Reading Books To Children Online Using Mac Messages

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to read a book to a child remotely using your Mac. 

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So unfortunately a lot of us are separated from the ones we love right now. Grandparents are separated from grandchildren, aunts and uncles from nieces and nephews and even parents from their kids. These children might be at the age where you normally would want to read a book to them. That's something that you can do using your Apple devices. Now you may already be using FaceTime on your Mac, your iPhone, or your iPad to video chat with them. But there's a way to use two Macs to be able to read a story to them.

It's basically using Screen Sharing through the Messages app. Typically you might use this in business to show a presentation or you might use it to walk somebody through a problem they're having with their Mac. But you could also bring up a book and have that as the content on the screen that you're sharing.

So the first thing you probably want to do is go to the Books app and get a book to read to them. There are many free books in the Apple Book Store and of course plenty of kids book you can purchase as well. Once you have that ready to go the next thing you want to do is start a chat with them in Messages. Now it's important that you be using a Mac and they are also using a Mac. Unfortunately you can't screen share from a Mac to an iOS device or vice versa. 

The first step is to go to the Messages app and start a regular Messages conversation with the other computer. So you want to know their Apple ID. So we'll start that here and just send a quick message to get going. You'll get a notification on their computer and if they have the Messages app open already they'll see it appear there. Now you can start off by some texting back and forth. 

For Share Screening you can go to two different places. One is you can go to Buddies and then you can go to Invite to Share my Screen. Or you can click on Details up here and then click this little button and Invite to Share My Screen. Either one will bring up a message on their computer that will ask them if it's OK. They hit Accept and now you'll be sharing screens.

Not only will you be sharing screens but audio as well. So everything you speak into the microphone on your Mac, they'll hear on theirs and anything they say you'll hear on yours. So it turns it into an audio call. On their side of things they will see a window where the screen sharing appears. They get some controls here at the top. Scaling you want to leave here. That will scale it into the size of the window. Chances are you both don't have the same size screen so this is the best option. If you have multiple screens on your Mac they are going see all of them so you want to instruct them to be able to go displays and select only the display that contains the content you want to show them.

They could easily click the green button here into full screen mode. Basically their entire screen then is mirroring yours. At this point you can go to the Books app and you can bring up the book just like you would if you were going to read it yourself. You can also click the green button here to take this full screen so they see it there. You can select any book you want. You can use some of these settings up here to say increase the size of the text, change the background. Anything you see on your screen is just going to be mirrored on theirs. You can also use your cursor and they'll see it on their screen as well. You can highlight text and they'll see it on their screen. It's just mirroring your screen to theirs. 

Which gives you a lot of flexibility to be able to do things like you were there with them. Highlighting and pointing to things. When you're finished you can end this from either side. Here if you're in full screen mode you can go to the top. Click the green button again so you're not in full screen mode anymore. Then in the menu up here you can go and End Screen Sharing. Likewise they can do it from their end as well. Go to the top of the screen and hit the green button so now they're back in a mode where they have a window. They can go and simply click the red button here and close screen sharing and that will close it out and you can see they've disconnected.

You're still here where you can continue to chat with them. The real advantage that this has over say just using FaceTime and holding the book and reading to them is if they're old enough to really follow along with the words. So it's more of an educational experience than just say a bedtime story. You can show them any educational content really. You could show them things to help them with homework. You could bring up websites and go through them together. You could bring up other apps. Like say a Kindle app. If you have books that are part of Amazon's Kindle ecosystem, rather than Apple books, you can certainly bring up the free Kindle app and have access to your library there.

Also a lot of local libraries have the ability where you can view the content online. So check with your local library. Go to their website. You may be able to setup an account using your library card and then take out books virtually. See them on your screen and if you can see them on your screen you could share them this way and read them to children remotely.

Also remember kids love photos. You can show them photos from the Photos app or a gallery online of photos of animals, nature, things like that. You two can talk about them. It's a great way to share an experience when you can't be together. Naturally if the kids are too young to know how to do some of these things working with the adult that's there with them will help to get things started and also to finish things up at the end. 

It would be great if you could also video chat while also sharing your screen. Kind of combine FaceTime and Screen Sharing. Now there are some higher end business conferencing apps that can do this. So if you have something like that available you might want to try it. This is a quick and easy way to be able to read a book with a child, if you both have Macs, just using the Messaging app in Screen Sharing.