iPad nightmares

[simonhayes]

I literally wake up in cold sweats at night having dreams about iPads!

 

We have 2 class sets of 16 iPads that people book for them to use in lessons. It wasn't my idea to get them, I swore that if the school ever purchased iPads I would have nothing to do with managing them! And I didn't until the person that did manage them left and I was then holding the baby.

 

The main problem is, they are pretty much used as expensive video cameras. Then I end up with 16 iPads coming back to me, each with 2 videos on that the teacher wants me to upload to the Windows shared area. The idea was originally that the students would do this using Dropbox, but that involves third-party apps, and Dropbox ends up getting filled up, or the app goes out of date and won't work, or the teacher won't know how to use Dropbox so won't tell the students to do it. Inevitably they end up coming back to me and I have to painstakingly transfer the videos from the iPads onto the system one way or another. I have been using a little app called Simple Transfer which is free and does a good job, but it still involves picking every ipad up, opening the app and downloading the videos with my computer which is a massive faff when you have to do this 32 times (or more if they're used more than once in a day!). There's also an annoying bug which seems to crash explorer every time it encounters a movie file from an ipad. It's just so time consuming. Surely Apple must realise that there will be people who wish to transfer files over to Windows so why do they make no easy way to do it?

 

Another issue is that the iPads all have standard backgrounds with their number on and which set they're from. They students seem to think it's great fun to change this background. Apparently there's no way to lock this down, so I have to go through the rigmarole of changing the backgrounds back every time some arse decides to change it.

 

So am I missing something? Is there something I've overlooked? I know there's other schools using iPads so they can't all be having these problems can they? Help me!

[Patrick]

Sounds like you need to look into a Mobile Device Management setup(MDM). It may take some time to set it up, but you can then lock down the devices so that students can't change the wallpaper, disconnect the wireless, delete app's and you can remotely install apps. As for the video files, Your best bet is some cloud based sync software and educating the teachers a little. Edited March 26, 2015 by Patrick

[Jamman960]

take a look at Foldr, it allows access to windows file shares directly... haven't tried it as yet since no one will buy me ipads to test with... I'm happy to have them but want to integrate them properly

 

As for the numbers on backgrounds - wouldn't it be easier to have the number on the ipad/case itself?

[tmoon-mint]

If you perform a refresh in Apple Configurator it puts the lock screen background back on.

[Brimstone]

1. If the school are just using these as video cameras, then they have really not thought carefully about what they intended to do with them before they bought (not your problem I know)

 

2. To get more out of them, there are ways of using cloud based storage (google drive, dropbox etc) as an easy way to transfer stuff. You could also look at a free app called "Documents" which can allow access to existing Windows SMB or WebDAV shares on your network, just bear in mind that this is free, so may take some setting up and training to get used to, link below.

 

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/documents-5-fast-pdf-reader/id364901807?mt=8

 

There are also more powerful "on site" cloud storage solutions such as Foldr, which uses your existing Windows Server, takes very little configuration, uses existing AD logins and passwords and can also let teachers annotate PDF files for marking work from the students for a totally digital workflow.

 

How it works | Foldr - Free Your Files

 

You can not lock background screens on iPads, but my answer would be really don't worry about this. If you have to have numbered iPads out some stickers on the back on them or when you refresh them using Configurator it will change this back to the default background you have chosen.

[caffrey]

The way our tech does it, is to install the Google drive app on each iPad, they can then directly upload the video themselves from the app. Of course this only works if you are a GAFE school (or have lots of Google drives) I intentionally moved our school to GAFE because of iPads.

 

*of course this is always dependent on internet bandwidth too, as iPad videos are huge.

Edited March 26, 2015 by caffrey

[simonhayes]

How much is Foldr?

[steveg]

We looked into foldr in the past, but it was too much money. We now use Filebrowser Business on all of the ipads in school. Using our mdm solution (airwatch) I can push out settings with the app, so it is pre configured to connect to our network. I have set it to connect to a dfs share name, which has all the shares anyone may need to have access to in it - nice and quick to update then in the future, if a share moves. You can of course set it to connect directly to a network share if you prefer.

 

When any member of staff uses it, it just prompts for their username and password for the network, and they can only access files as per their network permissions.

 

It costs about £4.50 per device if purchased in bulk, which was far cheaper than foldr and has no annual costs.

 

Getting all the devices set up with an MDM solution really is the key to a simple life with ipads. I wasn't keen on them when we got our first ones 3 years ago, I recently had a budget meeting with the head where I was pushing for another 32 of them, which will bring us up to around 150 in school. I will often get an email in the evening from a teacher asking if they could use an app the next day, if its not on the ipads I can have it deployed onto a whole class set within about ten minutes from my computer at home!

 

Steve

[lmgtfy]

I remember foldr being expensive too. A cheaper alternative is Aircatch Business I.T. Systems Ltd

 

Which is £295 for a primary and £595 for a secondary. I made my own version based on their idea using a virtual machine with outlook and a simple SMTP server and a couple of scripts and it works really well. Someone does work on the iPad they go to share email it to an address and within a minute it turns up on a shared network drive.

 

Can't get any easier really.

[Malph]

I have just started to experiment with Showbie- students can be set tasks and upload what they have done. US based so support available in the evenings. Have a go, one ipad set as a student and the other as the teacher account.

[Crumpet]

If you're using apple configurator with a trolley i think it's easier to reset them periodically than faffing about with the settings that the kids have played around with. If you're cloning them all from a single backup image, you can restore them back to the original settings. They are ok as personal devices but they've been shoehorned into education as communal devices and it just doesn't fit what they were intended for.

 

The camera lens on iPads are inadequate and we discourage staff from using them this way. Normally most don't unless they're on a jolly near the end of the school year and want to play around with a shiny toy.