have not really liked using the full screen mode in Lion. But I like it in this app because it is more what I expected – when using my iPad everything is full screen all the time. Plus I want no other distractions when projecting that image to the students. A quick shortcut (command F) and the app pops out of full screen mode. There are different optimizations for what image size you want mirrored, iPad, standard iPhone, Retina iPhone, or High resolution. This has been one of three issues I have found when using ReflectionApp. When I switched to High Resolution I really messed things up. I had to quite Reflection and reboot my iPad both to get things mirroring again. The second issue I found with ReflectionApp is when switching from portrait to landscape mode. If I am in landscape mode when I start the mirroring the image on the computer is filling the full screen, top to bottom – right to left. Then I can switch to landscape and the image is still top to bottom (not right to left of course) BUT when I switch back to landscape the image is no longer filling the entire screen top to bottom. It is smaller. A quick flick of the command F shortcut pops it back but I am not going to want to do that in the middle of class. The image when it is not filling the screen still is large and acceptable though.

Mirroring with both apps have gone very well – I will mention one exception at the end of this post about trying to mirror instrument apps though. In face with the ReflectionApp I found that I can end up mirroring both my iPad2 AND my iPhone4s! OK – I take that back I can mirror both devices with both apps! If you really want to do this though you should not have the automatic full screen mode on though because it is kind of a pain to get it to look like my screen shot. One of the amazing things I’ve found is that I can be running both the ReflecitonApp and AirServerApp at the same time. They are working very well together and they are not fighting each other at all! I even have been running audio from iPad through ReflectionApp and mirroring it too while mirroring my iPhone with AirServerApp! The audio plugged away and the video behaved as it had all day long with just one of these apps running at a time. I have been running the mirroring all day when I have been at my computer (my daughter did become a teen though so my time has been limited with her party and bowling and shopping though!). Every thing runs smooth as I would expect for all normal apps. I even tried photoBooth. There is a bit of a time delay in PhotoBooth as well as FaceTime with the video. At times I do get a stutter in the audio too. You should understand though that I am running an old AirPort Express with only 802.11b and I know that two of my boys have been running iTunes, FaceBook, Web Surfing and the like through their iPodTouches too.

My only complaint is when I have tried my musical instrument apps. For instance a piano app, MorphWiz or something like this. The lag is not going to work at this time for live performance! There is not way I could mirror this at at a concert and play a song on my iPad so the audience could see what was going on. Now I’m not sure what the problem is though because the PR on both web-sites show gaming apps running and they say that people could be using this for mirroring games! I am not a gamer but I do have a few games loaded on my iPad and I tried BugDom and it worked pretty well on both apps. Cro-Mag Rally crashed the ReflectionApp but worked in AirServer. So for gaming and musical instruments…. I wouldn’t hold my breath too much. These apps are not rock solidly performing in either mirroring app yet!

In wrapping this post up… there are two more points I need to make. The ReflectionApp tech support is really super and really super fast! I sent an email requesting and asking about a passcode (because the first version I downloaded didn’t have a passcode in it) Within minutes they had responded back to me. The next day there was an update to the program! Now don’t get me wrong – I know the update was not because of me but these guys are working hard on their app and want to interact with their users.

The AirServerApp has been rock solidly streaming music in my band room for a year now. This app is a bit more polished. For instance, there aren’t very many settings that we can adjust, the app just does it for you. When you select a song on your iPad in the Music app and push play there is a little notification (very Growl like, if you know what Growl is) on your Mac that tells you what song is playing. When you play videos, like YouTube, and take the video full screen, AirServer uses it’s own built-in movie player. AirServer has some more info about this sort of thing on their web site.

Both apps are great. ReflectionApp requires OS 10.6 or higher. AirServer will work somewhat with Tiger, Snow Leopard, Leopard and Lion as well as working some with Android devices (I think just for audio though) they are both $14.99 (the upgrade for AirServer from v3 was $3.99)

Reflection App, Apple TV for $15?

