Students are Power Washing Chromebooks

[DuckRunAmok]

Hey guys

 

 

We have an issue with students powerwashing Chromebooks (presumably to get out of doing work), this renders them unable to be used until they are brought to our office where we enter the internal WiFi password (which is kept even from members of staff). Is there any way for us to password protect this feature or make it more difficult to access? Students are very good at passing this stuff through word of mouth and I imagine it won't be long until we have to deal with this multiple times daily.

 

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks

[FN-GM]

Have you purchased the management licences and managing them via G Suite?

[DuckRunAmok]

Yes we have, we're using the Google admin console to manage them.

[SpaceInvader83]

I'm pretty sure you can't powerwash an enterprise enrolled Chromebook? They could do a Chrome OS recovery from USB but it would require forced enrolment when complete. (If it's been configured in the dash)

[DuckRunAmok]

It seems you can, we've had to do it a couple of times on some of our older chromebooks. All you have to do is press the right keys to get into verified mode whilst it's booting and you can do it from there. And as more and more students get their own personal chromebooks they're starting to learn how to do this and are trying it out on the school's chromebooks.

[HFloyd]

It seems you can, we've had to do it a couple of times on some of our older chromebooks. All you have to do is press the right keys to get into verified mode whilst it's booting and you can do it from there. And as more and more students get their own personal chromebooks they're starting to learn how to do this and are trying it out on the school's chromebooks.

Is there no way to password protect the options on bootup?

[rogerdnixon]

Make sure you have the force reenrollement option turned on for the devices. This is a device policy. Then its up to you if you let them re-enroll them (which is the only option if the first policy is turned on). The ability to enrol a device is a user policy.

 

We don't allow other users to enrol devices - so they have to come back to us. We then give them detention for trying to wipe their device. We have one a two a year (1:1 Secondary) who try it on - they get the message pretty quickly and realise its a pretty futile thing to try and do.

 

You could allow them to re-enrol the device - but they still need a network connection to do this - so would have to come to us anyways - so no point really.

[DuckRunAmok]

Make sure you have the force reenrollement option turned on for the devices. This is a device policy. Then its up to you if you let them re-enroll them (which is the only option if the first policy is turned on). The ability to enrol a device is a user policy.

 

We don't allow other users to enrol devices - so they have to come back to us. We then give them detention for trying to wipe their device. We have one a two a year (1:1 Secondary) who try it on - they get the message pretty quickly and realise its a pretty futile thing to try and do.

 

You could allow them to re-enrol the device - but they still need a network connection to do this - so would have to come to us anyways - so no point really.

 

Hey thanks for the reply, we already have forced re-enrollment enabled on all devices, the issue is that the devices need to first connect to the WiFi in order to enrol, and the password for the WiFi is closely guarded secret known only to the network support staff.

[browolf]

can you change the wifi or have a separate ssid whereby instead of a password the devices authenticate with their domain account? Our school laptops do this.

[rogerdnixon]

Hey thanks for the reply, we already have forced re-enrollment enabled on all devices, the issue is that the devices need to first connect to the WiFi in order to enrol, and the password for the WiFi is closely guarded secret known only to the network support staff.

 

We have a couple of USB to ethernet adaptors and then you don't ever have to put in credentials manually. But its a behaviour management thing really - nail a few and the rest get the message that its pointless and they will get a consequence.