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I’m going to copy paste something I wrote a month or so ago…

We’ve been using Swivl (teacher tracking cameras) in all of our classrooms for 6 weeks AMA

I’ve seen a few questions about Swivls over the past few weeks. I just got done writing up some notes about our experiences and thought others might be interested

We’ve had a Swivl in every classroom since the first day of school. They are working well for us. We wanted a setup that would allow remote students to feel as much like part of the class as possible with the least amount of extra work for teachers.

Our solution was the Swivl robots (partially because that also solved our microphone problem), paid Zoom licenses (which our teachers were already familiar with from last spring) and mounting 55 inch TVs in the classrooms so that teachers and physically present students could see the remote students.

We’ve been impressed with the Swivl developers. They have continued to make improvements to their software so that the robots, which were not designed to work as part of a video conference solution, keep getting better.

Here are some random notes that you might find useful. They are in no particular order:

• The stands that cost $99.99 from Swivl are just microphone stands with a thread adapter and a Swivl sticker. They are good mic stands, but you can buy mic stands for $15 and up and you can get thread adapters for around $5. We went with the microphone stands that our music department recommended because the music department will probably get them when this is all over. They cost $35 each.
• You can use the front or rear facing camera on the iPad with the Swivl. We went with the front facing camera because it is useful for the teacher to see the view that the Swivl is sending out, and because our video is getting sent through Zoom’s video compression anyway. If you are recording classes for asynchronous viewing, you might want to use the rear facing camera. I have not actually tested to see if the video quality is different on Zoom for the cameras.
• Last week we trained select students in grades 6-12 on how to set up the Swivl and join the class Zoom meeting at the beginning of class so that the teacher wouldn’t have to do that. This has worked well for us. It saves the teacher a few minutes each class.
• The “home” for our Swivl in each classroom is under the wall mounted TV. We have charging cables for the Swivl and the iPad at this location, and if the teacher doesn’t have a reason to move the Swivl, this is a good location to film from. We chose the TV location in each classroom with the Swivl placement in mind.
• The reason the “home” for each Swivl is near the TV is so that when the teacher looks at the remote students (by looking at the TV) the remote students see the teacher looking at them. It just helps to make them feel like they are part of the class.
• Hearing the remote students has to be on your radar. This can be accomplished in a couple of ways. (1) You can run a USB cable from the Swivl to the teacher’s computer and hear the remote students from the teacher’s audio. (2) You can attach a USB speaker to the Swivl. This is what we do; it makes it easy to move the Swivl. (3) You can AirPlay from the iPad to something. Some of our teachers are experimenting with this. They either airplay to the AppleTV that is hooked up to their projector and in some cases then to whole room audio, or they airplay to the TV, but I don’t like that because the Zoom meeting display on the iPad isn’t as nice as the Zoom meeting display from a computer (4) They make a USB dongle that is suppose to send the audio to the teacher’s computer, so like (1) above without the cable. They are advertising this for $100, but I don’t know if it is shipping. If this was available when we ordered, we would probably used this. NOTE: you can’t just turn up the volume on the teacher computer to hear the remote students. You’ll have a bad feedback loop. The sound from the remote learners has to come, somehow, from the Swivl.
• If you go with USB speakers, we like these the best, but had to get some of these as well when we couldn’t get enough of the former. The USB speakers are set to a medium volume each time the Swivl is started. 6 taps on the up button on the Microphone/Marker turns the volume up all the way. This is always what you want. Up all the way is loud enough to hear the remote students if the room is relatively quiet, but it is not really as loud as we would like.
• It is my understanding that if you are using anything other than Zoom, things (like audio) might not work the way you want them to. I would ask pointed questions to their support (not sales) people if you use something else for video conferencing and you want to do synchronous learning. Note that they are constantly doing updates, so this might no longer be true.
• It is possible for them to lose tracking. The will often happen when a teacher walk right next to them quickly, but has also happened to us for no apparent reason. turning it off and turning it on will fix the problem, but it is often easier in an actual class to turn off the tracking (middle button on the marker) and put the Swivl in a reasonable position until you can take care of it.
• Battery life has been good for us. They say that the Swivl will last for something like 4 hours (don’t quote me on what they say here). We have found that they always last until lunch and charging them over lunch always lets them last until the end of the day. We also charge the iPads over lunch. Zoom really eats up iPad battery.
• They make a fish eye lens. None of our teachers like it. But, when we’ve had teachers who were quarantining and teaching from home, they like having the fish eye lens on the Swivl so they can see more of the classroom. College admissions representatives have also all preferred that we put the fish eye lens on when they are “visiting”. That makes me wonder if remote students would actually prefer that we use them as well. I’ll have to look into that.
• We have not made extensive use of the additional markers so that remote learners can hear what is being said more than 6 feet from the teacher, but in our few experiments they have worked well. They also work well when the teacher is quarantined and teaching remotely.
• I’ve had several markers stop working normally. This has always been fixed by re-pairing the marker with thee Swivl. This is a simple process.
• Getting replacement equipment from Swivl was a big pain in the but. I needed 2 new lanyards, 1 power supply and a cable. They made that much harder than any other vendor I’ve worked with. Edit: someone at swivel must have seen this, they reached out to me to find out how that experience could have gone better. Nice of them.
• We did not have luck with any of our iPad cases fitting snuggly into any of the different sized mounting brackets that Swivl supplies. We ended up using the slimmest mount and no case. We have not had any trouble with that in 6 weeks, but it wasn’t what I expected. I guess we could have looked for cases that would work well, but I didn’t have the time.
• You don’t need to get Pro licenses if you are doing synchronous learning and making recordings of Zoom sessions for the occasional asynchronous student. I think I would get them if I wanted to use them for asynchronous only.
• I think there have been 4 firmware updates since we got ours. Those are quick and painless. But I don’t know how we are suppose to know what they do. It might be that I’m just not hooked up to the right announcements. edit: regular firmware updates continue. Also an update to their app, which now integrates better with other video conferencing systems.

