Down the tablet/chromebook/laptop rabbit hole

[AntiThesis]

So as per my previous thread on Enterprise Wifi we ended up in the Ruckus camp. Thus far it's excellent - now of course, the masses have gotten wind of it and want to get on. For now, that just means all my staff members (+- 80 with devices of some sort) but will mean 1300+ kids next year.

 

So I'd like to throw myself on the collective merciful wisdom of Edugeek () once more to see if I can whack out some ideas for going forward.

A prerequisite of my supporting any of this is that I get to decide (with the governing body ofc) any policies and can require installation of any device management stuff I deem necessary before anyone connects to anything.

 

So my questions are:

 

1) What devices do you guys use? Why?

 

2) What device management do you use? We're looking at MAAS360 via the Spiceworks partnership - it looks great but it costs R20 p/device p/month so at our upper limit, that's looking like R336000 p/year. Part of my proposal would be to pass that cost down to whoever wants their device connected because it's impossible otherwise.

 

3) What additional policies do you make people sign before they're able to use your infrastructure? We have an IT policy already so perhaps I should just make an addendum to that.

 

Thanks! Any input at all is appreciated. I should mention that we're the first school in our area doing this so everyone is looking to us to see where and how we'll cock up

[AntiThesis]

The only constructive information so far has been from a local school who did an iPad pilot. They bought 150 iPads through CAPEx and then effectively rented them out to parents at a reduced fee. They started off by not doing digital textbooks at all though and restructured the whole way the school worked in order to take advantage of the system.