
In Zoom, the Meeting Owl then becomes your camera, speakers, and microphone. Once it’s connected to Wi-Fi, you plug up to your computer over USB. Setting up the cameras is pretty straight forward. We were using them during our back to school meetings, and we had a few teachers who watched from home, and they even joked they could hear conversations they usually wouldn’t have been able to hear from other tables. The camera shows a 360-degree view, has a high definition camera, and eight microphones that will pick up from 12 feet away.
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The camera is also connected directly to Wi-Fi to download new software upgrades and be controlled from an iOS device. Each teacher that has virtual students has one in their classroom hooked up to their Mac. We decided to invest in Meeting Owl Cameras. Why Apple still includes such a low-quality camera in brand new laptops, I’ll never know, but I hope that changes with the transition to Apple Silicon. I am certainly not an audiovisual expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I know enough to know that the built-in camera on the 2020 MacBook Air wasn’t going to provide an excellent experience for the students.
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Our next decision was how to improve the camera and audio quality in the classroom. With this integration, the grades sync from Google Classroom back to FACTS SIS. We use FACTS SIS, and they have a built-in sync for Google Classroom that allows us to connect student accounts in Google Classroom back to their profile in FACTS. We then set up Google Classroom to help facilitate the assigning of work and handle the turning in of work. It takes a bit of work on the teacher’s end to set these meetings up, but it’s worked well for the most part. Students receive an email each morning with meeting links for their scheduled classes. Our teachers were already familiar with how to use it, and our students already had it installed on their devices at home. Zoom has had a wild 2020, but it’s the most accessible video conferencing software on the market. We knew that we’d be using Zoom for the communications technology as we’d used it before, and we’d been quite happy. Through his experience deploying and managing 100s of Macs and 100s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple’s products work at scale, stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for students. He has been managing Apple devices in an education environment since 2009. As we headed into summer, we knew that some of our kids would not return for the start of school regardless of what was going on in the world, so we wanted to be ready.Ībout Making The Grade: Every Saturday, Bradley Chambers publishes a new article about Apple in education.

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Trying to come up with solutions for when some kids are off-campus, and others are on is a daunting challenge, though. Building an IT system entirely on campus is one challenge, as is making one for completely remote is another challenging process.
