Teacher 1-2-1 laptops

[mavhc]

If you only have desktops what do people working at home do? I wouldn't want a normal person's computer having access to school files, do you RDP?

[kennysarmy]

If you only have desktops what do people working at home do? I wouldn't want a normal person's computer having access to school files, do you RDP?

 

Why not?

 

If they are just creating worksheets and preparing lessons what's the problem?

[mthomas08]

There would be uproar here if I suggested I was going to remove EVERY PC in classrooms and force staff to bring to school and carry around a laptop with them, constantly plugging in and out all day as they go from lesson to lesson.

 

Horses for courses I guess, so we'll just stay old fashioned here

 

I don't think it's old fashioned at all, I think it's cost effectiveness and at a time when Schools are having budgets squeezed... are laptops the right place for teachers... but it's all down to preference and if that school can afford it. We used to have laptops here and it was scrapped to save money.

 

-Windows Surface devices I think are fine and apparently there is a cheaper model coming out soon? With office 365 you've got a great office package which is quite simple to use etc.

 

And if you're still a M$ Vanilla network, the backbone etc is there already. We rolled out android tablets to staff a little while ago to assist with student devices.. didn't quite pan out well when staff wanted to treat them like M$ machines with all the software. Our investigations found that 90% of what we currently had didn't exist in an App form, online based or the cost of buying new software was too high (plus training). So we didn't continue.

[mavhc]

Why not?

 

If they are just creating worksheets and preparing lessons what's the problem?

 

a) class lists, b) behaviour reports, c) viruses

[kennysarmy]

a) class lists, b) behaviour reports, c) viruses

 

I think there is far more risk of a) and b) being left on a teachers desk somewhere that a student can pick up than there is of one of those files falling in to the wrong hands via a home PC - and that assumes once it falls in to the wrong hands they can do any harm with the data.

 

c) - I'd hope your AV product would pick up any viruses brought in from school no matter how they are transferred.

[LeMarchand]

a) class lists, b) behaviour reports, c) viruses

 

Shared Cloud folder.

[centerprise_lucy]

PM sent

[Blue_Cookeh]

As an aside we bought quite a few Lenovo laptops and found that we couldn't use KMS to activate them as the BIOS was an OEM one and would only accept MAK keys. How do you volume activate your laptops?

 

We used to use KMS but now use AD based activation, both worked fine on all our Lenovo machines

 

We don't want staff doing any work at all on home devices, especially reports etc - we couldn't achieve that with classroom desktops. @mavhc has a good point about restoring the entire session.

Edited May 25, 2018 by Blue_Cookeh

[max_carpenter]

Dear All,

 

Thank you very much for your feedback. Its all interesting to see your different responses and what your experiences have been.

 

To answer back on some of the points raised:

 

Activation: All devices will be domain joined and onsite for the majority of days so presumable a KMS activation as we are currently doing would be fine for this sort of thing

 

Storage: This is an interesting one and we have been doing alot of thinking about this, Currently we use Folder Redirection to shared areas on our server for Documents and Desktop as well as mapped network drives for shared areas. With the introduction of Surfaces in the trial we tried enabling Offline files for their Desktop and Documents for when they go offsite and no access to the shared drives but this hasn't worked, Offline files just has a mind of its own. The other things we have considered are Work Folders and sync stuff back to our server with the same technology OneDrive uses as far as I am aware, VPN dialin and moving alot of the files to the cloud with something like OneDrive. I cant remember if it was a reply here I saw or a comment somewhere else about using OneDrive to sync Desktop and Document storage and then folder redirect desktop and documents to folders inside OneDrive, I think this is a very interesting concept and I would like to trial it. Maybe look at client VPN's for the shared drives as an option however VPN's have always been nutoriously slow.

 

In regards to the comment about cost effectiveness, Consider this: We have a classroom computer and office computer and a ipad for every teacher constantly having to be replaced. Add the three costs together and you pretty much are at the cost of the Microsoft Surface, Depending on your setup of course if you have a ration of 1:1 or close for classrooms to teachers and offices to teachers. then add in the double cost of AntiVirus licenses and other software and time and effort to maintain double the amount of machines I think you will find its more cost effective for a 1:1 scheme of laptops.

