Mirroring mobile screen to the Whiteboard

This obviously has to be done next. As my students mobiles (see part 1) have both Android and iOS devices a solution has to support both (so a Miracast or Apple TV Box is not sufficient). My teachers workstation is Windows 10. After contacting our sysadmin to connect the mobile WLAN to the workstations subnet and installing the software the rest was easy — and works beautifully. I evaluated ApowerMirror, Airserver and Reflector (reported in this post) and decided to use ApowerMirror: it’s free version does what I want which convinced my sysadmin instantly (the other two are very inexpensive perhaps I use them later). Android devices need a proprietary client which is free too, iOS has Airplay built in.

Installing software onto mobiles

Apower Mirror

The only action required is installing the mobile client for Androids at the Play store. Some students liked to use the QR-code provided by a splash screen within the server program. Be aware that this client allows students to share their screens to each other too (which they enjoy to do for some time).

UPDATE: after few weeks I do not use this software anymore, there is a better choice (see here).

Moodle mobile

At the time of writing Moodle mobile is a nice addition to a Moodle website, allowing users to easily upload or submit content. Enabling my own website (http://moodle.klocker-mark.eu) to support mobile clients was a bit of struggling, discovering a bug (which is fixed since 3.3.2 — be sure to get this version at least). Reading the documentation thoroughly lead to success.

I wrote a (very) short tutorial for my students to support the process of registering at my site. This is very easy and should work instantly.

At first try changing your own profile picture taking a photo with your mobile: this is great fun. Enabling notifications is  handy — students get notified if a submission is due via their mobile (very fine because some of them never read their emails).

Mahara mobile

Mahara mobile allows uploading of pictures easily which is very useful for example when adding handwritten or drawn content to a view. I often allow students doing their homework by hand (using their paper notebooks) posting the results as a photo to share with their colleagues.

I wrote a Mahara mobile tutorial showing registering by using a token (which has to be used if you are using Mahoodle configuration). Although my students are very swift copying the very long token by hand using email to transfer the token to the mobile is easier by far.

Geogebra

At the time of writing Geogebra graphing calculator is available as a perfect solution to replace almost any calculator without having to buy expensive dedicated graphic calculators. As Geogebra can be used in exam mode or you can youse restricted desktop versions in a computer lab connectivity of the mobiles should be no problem if not wanted.

Installing and using is very easy for both mobiles. Adjusting precision probably is the first thing you will want to do (in settings – click on gear symbol).