I have a board member who wants my advice on note taking apps on the iPad. Rather than trying to explain that via email, I’d like to use Zoom on my MBP while sharing the iPads on my iPad to show him, e.g., Drafts, Ulysses, Apple Notes.
Is it possible to share the iPad while using Zoom on the MBP?
You can easily share your iPad screen via Zoom because you can show your iPad screen as a window on your Mac and then just share that.
Connect your iPad to your Mac with the appropriate USB cable. Make sure that the iPad “trusts” the computer (only necessary the first time you connect it.
Launch QuickTime Player
Choose File » New Movie Recording and a window like this will appear:
In the yellow box, notice the VERY SMALL ∨ new to the circle that you click to start recording.
Click on the ∨ and it will show you all of the “cameras” which are attached to the computer. This list will include any iOS devices which are attached, like so:
The “Movie Recording” window (where you currently see my big dumb face) will change to showing you the iPad screen.
Note: You only get one chance to select something from that dropdown list. If you change your mind, you will have to close the window and choose File » New Movie Recording again to open a new window.
You can then share that QuickTime window via Zoom just like any other window.
I followed it down a rabbit hole today, and made a discovery: using the same method, it’s possible to record the screen of an Apple TV that’s on the same network.
That’s going to be really useful to me when I teach online this spring. There will be times that I want to use GoodNotes on my iPad as a whiteboard. Recording the iPad directly shows the GoodNotes user interface, unfortunately. But if I AirPlay to the TV, I can then capture that screen in a QuickTime window, without the interface, and share it. I experimented a bit this afternoon, and lag seemed to be negligible.
This does mean the living room Apple TV and the home office Roku are going to have to trade places…
If you have trouble connecting the iPad wirelessly, you might do better with a direct (wired) connection. In the early part of the pandemic, I was working with professors to help them move to online teaching. Their older Mac laptops couldn’t share the iPad, no matter what we did. I assume it was a limitation of their computer’s hardware, since it worked beautifully on my machine.
If you do have trouble, it is entirely possible to join a Zoom meeting from two different devices simultaneously (using the same Zoom account). That’s how we worked around this problem for the end of the 2020 Spring semester.
The only caveat to doing this is you must not join the audio on both devices. If you mistakenly join on both with microphones on, you will create a feedback loop that can only be cut by dropping out of the call on one of the devices. I don’t know why muting one of the devices doesn’t stop the feedback loop, but it doesn’t. Over all of these months, Zoom still hasn’t fixed this.