Considerations for deploying the AppleTV in your school or enterprise.

Posted on 04/12/2012 by William Stites

AppleTV is awe­some! I’ve had one in my home for years and I am really excited about what you can do with these devices and par­tic­u­larly Air­Play.

We are begin­ning to look at using the AppleTV in our school as part of our iPad deploy­ment but much like the iPads them­selves we are in the posi­tion of try­ing to fig­ure out how to deploy and man­age a con­sumer device in the enter­prise (schools to all of you).

The rea­son for con­sid­er­ing the use of the AppleTV in the class­room has every­thing to do (for us) with Air­Play. The abil­ity to give any stu­dent the oppor­tu­nity to share what they are doing on their device with the class and demon­strate their learn­ing is amaz­ing — - can you say bye-bye Smartboards!

But as I play with this idea and dis­cuss it with my col­leagues there are some man­age­ment issues and ques­tions that I have.

1. How do you man­age mul­ti­ple AppleTVs on your network?

As it stands, in order to set the name or pass­word to the device you need to be in the room with that device.  While this may seem like a one time thing you may have annual pro­ce­dures that require you to have to rename the device or reset the password.

Pass­words will also play a role in how you deter­mine who can con­nect to the device.  I am able to walk around our build­ing with my iPad and con­nect to an AppleTVs from any­where via Air­Play.  Con­trol­ling access to the device(s) could become a real issue and the ease of doing so could be a pro or a con depend­ing on you needs, cul­ture and community.

I’d hate to see some­one project some­thing some­where they shouldn’t…

UPDATE: Onscreen Pass­code and Con­fig­u­ra­tor sup­port for AppleTV Deploy­ments. — 10/14/2012

2. The same net­work your AppleTVs are on needs to be the same net­work the devices are on.

Depend­ing on how you have your net­work con­fig­ured you may or may not have mul­ti­ple VLAN or SSIDs employed to help man­age traf­fic and con­trol access.  If you’ve seg­mented your wire­less net­work into stu­dent, faulty and guest net­works what net­work do you put you AppleTVs on?  If you plan to allow lap­tops to con­nect what net­works are they on?

NOTE: You can use an app called Air­Par­rot to do this already or if you will have the abil­ity to do this with Air­Play for Moun­tain Lion.

3. The need for clear, under­stand­able nam­ing of the devices.

Depend­ing on how many AppleTVs you have on the net­work the list of avail­able devices could be exten­sive.  Mak­ing sure you have a clear nam­ing stan­dard will be key in any deploy­ment.  Sim­ply using the room num­ber will more than likely be suf­fi­cient, but in our school room num­bers are not how many rooms are known, they are named after the teacher in that room for that year.  Room 121 might actual be know as 2J — Sec­ond Grade, Jones class­room — hence the (our) need for remote man­age­ment of the devices (above).

4. Remotes and an AppleID

The AppleTV remote is clean, easy to use, ele­gant and some­thing that can eas­ily get lost in a class­room.  One thought would be to install the Apple Remote App on the iPad(s) and allow peo­ple, how­ever in order to set this up you need to set an AppleID for the AppleTV.  Does this then mean that I need an AppleID for every AppleTV that I have… sounds that way.  Maybe there’s another “app for that”?!

So… these ques­tions and con­cerns are not going to stop us from going for­ward, but they are things that we are going to need to con­sider and we begin to deploy these device through­out the school.  I’m happy we’ll be able to test these things out and tweak our deploy­ment at one cam­pus before poten­tially mov­ing this to our other two campuses.

I am curi­ous as to what you are doing or plan on doing.  Please share your thoughts, ideas and con­cerns as I will be sure to post an update once we get fur­ther down this road.

NOTES:

4/13/2012 —  In order to use the new AppleTV and Air­Play your pro­jec­tor (or other device) needs to have an HDMI port.

Some more great thoughts from my friend Steve Zalot (@stevezalot) from Apple - https://aneedu.com/wiki/pages/b6K7Y2y/AirPlay_Mirroring__Apple_TV.html

 

About William Stites

Currently the Director of Technology for Montclair Kimberley Academy, "Blogger in Chief" for edSocialMedia.com, husband and father to two crazy kids who make me smile everyday.
This entry was posted in 1to1, AppleTV, iPad and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
  • http://twitter.com/adamvartek Adam Heck­ler

    One of our clients deployed some Apple TV’s and we found that the con­stant traf­fic they gen­er­ated on the net­work caused some prob­lems. We had to work with the dis­trict ISP at a pretty high level to resolve those. So that might be some­thing to be aware of as well.