We’ve had one in every classroom since the first day of school. They are working well for us. We wanted a setup that would allow remote students to feel as much like part of the class as possible with the least amount of extra work for teachers.

Our solution was the Swivl robots (partially because that also solved our microphone problem), paid Zoom licenses (which our teachers were already familiar with from last spring) and mounting 55 inch TVs in the classrooms so that teachers and physically present students could see the remote students.

We’ve been impressed with the Swivl developers. They have continued to make improvements to their software so that the robots, which were not designed to work as part of a video conference solution, keep getting better.

Here are some random notes that you might find useful:

• The stands that cost $99.99 from Swivl are just microphone stands with a thread adapter and a Swivl sticker. They are good mic stands, but you can buy mic stands for $15 and up and you can get thread adapters for around $5. We went with the microphone stands that our music department recommended because the music department will probably get them when this is all over. They cost $35 each.
• You can use the front or rear facing camera on the iPad with the Swivl. We went with the front facing camera because it is useful for the teacher to see the view that the Swivl is sending out, and because our video is getting sent through Zoom’s video compression anyway. If you are recording classes for asynchronous viewing, you might want to use the rear facing camera. I have not actually tested to see if the video quality is different on Zoom for the cameras.
• Last week we trained select students in grades 6-12 on how to set up the Swivl and join the class Zoom meeting at the beginning of class so that the teacher wouldn’t have to do that. This has worked well for us. It saves the teacher a few minutes each class.
• The “home” for our Swivl in each classroom is under the wall mounted TV. We have charging cables for the Swivl and the iPad at this location, and if the teacher doesn’t have a reason to move the Swivl, this is a good location to film from. We chose the TV location in each classroom with the Swivl placement in mind.
• The reason the “home” for each Swivl is near the TV is so that when the teacher looks at the remote students (by looking at the TV) the remote students see the teacher looking at them. It just helps to make them feel like they are part of the class.
• Hearing the remote students has to be on your radar. This can be accomplished in a couple of ways. (1) You can run a USB cable from the Swivl to the teacher’s computer and hear the remote students from the teacher’s audio. (2) You can attach a USB speaker to the Swivl. This is what we do; it makes it easy to move the Swivl. (3) You can AirPlay from the iPad to something. Some of our teachers are experimenting with this. They either airplay to the AppleTV that is hooked up to their projector and in some cases then to whole room audio, or they airplay to the TV, but I don’t like that because the Zoom meeting display on the iPad isn’t as nice as the Zoom meeting display from a computer (4) They make a USB dongle that is suppose to send the audio to the teacher’s computer, so like (1) above without the cable. They are advertising this for $100, but I don’t know if it is shipping. If this was available when we ordered, we would probably used this. NOTE: you can’t just turn up the volume on the teacher computer to hear the remote students. You’ll have a bad feedback loop. The sound from the remote learners has to come, somehow, from the Swivl.
• If you go with USB speakers, we like these the best, but had to get some of these as well when we couldn’t get enough of the former. The USB speakers are set to a medium volume each time the Swivl is started. 6 taps on the up button on the Microphone/Marker turns the volume up all the way. This is always what you want. Up all the way is loud enough to hear the remote students if the room is relatively quiet, but it is not really as loud as we would like.
• It is my understanding that if you are using anything other than Zoom, things (like audio) might not work the way you want them to. I would ask pointed questions to their support (not sales) people if you use something else for video conferencing and you want to do synchronous learning. Note that they are constantly doing updates, so this might no longer be true.
• It is possible for them to lose tracking. The will often happen when a teacher walk right next to them quickly, but has also happened to us for no apparent reason. turning it off and turning it on will fix the problem, but it is often easier in an actual class to turn off the tracking (middle button on the marker) and put the Swivl in a reasonable position until you can take care of it.
• Battery life has been good for us. They say that the Swivl will last for something like 4 hours (don’t quote me on what they say here). We have found that they always last until lunch and charging them over lunch always lets them last until the end of the day. We also charge the iPads over lunch. Zoom really eats up iPad battery.
• They make a fish eye lens. None of our teachers like it. But, when we’ve had teachers who were quarantining and teaching from home, they like having the fish eye lens on the Swivl so they can see more of the classroom. College admissions representatives have also all preferred that we put the fish eye lens on when they are “visiting”. That makes me wonder if remote students would actually prefer that we use them as well. I’ll have to look into that.
• We have not made extensive use of the additional markers so that remote learners can hear what is being said more than 6 feet from the teacher, but in our few experiments they have worked well. They also work well when the teacher is quarantined and teaching remotely.
• I’ve had several markers stop working normally. This has always been fixed by re-pairing the marker with thee Swivl. This is a simple process.
• Getting replacement equipment from Swivl was a big pain in the but. I needed 2 new lanyards, 1 power supply and a cable. They made that much harder than any other vendor I’ve worked with.
• We did not have luck with any of our iPad cases fitting snuggly into any of the different sized mounting brackets that Swivl supplies. We ended up using the slimmest mount and no case. We have not had any trouble with that in 6 weeks, but it wasn’t what I expected. I guess we could have looked for cases that would work well, but I didn’t have the time.
• You don’t need to get Pro licenses if you are doing synchronous learning and making recordings of Zoom sessions for the occasional asynchronous student. I think I would get them if I wanted to use them for asynchronous only.
• I think there have been 4 firmware updates since we got ours. Those are quick and painless. But I don’t know how we are suppose to know what they do. It might be that I’m just not hooked up to the right announcements.