laptop Check in/ out Systems?

[6288]

My Lovely People,

 

I work in a school. We have 13 laptop trolleys all holding 15 laptops each. We have an issue with students pulling keys off the keyboard and damage to the casing of each laptop and the chargers.

 

I've tried to roll out documentation (Spreadsheet with four columns 'Laptop Name', 'Student Name', 'Checked in/out' and 'Damage/Issues') for Teachers and other members of staff to fill out when laptops are handed out but it never gets filled in.

 

Although to me this would be classroom management issue it's fallen on good old IT support to find and roll out a solution.

 

Has anyone implemented anything similar to this and had results?

[Duranis]

I did the same as you have and had exactly the same results. Honestly not sure what the solution is. Anything that is actually going to be useful (i.e. tell you if something is broken or missing) needs teacher/pupil input to work (teacher in my case as we are primary school). If they cant enter a fill out 3-4 boxes on a sheet then I don't see what could be easier.

 

Only way I could see something working is if they can't physically remove/use the laptops unless they have been signed out. I have never seen any automatic system like this though.

[Edu-IT]

Catalogue them on your library system, if you have one, and book them out through that?

[6288]

The problem is all the laptops trolleys are in departments so staff hand them out when they see fit so currently nothing goes through us. Not sure how we could implement a way to have them go through us either without having 150+ laptops sitting in out office.

[midweek]

On a much smaller scale we've got a small PC in kiosk mode locked to our library software (Junior Librarian). This sits on top of the laptop caddy.

All the children and teachers have a barcode they use to scan out the laptops (and iPads in our case). They can of course put damaged laptops back without any checks in place but I suppose you could train your users to check the laptops before they scan them out and reports any missing keys?

[difinity]

My last school had a similar number of trolleys. All sorts of paper systems were tried by different departments. Rarely were they filled in (time constraints were cited as the reason.) and it did nothing to curb the damage (keys and the occasional plastic). If a student was found with a damaged laptop.. "it was like that when i got it out of the trolley"

 

Laptops seem to require more proactive maintenance than desktops.

[pcstru]

My solution is that laptops are now 'owned' by departments so any damage gets charged to them. That does seem to have substantially reduced but not entirely eliminated damage.

[Meldrew]

My solution is that laptops are now 'owned' by departments so any damage gets charged to them. That does seem to have substantially reduced but not entirely eliminated damage.

 

Same here. Literally nothing works except charging the department for the cost of the repairs.

 

Meldrew