Native apps for the classroom and the cart.
School Tech Ops is a management platform. These are the apps that sit at the other end of it — on the iPad clamped to a stand at the front of a room, on the Apple TV in a district office, on the phone in a maintenance van. Each one exists because a commercial app either could not be bought, could not be modified, or could not be pushed to managed devices the way a district needs.
Overhead
Overhead turns an iPad into a document camera. Point it at a worksheet, a textbook page or an object on the desk and the class sees it on the projector or TV. Freeze the page, mark it up, keep it, and use it again next year.
It replaces a free App Store document-camera app that was already on the carts. That app works well enough, but it cannot be modified, cannot be bundled into a managed build, and cannot grow the features teachers kept asking for. Overhead started as feature parity with it and went well past.
The camera
- Freeze and resume — the page holds still while you talk over it, at full sensor resolution rather than a screen-resolution grab.
- Zoom to 8× from a menu of stops, so small print is readable from the back of the room.
- Tap to focus, then lock it — a doc cam otherwise hunts every time a hand crosses the page.
- Rotate, mirror and light, to match however the iPad is mounted.
- The screen stays awake while the app is open, so the projector never blanks mid-lesson.
- Presentation mode hides every control for a clean projected image, and a second display shows only the page while the controls stay on the iPad.
Marking up
- Ink — pen, pencil, highlighter and marker, with a finger or Apple Pencil.
- Text blocks in any colour and size, with an optional shaded panel so a label stays readable over a dark scan.
- Arrows, lines, boxes and ellipses, because a freehand arrow looks scrappy on a projector.
- A highlighter that keeps the words legible — drawn with a multiply blend rather than painted over the text.
- One undo stack covering ink, text and shapes together.
- Annotation straight over the live image for pointing at part of a page while talking, kept deliberately separate from saved markup.
Keeping and reusing
- Saved pages live in a library that is meant to be reused — next lesson, next term, next year. Opening a saved page makes a fresh copy, so this year's annotations never overwrite last year's.
- Multi-page documents and slide decks appear as one entry, not forty, with a thumbnail strip for moving between pages.
- Duplicate a marked-up page to work a second example from it.
Bringing documents in
- Photos — a picture already on the iPad, straightened automatically if it was shot at an angle across a desk.
- Files — On My iPad, iCloud Drive, a USB stick, or any other file provider.
- Google Drive — browse My Drive and shared drives, or search the whole Drive by name.
- Google Slides and PowerPoint decks are converted and imported as markable pages, one page per slide.
- A document scanner with automatic edge detection, cropping and straightening, saved as reusable pages or shared as PDF.
Slides arrive as pages, so animations and click-through builds are flattened — a slide that revealed four bullets one at a time shows all four at once. Overhead says so on import and points at its own reveal mechanism instead, where a region of a page is hidden on the class display and visible on the teacher's iPad until they choose to show it.
Saving out
- Photos — flattened at the page's own resolution, so the export is exact rather than a picture of the screen.
- Google Drive — with a folder picker across My Drive and shared drives, either as a default destination or per page.
- Sign-in is optional. Every other feature works with no account at all.
The rest of the family
| App | Platform | What it does | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overhead | iPad | Document camera, markup, lesson pages, slide decks | Pilot |
| Overhead Builder | Mac | Builds Overhead lesson documents on a laptop, where a keyboard and a big screen make layout far quicker than on an iPad | In build |
| CCTV Wall | Apple TV | A camera wall on an office television, driven by a screen configuration served from the platform; grid layouts and rotation, locked to a single app by MDM | In build |
| iPad Admin | iPad | Field tool for device work — enrolment, checks and reconciliation against the management systems | In build |
| Door Controller | iOS & Mac | Access-control operations against the door system from a phone or a desk, rather than a fixed workstation | In build |
| Student Companion | Web | Turns the class's own devices into an interactive whiteboard: students answer on their device, the teacher decides what the class sees | Prototype |
| Nutrition | iOS | Food-service operations for kitchen staff | Prototype |
| Mileage | iOS | Staff mileage capture and submission | Prototype |
| Print Admin | iOS | Print-fleet visibility and queue management on the move | Prototype |
| Tasmancer | iOS | Controls Tasmota smart devices across district buildings | Prototype |
How they're built
Swift and SwiftUI throughout
Native, current-generation Swift with strict concurrency checking on. Observable view models with services injected behind protocols, so behaviour can be tested without a network, a camera, or a signed-in account.
Projects are generated, not committed
A declarative project file is the source of truth and the Xcode project is regenerated from it. Signing configuration is kept out of the repository entirely, beside a committed template.
Shared code lives in packages
Document models, geometry and file formats sit in local Swift packages shared between an app and its companion tools, so an iPad and a Mac cannot drift apart on what a lesson file means.
Tests where they can actually prove something
Model and persistence logic is covered by unit tests; the parts that only fail on real hardware are tested on real hardware, and the difference is documented rather than assumed.
No third-party SDKs
Overhead has no external dependencies at all. Integrations talk to published web APIs directly, which keeps analytics, trackers and someone else's release schedule out of a device a child is sitting in front of.
Privacy by construction
Camera frames, pages and scans stay on the device unless a teacher chooses to save or share them. No analytics, no advertising identifiers, no accounts of the app's own, and no backend of ours in the middle.
How they reach devices
These are not public App Store products. They are distributed as Custom Apps through Apple School Manager — private to the district that commissioned them, never publicly listed — and then scoped in the MDM exactly like any other managed app. Licences are assigned to a location and the app is pushed to a device group.
Anything a district needs to vary is delivered as managed app configuration rather than something a teacher has to type: which identity provider to use, which domains may sign in, where uploads should land. Values pushed by the MDM take precedence over anything set in the app, and the app shows them read-only with a note that the district set them.
A tool built around a district's own identity provider, roster and device fleet has no meaning outside it — a stranger downloading Overhead could point a camera at a page and nothing else. Private distribution keeps the review process without pretending the app is a consumer product.