Classroom View Screen Problem (Re-visited) - MDM Restrictions

Hello,

This post is for those that may experience issues with Apple Classroom where a staff members iPad is unable to see the screens of their student iPads within the Classroom app. Please check your MDM settings/restrictions for the camera's for the room (group/class) in question. For our site, we had a request by our Admin team to turn off the cameras due to behavior issues months back. We then had a teacher who recently started using Apple Classroom but reported the inability to see their student screens with only a icon of binoculars with a cross on them. Everything else worked however. We confirmed it was specific to only a few rooms. We realized the rooms with this issue had the cameras disabled in their profile restrictions in our MDM. We use Meraki and navigated to:

System Manager > Manage > Settings > Profile List > Profile (w/ restrictions) > Cross-platform restrictions > Allow use of camera (checked off). Once enabled, the teacher confirmed being able to view student screens. Of course this will vary with your MDM provider but hopefully lead you to the correct section to troubleshoot.

I of course saw this post: Classroom View Screen Problem - Apple Community

by lapdoran, who was experiencing the same issue. I didn't find the "Community Specialist" response that helpful, nor did the Apple Education Department have a readily available answer for us. They stated they had to escalate the issue. Thankfully we realized the cause of the problem and setup the solution before scheduling additional calls with support. I wanted to share this for those that may be in a similar predicament but don't have the time to research and make phone calls with multiple parties.

Hope this helps any school technicians, IT admins, coordinators, etc that have to support these environments. Good luck.