Buying an Apple TV is on my list of soon to buy items. Of course at this point I am waiting until next weeks announcements from Apple on March 7. I have ideas about what will be announced, go read the rumor blogs if you have no idea. I an assure you it is not the iPhone 5 though, like one of my 8th graders pronounced today in class. Of course I don’t have any REAL knowledge, just educated guessing.

The problem with the Apple TV is that my classroom projector does not have HDMI. This means I also need an adaptor. No problem, just need more money.

Now, today though I saw all sorts of information about the Reflection app for Mac. This app allows you to mirror what is on your iPad2 or iPhone 4s to your computer. It works too! Go check out the website and watch the videos.

My question to those of you who have an Apple TV already is how does it compare in real life? $99 vs $15

 

 

Bring your own Devices in Education and Interactive Student Engagement

If you have not been paying attention to the discussions flying around the internet and school about BYOD then you should be. BYOD – Bring Your On Device – is where the school stops providing the device that students use to enhance their learning. Instead the students must provide their own. Their a many students who have great devices in their pockets already in the form of iPods and phones. Of course now the discussion is exactly how many students do own such a device and what could we use them for? How can such devices be used to enhance learning. That is the most important question we need to ask. What we plan to do with these devices must make what we are doing better, faster more engaging or even better, provide a new opportunity not otherwise available. It is not good enough just to use these devices for the sake of using them or the novelty of it.

Tonight I ran across a web service/app that I have been on the lookout for since the iPad came out. I have wanted a better way to incorporate student response systems in my classroom. I have one set of 32 clickers that the students and I both enjoy using. I have been looking for apps that would take the current experience to the next level. I have also anxiously been waiting for a system that would allow my students to use their own devices that they own. 

http://www.socrative.com/ is the service I ran across. This is a way to engage the entire class using any device. There are a slew of options in Socrative! Quick exercise, Exit Tickets, Quizzes and Games to name a few. These are all ways the student interacts with Socrative. Then the teacher has the capability to run reports on how the students responded.  The compatibility includes any device that is web enabled and any internet browser. This means a student could use Android, iOS, Palm or anything else that lets you access the web! These are the devices that are sitting on kids music stands or are in their pockets anyways! Why not actually use them to your benefit and more to the point allow the students to give you feedback that will help you teach better? Why not give a quiz that is automatically graded for you? How great would that be? Give a test and you walk out of class with the grades already done!

There is a teacher app as well as a student app for iPod Touches and iPads. The sign up was quick and fast. Their website says it takes a teacher 3 minutes to setup and the students apps take 20 seconds to load! Now that should keep them going!

One of the great parts of this service is that this is free (for now!) You need to go check this service out – do yourself a favor and your students as well! Leave me a comment down below if you use this service or if you use student response systems in your music room/classroom.

As a side-note, the only reason I came across this app is because I subscribe to many different web-sites using RSS feeds. If you don’t use RSS News Feeds you should. RSS is a quick way to follow your favorite web-sites without having to actually go visit each and every web-site on a daily basis. I simply use Google Reader as the main component, the place I subscribe to my web-sites from. Then I have several iPad apps that I use to go and see what’s new. This is a 2012 version of my Grandpa’s/Mom’s newspaper. I get to see only news that I want to see. I get to QUICKLY go through and look at only new information.

Working with photo’s and Video’s and iOS devices

This past couple of months I have started looking for a different way to handle my photo’s and video’s that I capture with my iPad and iPhone. I used to not have that many to deal with so I simply hooked that cable up to my laptop, plugged in my iOS device and imported it all into iPhoto. Then I would hit the delete option after importing. This would keep my camera roll cleared out and keep me from importing duplicates the next time around. Now that I have my iPhone it has become as bit more complicated because I am capturing many more photo’s and video with the phone. So let me fill you in on how I am dealing with this issue.

First thing to keep clear is the difference between the camera roll and your photo library. The camera roll is where a picture will go when you shoot it with your camera. That picture will sit in the camera roll until you delete it. The camera roll is also where screen shots are stored, any pictures you save from the Safari app and any other app.

Your Photos app is where you put photo’s when you are syncing from your computer.

