Dealing with laptop trolleys

[SteveB_NI]

Those of you that have laptop trolleys to support / within your school, how do you deal with them?

I've got 2 trolleys each containing 20 laptops, and am in the process of trialing these laptops. What I'm doing is going into each class, explaining to the class how to carefully use the laptops, and also to the teacher how to connect the laptops wireless connection to the network.

So far so good - but now comes the questions:

1. Who "delivers" the laptops to the classrooms - if the pupils collect them how do you get around them entering secure store rooms etc to get it.
2. How much time in between bookings - ie. some class wants them period 1, what about if a class wants them period 2 - or do you make sure they cant be booked until period 3.
3. How much interaction do YOU / other technicians have with the trollies - i.e. making sure they are charged up / secured at night.

Thanks!

[michaelf]

Here we only have a single trolley and its allocated to a specific department so they deal with the booking and moving the thing around internally. As far as i know though they do book it out for consecutive lessons, although the fact they never have to move it far makes it easier. We also have site-wide wireless connectivity so its simply a case of turning the laptop on and it works, making things much simpler. Because of this we barely touch the thing.

[callumtuckey]

hi
what we do pupils who are on the register to receive a laptop are told were to collect them.we have them in a secure room were there is 5 teachers in there at all times as it is part of an office the pupils come in teacher unlocks laptop safe ticks name and then there on there way at the end of the day they return there laptop then teacher prints work off and then gets locked up again ready for next morning

[Optimus]

Those of you that have laptop trolleys to support /
1. Who "delivers" the laptops to the classrooms - if the pupils collect them how do you get around them entering secure store rooms etc to get it.
2. How much time in between bookings - ie. some class wants them period 1, what about if a class wants them period 2 - or do you make sure they cant be booked until period 3.
3. How much interaction do YOU / other technicians have with the trollies - i.e. making sure they are charged up / secured at night.

Thanks!

We have been using trolleys for 3yrs now.. and have had 3yrs of problems!

In answer to your questions:
1. The teachers move the laptops from room to room - each faculty manages the booking of trolleys. We almost have 1 trolley per faculty.

2. Again, up to faculty - but a couple of lessons to let them charge is recommended. I have heard of one class teacher putting the trolley in centre of class and trailing power cables from trolley to each laptop to ensure continuous power all day! Almost defies the point of having laptops instead of booking a computer room!

3. It is up to the faculty to lock them up at night and the teacher using them must ensure all laptops are returned to the trolley in perfect condition.

I don't get involved with trolleys until the laptops start to break and don't log in to network....

As a tip - don't do what I did one day... took a laptop to my office to play about - forgot to tell teacher.... who had the headteacher gather together all of Yr 9 and was organising a bag search of yr9 pupils! Now I always ask before taking

[Scotmk]

Come september we will have 3 new ict rooms and no more laptops / trolleys.

GREEEEEAAAT!

[Quackers]

1. The junior ICT tech makes sure the laptops are delivered to classes.

2. Our trollys will do 4 lessons in a row before needing to be charged.

3. The junior ICT tech makes sure they are all on charge and deals with the booking of them too.

[witch]

As a tip - don't do what I did one day... took a laptop to my office to play about - forgot to tell teacher.... who had the headteacher gather together all of Yr 9 and was organising a bag search of yr9 pupils! Now I always ask before taking

This sounds wonderful - I wish our teachers were more like this. When I take a computer to do some work on it, no one ever notices!

[mossj]

We have 7 (i think more, but 7 at least) laptop trolleys each with 16 lappys in.

1. depends on which trolleys..... four have a dedicated person who moves them and checks laptops as well.... the others it depends on the teacher but mostly teachers/ departments techs puts trolley outside room, then lets kids collect.

2. 5 mins inbetween periods is enough for movement.

3. We only maintain the laptops & booking system and most damage is caused by vadilism to the keys, or hinges breaking on the not so well made laptops.

Some advice i'd offer is....

Get extended warenties!

Be aware your batteries will soon fubar with all the discharging and recharging.

Sort out some system that finds the lil angels that vadelize the laptops.

Also stress importance of looking after the laptops to HODs as you can defently tell which dep looks after there trolleys and which doesn't (the worst offending dep has 3 trolleys, and we have returned 35+ laptops for warrenty repair since September.... god bless toshiba and there warranty recording)

[grumpy_git]

Urrrrg. We had two trolleys, one based down in the science/humanities building and one in the library/maths area. Both of these had staff to look over them and keep a day-to-day view - the science technicians for the former and the librarians for the latter. They make sure that the trolleys are at the rooms booked, make sure the laptops are on charge, and report any faults to us. We allow booking for all periods and I've never heard complaints about lateness (generally classes don't use them first thing in a lesson so we're ok).

Booking is done via the admin office who deal with all 'bookable' things in our school (halls, VCRs, rooms, laptop trolleys etc).

They unfortunately get a lot of hammer and cause an awful lot of trouble. I was hopeful we'd see the back of them soon - as the library one has fallen into near disuse since the library itself was tarted up with new desktops. Sadly I've heard that one of our departments is demanding 2/3 trolleys as part of their specialism spending .