The iPad is supposed to make teaching and learning easier, right? But if you’ve ever tried to talk your mom through a new task on her computer or iPad without being able to show her what you’re doing, you can understand that some frustration might ensue as you try to get an entire class to follow along with you. Or maybe you want to show a quick video or diagram, but holding up your iPad to the class really isn’t reaching everyone.
There are a lot of folks out there who feel your pain, and to ease it just a bit, they’ve created Apps to share your screen. There are a lot of them out there, so we’ve sifted through and picked out some of the better ones to give you a good place to start. If you’ve used any of these (or others) and like them, please let us know! We’d love to hear of some real world classroom experiences!
Join.me
With the join.me viewer, you can join an online meeting no matter where you go.
View someone’s screen, share ideas and collaborate in real time, for free!
Optimized for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, join.me is fast, free and nimble, and makes attending an online meeting as easy as touching your screen.
We’ve tried out Join.me and really enjoyed the ability to share screens across our iMacs and iPads at the same time. Great that it works with the iPod touch / iPhone as well. Perfect for BYOD classrooms.
Air Sketch
You can now project PDF documents (such as exported PowerPoint or Keynote decks) to a computer on the same local network, then annotate them in real time, all from your iPad.
Air Sketch is great for presentations in the boardroom, classroom, or on the go. Just fire up Air Sketch on the iPad and open the specified URL from any HTML-5 compatible browser on the local network. Your photos and drawings show up natively in the browser. There’s no additional client software to install, or services to subscribe to.
Tip: You can also find the link in Desktop Safari’s Bonjour bookmarks: Show All Bookmarks menu ➢ Bonjour.
The controlling device – an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad – allows any number of other devices to connect to it while it displays a PDF on its own screen and any connected display. The display is fully under *your* control; when you change pages, pinch to zoom and pan around, or tap-and-hold to activate the laser pointer, all other devices instantly do the same.
Conference Pad shows PDFs, which means that presentations in other forms must be converted for use. Fortunately, Conference Pad Loader, a free app for Mac OS X available from conferencepadapp.com, can use Keynote to automatically convert Keynote and Powerpoint presentations to PDF before sending them wirelessly to Conference Pad on your device.
TeamViewer provides easy, fast and secure remote access to Windows, Mac and Linux systems. TeamViewer is already used on more than 100,000,000 computers worldwide and with the TeamViewer HD app for iPad you are able to:
- On the fly support your family and friends
- Have access to your own computer with all of its documents and installed applications
- Copy files from your home pc to your iPad and vice versa
Share a great idea… Explain a tricky concept… Help kids with their homework… Screen Chomp (and its awesome icon) can help you out.
A simple doodling board, markers, and one-click sharing tools make spreading your ideas and know-how easy and fun!
Just – Record It. Sketch It. Share It. – to create a sharable, replay-able video that tells your story clearly.
Hi Katie!
Just wanted to throw our hat in the ring as we also developed a screen sharing iOS app for iPhones and iPads for our software Mikogo. People can join online meetings straight from their iPads and view the presenter’s desktop screen. Presenter can be on a PC, Mac or Linux computer. Very easy and the app is free.
You’ll find our website at http://www.mikogo.com or feel free to send me an email if you have any questions.
Thanks!
Andrew Donnelly
The Mikogo Team
@Mikogo
Great wrap up. I was curious if you had any idea of the wifi network requirements for using any of these in a classroom? I’ve taught iPad classes and had students log into wifi but have seen the response affected if there’s not a powerful
Enough router available. I’ve also used 4g LTE hot spots and for small groups that worked ok.
If you hear of any network requirements I’d like to know.
None of these actually shares the iPad’s screen – only a file, pdf,or the app. Is anyone aware of a solution that would allow you to share the screen between apps, or at the very least, a browser?