Apple’s Photo Stream makes these two apps a bit more confusing. If you have Photo Stream turned on then your last 1,000 photo’s will be streamed out to the cloud. (This time I do NOT mean videos by the way. Photo Stream does not do video as of right now.) So you will be able to see the photo’s that are in your Camera Roll, inside of your Photo’s App under the Photo Stream button. Those photo’s are not actually in your Photo’s app though. You are simply looking at your pictures that are out there in the cloud. Now remember that your Photo Stream are the last 1.000 pictures from ALL your devices, your iPhone, iPad, iPodTouch, Computer or whatever else you have hooked up to your stream.

Obviously you would probably want to save the pictures from your camera roll and cherish those precious moments forever. Photo Stream makes this an easy process! Take a look in iPhoto at the options under Photo Stream. Those settings allow you to automatically import the photo’s (not videos) from your iPhone or iPad camera roll and iPhoto will import those into your permanent iPhoto database.

This is an easy way to take ALL of your camera roll pictures (not videos) and get them into your computer for further manipulation. The videos you need to find another way to deal with those – which is easily done by hooking that cable up between the computer and the iOS device.

There is one huge issue though with this process. If you let Photo Stream and iPhoto do all the work of importing your photo’s (not videos) into your computer iPhoto database, you will be left with the original photo’s on your iOS device. This gets confusing after awhile though. I’m constantly forgetting what I have imported and what still needs to be imported. The answer is to delete the photo’s from the camera roll once you know that iPhoto has imported them form your Photo Stream. Of course you can do this one at a time on the iOS device but this gets tedious, especially if you have 400+ pictures like i did tonight. You cannot delete them using iPhoto either – in the old days before Photo Stream did the improving of the photo’s for us, we would click the import button and then click the delete button after the import was done.

There is a quick solution. A very unused app, Image Capture, sits in your applications folder. It comes with every Mac and most of us never use it. If you hook your iOS device up and start that app you will find a very easy way to delete your photo’s (JUST REMEMBER – those videos were never imported by Photo Stream!) In fact you will see that using this app you can import pictures (and those videos), rotate them, and delete them. Plus you can select all or some. Another bonus is that Image Capture is really fast! Take a look at the screen shot below to see what your options look like. There are even other options available. Things like having Image Capture open automatically when you hook up your iPhone or iPad, you can import the media to a folder or even directly into iPhoto or a different app. Image Capture will even let you make a web page of the media and email pictures as well. This app is capable of many things. Dig around and enjoy.

I will be taking a look at several other apps I have found to deal with getting that media off your iOS device and into your computer in the next couple of days. So stay tuned.

PS…. sorry if you are looking for information about using your iOS device with a PC – I am a user of Macs.

iPhone 4 and GPS Apps

While this is not exactly music related I thought I can still tie it in!

I ditched my Android phone the day that the iPhone 4S came out. This was a move I had been waiting for. Waiting for ever in fact! Various issues kept me from buying an iPhone from the first version until this one. The one app that I am missing from my Droid is the Navigation app from Google that tied into Google Maps. That was about the only thing I liked about my Droid after the first year.

So now I am taking students down to Battle Creek to see the Brass Band down there. This will be the third time we are doing this and every year the trip keeps getting better and better. The first year we were basically observers for rehearsals and then we saw the concert. The second year we actually managed to get a few classes from Steve Mead, Marty Erickson and Allison Shaw, in addition to watching rehearsals and the concert. This year the kids will be sitting in master classes with four or more people! One of those is Wycliffe Gordon! The people playing in this Brass Band are absolutely astounding players – superstars of the Brass Band world!

The reason I am writing this post is because I am trying to find a good GPS App for my new iPhone. I’m not very impressed with Apple’s Maps. I’ve tried the open source app Waze – that one is pretty useful. Waze offers free voice turn by turn directions. My kids like the munching that we get to do (kind of like packman). I do not like that I can not easily see the route it has picked for me to take to my destination. Tonight I downloaded MotionX GPS Drive. This app looks promising. Plus it was on sale! YIPPI! .99cents right now – normally $10 (I think that was it – I don’t like the way Apple blocks out prices after you have purchased an app – I always forget how much it cost so writing about them later is a bit more difficult.) Does anyone else have suggestions for GPS apps they are using on a consistent basis and love?

