Apple Classroom Preference pane

[Face-Man]

I'm trying to get apple classroom running on a set of 16 iMac's. I can install the teachers Classroom application fine and that run ok as far as I can tell. The issue comes when I want to add a student on a mac to a class, to add them I try and run the classroom preference pane in system preferences. It just brings up an error message

 

You can’t open the “Classroom” preferences pane because it is not available to you at this time.

To see this preferences pane, you may need to connect a device to your computer.

 

Looking online the computers are the right specification and the OSX version is 10.14.4 and there are no updates avalible from apple. The mac's are all DEP and enrolled in meraki MDM

 

I thought it might be a bluetooth or wireless issue but they are both on.

I even tried tethering to my phone incase it was a filtering issue with the school broadband.

 

Has anybody been able to get the classroom 2.0 app for mac working ?

 

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT206151

[Brimstone]

Are these admin created classes or teacher created classes...?

[Face-Man]

They are teachers created classes. The apple classroom app runs fine on the teachers mac. Without the Classroom preference pane I can't allow the student iMac access to the class by adding the 4 digit pin.

[Brimstone]

It could be a couple things....

 

Manually created Teacher classes rely on no MDM at all being used to manage the iMacs, you said these are in DEP and Meraki MDM, you may need to speak to an admin to set these up within the MDM.

 

Your network needs to have ports open for comms between the teacher Mac and Student Mac, see below...

 

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/classroom/classroom-infrastructure-requirements-apd1d311e8c0/2.0/mac/10.14

[Face-Man]

Thanks for the advice and link. At the moment I just testing it before looking at the more involved admin classes from MDM

 

I spoke to apple and they couldn't resolve it but I have managed to find a solution but it is a little bit strange.

 

Here goes the explanation

 

On Student iMac 1 I added an student managed apple id (created on Apple school manager) to the icloud account details in system preferences .

After a restart this allowed “classroom” preference pane to run.

I could then enter the details (pin etc) and add it to the class

 

I then went back to the teacher iMac and added an iCloud account from Apple School Manager

 

Then on imac 2 before I added the next icloud account classroom appeared in system preferences and I was able to add this mac to the class without adding an icloud account. I could do this for all the other mac in the lab.

 

So it would appear that either the student or the teacher need to have a Managed Apple id to be able to use Classroom on the mac.

 

To test this theory I setup a different user on the teachers mac and a new “class” in the classroom app. This user didn’t have an managed apple id in the icloud settings. When I tried to add a student to this class from a mac with no account on it, the classroom preferences initially appeared and ran but the class disappear before I could join it.

 

 

I suspect there are some online checks that take place to ensure that you have the rights to run classroom to stop anybody using it.

[Brimstone]

The support link you sent does make mention of Managed Apple ID's for Shared iPad and some about using Classroom for the Mac.

 

I've not fully tested this yet myself as I'm waiting for a colleague with some Macs to do this, it might well be that the "Teacher Mac" has to be assigned a Managed Apple ID which they sign into before they can create a class. These are not required to use Classroom on iPad but I would guess that Apple are moving forward with Managed Apple ID's which are required to use Apple Schoolwork

[Brimstone]

I've had another look through the support document which says this below for Admin based classes, seems as you are using an MDM and the Apple EDU Profile then Managed Apple ID's look like they are required.

 

I'll speak to someone at Apple tomorrow to get this clairfied.

 

[h=2]Prepare students in a one-to-one iPad deployment[/h]

• Make sure students can use their iPad to sign in to iCloud with their Apple ID or Managed Apple ID.
  

 

[h=2]Prepare students who use Mac computers[/h]

• Make sure students can use their Mac to sign in to iCloud with their Apple ID or Managed Apple ID.
   
   
   
  

 

[rareapple]

Face-Man, I had the same issue, here is what one my sys admins figured out.

Apple School Manager needs to be involved.

The student device needed to be a shared device with a managed apple id, you have to signin to the device with the apple managed ID.

The teacher device does not need to be a managed device.