Sixth Form Centre - ideas

[Simcfc73]

Morning,

 

We are looking at a refurb of our sixth form centre which will include a budget for ICT equipment. Now its been muted as just buying new PC kit but with the influx of BYOD and other mediums I wondered if anyone has done anything new recently and can offer some idea... or even photos would be good.

 

We have a design company in to do the building by the way.

 

Interested to know about the power situation also with BYOD, expecially getting round the PAT testing for appliances. Do you offer additional clean sockets for them?

 

Anythink useful would be appreciated.

[FN-GM]

PAT testing will only apply to school devices. You are not required by law to PAT rest anyway.

 

With power it depends on the device. If they are using iPads for example they will last all day on the battery. Laptops could be a mixed bag.

 

How many devices are we looking at?

[FN-GM]

How are you looking to delivery the BYOD. Are you looking at an internet connection? The problem with that is your students might not have the correct software installed (office for example) to open files. For our BYOD we have an open SSID. users connect and they are taken to the Citrix login page. They then get a desktop the exact same as the schools computers streamed to the personal device. The personal devices have no internet connection at all.

[twin--turbo]

Pupils plugging/unplugging is a health and saftey concern that needs to be considred.

Pupils with trailing cables is a health and safety concern that needs to be considred.

Pupils overusing the WiFi is a technical concern.

Pupils using your wifi to attack other BYOD laptops is a technical concern.

The way BYOD is delivered to the pupil and how you enforce security of your network and enforce e-safety is a concern.

List goes on.

 

We:

 

Have a BYOD wireless vlan, traffic between clients is prevented on this by the wireless firewall.

When the students connect, all they get is a redirect to a BYOD login.

When they login they get redirected to our virtual desktop.

 

They can only do what they can do on one of our laptops or terminals so all normal e-safety measures are in place.

Their bandwidth useage on the wifi is low as they only used VDI and can't use P2P tools via our WIFI to other users.

 

Take up has been fairly low probably due to the fact that they don't get any special privilage or unfiltered access.

 

Rob

[chazzy2501]

For our 6th form I purchased a business ADSL line and stuck a Meraki MR12 AP on it. I created an open wifi that requires a facebook login (to our school facebook page). I also used the Meraki cloud tools to stop all P2P traffic and NAT the clients at the AP.

[SovietRussia]

For our 6th form I purchased a business ADSL line and stuck a Meraki MR12 AP on it. I created an open wifi that requires a facebook login (to our school facebook page). I also used the Meraki cloud tools to stop all P2P traffic and NAT the clients at the AP.

 

I bet your "like" count went up

[TronXP]

By the looks of it, our vision of BYOD is completely different to a lot of peoples.

 

We started roll out to the sixth form this September. For us we wanted students to use their own devices in the way they are used to using them, if they want to use pages on their mac, then fine, if they use evernote on an android tablet that is fine. Being comfortable and knowing how to perform a task on software and a device is for us a positive thing, if a student can do a task in five minutes using what they are comfortable with rather than struggling with school software they don't understand, it increases productivity with students. We don't simply want their devices to be a gateway to rds servers. We do provide access to RDS servers and remote apps but they are not essential or necessary for the system. What we look at ourselves as, is a "service Provider". We provide a filtered internet access, which includes being able to filter app traffic, ability to web print, access to VLE, email etc. Yes there are risks and yes we don't have a uber MDM that blocks out all apps etc but we deal with issues like any other issue. Not every problem has to be solved with a technological solution.

 

Our BYOD ssid is a VLAN and it traffic goes to our BYOD firewall, on here we define what gets forwarded to our main school firewall. Between this firewall and our main firewall is a Transparent filter (untangle) this provides us with web filter, application control, virus blocker, spyware blocker, bandwidth control and the Captive portal. The main firewall then routes information either off to the internet or to our internal servers and again there are rules on this firewall to only allow access to servers and specific ports.

 

For this years trial we have not done any fancy radius authorisation, we simply have made an online form, which pupils fill out. This gets emailed to our helpdesk and we give their MAC address an IP. After this trial when we open access to the rest of the school, we will probably change this part of the system.

 

Take up is about 75% of sixth form at the present, but this is because we are working with the teaching staff to incorporate BYOD into their lessons, allowing pupils to use their devices in lessons and helping them to ensure lessons/resources etc are available on the VLE. Pupils still go onto 3G on their phones to get onto blocked sites, but heh ho kids have always done this when they can get away with it so really it has not changed anything. Have we had increase in bullying and cyber bullying..... no. Have we had damages\thefts of own device stuff? NO but what we have got is less booking of the school sixth form laptops, which have benefitted the lower schools, as we can deploy them in busy periods to the lower schools.

 

It is important that you have policies in place and an agreed action plan with punishments set out, so everybody knows where they stand.

 

I forgot to mention, we don't allow charging during the day or using chargers. Devices must be charged and ready to use. If they run out of power because they have been messing around in lunchtime with their device then they learn the hardway. Since most tablets/phones use usb charging we are looking into possible providing USB charging lockers, where they can plug in the relevant cable to their device to charge at lunch time, but this as I said this is a possibility in the future.

Edited November 13, 2013 by TronXP

[twin--turbo]

By the looks of it, our vision of BYOD is completely different to a lot of peoples......

 

So what services can they use? How do they access their user documents, printing, etc?

 

Cheers

 

Rob

[winng]

Presumably they do it in the cloud, i.e. office365, etc. I like what Tron-Xp has achieved. I believe it's not about replicating what they already have, it's about giving them/allowing them to use new tools to engage with their learning.

[SovietRussia]

So what services can they use? How do they access their user documents, printing, etc?

 

Cheers

 

Rob

 

We here have a similar approach to BYOD, Users are authenticated using RADIUS and their traffic completely bypasses the network going straight to LEA for filtering. But, we provide our own suite of Cloud Services for students to "get back in again" to their documents etc.

[Marci]

How do they access their user documents, printing, etc?

 

In our case via our VLE, which gives access to network shares and MyDocs via the browser for pupils. Staff use a suitable SMB-based app to map to their share on the server (e.g.: Filebrowser on apple devices). Printing - we have email to print queue via Konica Minolta, which deals with user accounting etc.

[TronXP]

So what services can they use? How do they access their user documents, printing, etc?

 

Cheers

 

Rob

 

I was off work looking after my sick daughter, so sorry for the delayed response.

 

They can access there files on the school network using Home Access Plus+, but we are looking at buying in Acronis Mobile echo and Active echo as more integrated solutions. Printing is done using Papercut's web printing, this allows you to print .pdf files or any of the Microsoft file types and so far this is working well. Then obviously they can access our VLE, Library system and everything else which is web based.

 

I may also point out that BYOD is primarily aimed at students. There is a computer on every teachers desk, but we can't provide a computer for each child and this is where I see BYOD as being the most important. With the teachers there is much more concern about data security an the approach we have for Staff devices is going to be slightly different.