I am also looking for a great car mount to hold my iPhone while driving down the road. I have it in an OtterBox Case so I would really like to leave it in that case and put it in the mount. Any ideas?

Field trip with my students…. Apps…. iPhone 4S…. it’ll be an awesome trip!

Using SIRI and voice dicatation in the classroom

So for those of you with a nifty new iPhone 4s i read a great article from TUAW today. I have had Mobile Mouse installed on my iPod touch and now on my iPhone for some time now. It is a very nice way to interact with the computer that is hooked up to my projector in the front of the band room. I never once thought about this possibility though. When using Mobile Mouse if you are have the mouse in a text input situation othe computer, like trying to run a Google searthen a web browser, yu can simply tap the mic and dictate through mobile mouse to the computer. This is going to be WAY faster than trying to type from my iPhone!

By the way, I’m on an iPad typing this in the web interface on WordPress. Seems as though there is a bit of a bug. I lost the ability to see my cursor until I hid the keyboard and tapped back into the typing area.

Anyways, here is the link to the original article,

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/11/19/how-to-use-siri-for-voice-dictation-on-a-mac/

If you have never used Mobile Mouse it is a wonderful remote to your computer. There are all sorts of bells and whistles to it! I use it to control SmartMusic for one! This let’s mestand back ithe percussion section and still run the computer.

Amazing new Technology is making our life easier.

Apple’s release of iCloud is an amazing technology. iCloud is fast, scary fast! As I was helping one of my boys upgrade their iPod’s and enable iCloud he experienced this quickness. We turned iCloud on in his iPod Touch and by the time we opened a web browser on my MacBook, all his contacts and calendar information was in the cloud! His reaction was priceless and I wish I had it on video. When the web page came up, his eyes got real big and he exclaimed “Whoa!”. He whipped his head around to me and uttered, “How did it get in the Cloud already?!”

I also experienced how quick iCloud was as well. I went after school friday to the local Verizon store to get my new iPhone 4S. I could not believe they had any in stock as I knew there had been people in line starting at 4:30AM and this is a college town. After paying for the phone the sales person asked if I wanted help setting it up. I of course chuckled and told him that all he needed to do was make sure it was ready to make phone calls and I would do the rest. He was happy I was making it so easy for him. I took the phone, typed in my iCloud ID and answered the rest of the start up questions. Then I left. By the time I made it to my car (not even 200 feet away), got in and turned my phone on, all my contacts and calendar information were all on my new phone without ever connecting a cord! I was blown away!

I am having issues with iCloud, Google and my laptop though. On my laptop I am ending up with duplicate entries of calendar info and duplicate contacts. The only thing is that they are not “really” duplicate though. One is what is in the cloud and the other is what Google is syncing to my laptop. I am thinking that I REALLY need to have at least one Google calendar working to sync to my band website. Other than that though I am ready to dump Google calendars and contacts. The only reason I started using them in the first place was because I had bought a Droid (1st version) 2 years ago. Now that I have upgraded to the 4S (Thank goodness for a wonderful wife!) I’m not relying on Google anymore. I wonder if you can publish an iCal calendar to a web site?

The other piece of software Apple has put out that is blowing me away is SIRI. 2 years ago my Mother could not believe that my phone talked! Really what had happened was that she heard my Droid, ring-tone, that said – “Droid”. She was very ill at the time and I will never forget that picture of her trying to find the energy to talk enough to say, “That phone talks!”. If she was still alive and could experience SIRI she would be as blown away as I am, as my kids are and would probably join in our laughter at some of the crazy things SIRI can do. SIRI is a revolution in technology. SIRI is going to save people a lot of time. SIRI is going to absolutely change the way the world interacts with devices. It is no wonder that Steve Jobs simply smiled after watching the introduction of SIRI the day before he passed away! He knew. Now we know.

If you have no idea what I am talking about or what SIRI is, I am not going to re-state what has been reported on the web all over the place. Go to Youtube, go to Apple’s web-site go read some news. Then go get an iPhone 4S!