    I don’t know how they’re man­ag­ing them, since I don’t work at that client site any longer, but from what I can see there isn’t an equiv­a­lent to Apple Configurator.

    • http://www.williamstites.net William Stites

      A tool like Con­fig­u­ra­tor would be as awe­some as the AppleTV itself! Band­width con­cerns will be some­thing we’ll have to mon­i­tor as well, both on the wired and wire­less networks.

    • http://twitter.com/wpulte Bill Pulte

      had the exact same prob­lem.  The use of bon­jour is essen­tially a broad­cast on our wire­less network.

      • http://twitter.com/wstites William Stites

        Need to look into seg­ment­ing the net­work (where pos­si­ble) to con­tain the traf­fic.  Another option is to man­age the band­width used.  We are going to keep an eye on this and pos­si­bly cre­ate a sep­a­rate SSID for the iPad(s) & AppleTV.

        The big­ger issue will be once you can use your lap­top and Air­Play… man­age­ment will become a HUGE issue at that point on the net­work and user end.

  • Nate Green

    Inter­est­ing read. Thanks a lot Bill.I’m try­ing to use my iPad in the class­room more in more, but few of my stu­dents have them. I also feel like it would be much eas­ier if I taught math or science.

    Have you tried Reflection? http://www.reflectionapp.com/

    • http://www.williamstites.net William Stites

      That’s an inter­est­ing issue too.. .if you allow stu­dents to bring in their own iPads to the school, have AppleTVs can they hijack them.  I’m sure that isn’t what you meant, but some­thing to consider.  

      I think the use of the device is depen­dent on the sub­ject area and the app.  We are focused right now on our pri­mary school so there is more to the “show and tells” aspect of things.

      The Reflec­tion app is cool, I’ll need to spend some more time play­ing with it.

      • Bre­icher

        You can set a pass­word on each Apple TV

        • http://www.williamstites.net William Stites

          Yup… just look­ing for a way to be able to set those pass­words with remotely.  Don’t want to have to go into each room to do that. 

          • Tom

            hey any luck with that?

          • http://twitter.com/wstites William Stites

            Not yet… how­ever, I have heard from a friend that Apple is aware of the extended use of these device in schools and busi­ness.  While their stan­dard answer is that they are a con­sumer ori­ented com­pany there was some indi­ca­tion that they are look­ing at the man­age­ment piece.

  • Aykroid+isedchat

    We have five Apple TV’s that are active, with two addi­tional that are used for tem­po­rary setups. Ini­tially I was have stored the remotes in my office as they are not nec­es­sary for screen mir­ror­ing, how­ever if Apple pushes an update, it is nec­es­sary to use the remotes to respond to the prompt. Regard­ing net­work issues, some­times the Apple TV’s will “van­ish” from teacher’s air­play list — we found by reset­ting the iPad or the net­work con­nec­tion on the iPad (by tog­gling air­plane mode on/off) this rec­ti­fies the issue, and the lat­ter step only takes a few sec­onds. Any­one else hav­ing a sim­i­lar issue?

  • Richard Kas­sissieh

    We have only dipped a toe in this water, but here are a cou­ple of ideas that might add to the conversation.

    Most of our teach­ers are on a wire­less sub­net, so we con­fig­ured the build­ing switches to put the eth­er­net port used for the AppleTV on the same sub­net. We were con­cerned about wire­less AppleTV’s being less con­sis­tently accessible.

    I have heard rumors of pro­jec­tor com­pa­nies includ­ing Air­Play sup­port in future mod­els — might be worth wait­ing for. Printer com­pa­nies have begun to do this with AirPrint.

  • Pingback: Considerations for deploying the AppleTV in your school or enterprise [Stites; Zalot]

  • Robert

    WE use HDMI to VGA con­vert­ers to project ftom the Apple TV to our non HDMI units.  It work well but does not give high def images.  We will update pro­jec­tors as bud­get per­mits.  All of out fresh­men use iPads; next year it will be fresh­men and soph­mores…
    Robert

  • http://twitter.com/chitt44 Jeff Pitt

    Our issue is that our wire­less is 802.1x, and there is no way to con­nect an ATV.  We can con­nect the ATV to wired, but then our wire­less clients can’t see it.  So close to useful…

    • http://twitter.com/wstites William Stites

      Can you authen­ti­cate via MAC address? It’s how we are doing things. AAA authentication.