 

Now to answer about damages and forgotten devices I will split this answer up a little

 

1: We will at all times have at least two spare devices onsite (With each phase of the rollout adding to that pool so by the end of the rollout to entire school I invisage we will have about 10 spares) which will already be setup and ready to go on the spot so any broken ones will be swapped on the spot and forgotten ones loaned out.

 

2: We have taken out Extended Warranty and Insurance for each of the devices so if they break for whatever reason we simply send off and get a repaired or replacement one back to go back into the pile.

 

Someone mentioned about USB-C docks which I like however the Surface doesn't have USBC but does still have one cable for docking and charging which each classroom and office space will have a fixed dock at - This also answers the person said about teachers having to carry around the charger, They won't because everywhere will have a fixed dock with charger so the main reason they would need a charger is out of department meetings (but one would assume the super long battery life and being charged for last lesson or office use would ensure it lasts the meeting) and at home or out for the day elsewhere. As for carrying the device there is this extra to carry but its not alot and the teachers that I have spoken to appear to be ok with that and welcome the technology.

 

The last thing I think I wanted to answer on was the arriving at a classroom knowing whats there. This should be the case because each classroom will have a standardised dock with all the screen/speakers etc plugged into the dock and not touched. We will do our best to prevent messing with this by cable tieing all the cables together and hidding away what we can but this does present a problem, The only way to combat this I think is on each hand out instructing the teachers on protocal and if there is a problem call IT don't mess with the cables, If we find cables are messed with a process to find out which teacher recently used the room and speak to them.

 

 

I am not trying to invalidate everyones negative points of this scheme I just wanted to highlight what we have thought off and how we are going about it because while there are potential problems I think showing that you have thought about everything and implemented it the correct way then this could be a really positive thing to implement especially giving out quality hardware opposed to multiple cheap hardware that causes its own set of problems.

[mavhc]

Wonder when a MS Surface with USB C and without all the MS Surface only connectors is due

 

I've had no problem with Offline files for users really, but shared drives is a problem. Work folders should fix that.

 

There's so many kinds of VPNs, I've not really looked into it much, next year probably, once I get control of the router.

[Blue_Cookeh]

We're looking at moving shared drives into our Office365 SharePoint instance - particularly now we're redirecting user folders into OneDrive (which has worked well so far). That leaves DirectAccess for our VPN which will become management only shortly.

[free780]

Just asking. Those redirecting to OneDrive is it only on 1:1 devices? The time it takes for the sync client takes a while on 1st login.

[mavhc]

I'm surprised people are fine with moving to sharepoint, it never seems reliable.

 

Also we should really make clear what version of OneDrive we're talking about, Personal vs Business, Synced vs OnDemand, etc

[free780]

It seems more unreliable behind a proxy even if domains are whitelisted. Microsoft do say it's a poor experience for the user behind a proxy. The trouble is we need firewalls to talk to the REST API to keep up to date with the Office 365 ranges and let the IP ranges straight out.

[psydii]

It seems more unreliable behind a proxy even if domains are whitelisted. Microsoft do say it's a poor experience for the user behind a proxy. The trouble is we need firewalls to talk to the REST API to keep up to date with the Office 365 ranges and let the IP ranges straight out.

Which ought not to be hard.

I'm just leaving these links here incase anyone ends up on this thread when looking for how configure their clients and firewalls to allow Office365 traffic through without proxying or filtering it:

 

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/managing-office-365-endpoints-99cab9d4-ef59-4207-9f2b-3728eb46bf9a?ui=en-US&rs=en-GB&ad=GB#ID0EACAAA=2._Proxies

 

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/undocumentedfeatures/2015/10/12/subscribe-to-the-office-365-urls-and-ip-addresses-rss-feed-in-outlook/

 

There really is no excuse for vendors not to have baked near-realtime updates to their rules into their products, but failing that a weekly update using the example pac files and IP lists should keep things ticking along.