    • Aykroid+isedchat

      Our wire­less uses 802.1x as well, we wired the Apple TV’s and resolved the issue by des­ig­nat­ing the hard­wired port on the same VLAN as the WiFi clients — authen­ti­ca­tion for the wire­less is done at the wifi con­troller which the wired lan bypasses. This worked for us! 

    • Ran­dall King

      I think Apple TV sup­ports 802.1x now.  http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5438

      • http://twitter.com/wstites William Stites

        Thanks for the update.

  • fcoe_tech

    This is great. We’re look­ing at deploy­ing these in con­fer­ence rooms through­out our enter­prise and the “any­one can break into a pre­sen­ta­tion using air­play on their device” issue is a bit of a turn off. I would appre­ci­ate a way of assign­ing pri­or­ity to a mir­ror­ing pre­sen­ter. In gen­eral some sort of cen­tral­ized con­trol of mul­ti­ple ATV would be nice. Also, we are employ­ing 820.1x, and chose to have a pub­lic WLAN SSID and a pri­vate SSID, where the Apple TV is on the pri­vate SSID, authen­ti­cated by mac filtering.

    • Schaufde

      We are play­ing with a small deploy­ment of these on a col­lege cam­pus with cisco net­work­ing equip­ment and the 1st issue is the hard­est to get around if you want to get a class involved with their own devices.

      • http://www.williamstites.net William Stites

        The need for a “enter­prise” type con­trol for these device would be incred­i­ble. Some­thing like the Con­fig­u­ra­tor for the iPad. 

        While I don’t hold out much hope for that to hap­pen soon, I think that you can look at some­thing like the Con­fig­u­ra­tor as an indi­ca­tion that Apple may rec­og­nize that device they orig­i­nally envi­sioned as con­sumer level devices (iPad & AppleTV) have real use in the schools, busi­ness and other institutions.  

        My hope is for more man­age­ment in this area and my fin­gers are crossed!

        • Dun­can Wilcock

          Looks like you just got your wish RE: Con­fig­u­ra­tor:  
          http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5437(new Apple TV update today — Sep 24th, 2012)

          • http://twitter.com/wstites William Stites

            It’s a start, but not there yet.  One thing that I saw that is very inter­est­ing in avoid­ing an AppleTV to be inad­ver­tently hijacked is the OnScreen Pass­code - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5517?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

  • Anne Dot­son

    You have raised some great ques­tions.  I have been try­ing to work my way through all of these con­cerns and would wel­come a dis­cus­sion with oth­ers on the best ways to man­age these.

  • Tryg­gvi

    You could always just use AirServer instead of an AppleTV.
    It would save you loads of money and at the same time you could use your Mac or PC as a Mir­ror­ing screen with Pass­word protection.

  • Ted­turner

    How come no review of what poten­tial an appleTV will have on the over­all wire­less infas­truc­ture ( No con­cerns there?) Seems like most IT peo­ple at schools look at Layer 7 and for­get about Layer 1 and 2

    • http://twitter.com/wstites William Stites

      Its a con­cern for sure, how­ever there are so many vari­able to each per­sons infra­struc­ture both wired and wire­less along with inter­nal band­width.  It is some­thing you will want to keep an eye on for cer­tain as you deploy more and more devices.

  • Jake

    William,
    Thanks for the arti­cle and, as some­one who is rolling these devices out on a global scale, we went through the same checklist.

    In regards to item 2, Cisco now hon­ors Boun­jor across L3 domains. Info here:
    http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/wireless/ps4570/products_tech_note09186a0080bb1d7c.shtml

    We ended up rolling out a com­mon SSID across all of our offices with the sole pur­pose of Multi-media (i.e Apple TV’s and some oth­ers) devices.

    Hope it helps
    – Jake

    • William Stites

      Thanks! This will be help­ful to peo­ple. We actu­ally pro­grammed switch ports that the AppleTV are on to be mem­bers of the var­i­ous subnets.