Hardest thing about looking after lots of devices within a school

[b4beef]

I'd like to know what IT departments and Technicians believe is the hardest thing to manage when it comes to looking after lots of devices within a school or group of schools.

 

is it making sure the devices are all plugged in and charged ready for class?

Is it having to fix broken screens and keys on the devices?

Is it being told theirs a problem with the devices at a time when the devices are actually needed?

Edited June 21, 2019 by b4beef

[3s-gtech]

Users. The devices can be managed, the users cannot.

 

I suppose the hardest part is the physical maintenance, trying to ensure that several large suites and especially laptop trolleys full of devices on WiFi aren’t getting damaged, are plugged in properly, and still function. Users not reporting issues certainly doesn’t help that.

[hardtailstar]

is it making sure the devices are all plugged in and charged ready for class?

 

- All our laptop trolleys are set to charge during day (site team don't want charging over night). It's the responsibility of the the teacher who borrowed them to make sure they get plugged in after use to charge

 

Is it having to fix broken screens and keys on the devices?

 

- Thats the easy part. Getting staff to report damages is hard. Although that may be different in some schools.

 

Is it being told theirs a problem with the devices at a time when the devices are actually needed?

 

- most of the time you are told after it's needed if the teacher is annoyed by it and fires off an email to SLT.

 

 

In my 10 years of working in schools, both primary and secondary. Getting staff to be responsible for their own laptops, class computers, shared laptops and to report damages when it happens is a battle.

 

Teachers tend to just live with damages and issues if the can still use PowerPoint for their class. They only tend to report it when not useable.

 

I once had a teacher spill coffee on her laptop and all I wanted to know when checking it was where it was spilt. She got so defensive about it she accused me of belittling her in front of her class.

She was adamant that it wasn't her fault and the details of what happened were vague.

 

Having said all that. Some schools might be good at being responsible for their equipment.

 

Money is a hard thing too!

[MrEprise]

One of the hardest things I face looking after lots of devices (in this case Chromebooks at a Primary School I'm at 2 days a week) is actually keeping a track of where they are. Thing is that while G Suite can be configured to let you know when a device hasn't been online for a certain amount of time which is useful in telling you which devices are missing, that finding that missing device can take up a lot of my time, especially as I'm often bombarded with other jobs that need doing.

 

They had a HP Chromebook which had been missing for months, Staff were no help as they often can't tell one device from the next and I thought I'd looked high and low for it before deciding to set the device as locked (with a "If found, please return to us" type message.) in the hope that if someone did pick it up to use it that they'd encounter that and hand it in. This proved fruitless as I didn't hear anything again for weeks. I was close to giving up and writing the device off when I decided to have one last thorough attempt at finding it (i.e. going through everyone's cupboards/drawers/etc whether they liked it or not as I really needed to find it.) It eventually turned up at the very bottom of a filing cabinet which had dozens of books chucked on top of it. By some luck, the battery still worked and it powered up with the lock message I'd set. I was very glad to have found it but as said, it took a lot of my time just to find that one (which given I only have 2 days there becomes a waste of my time) and as I write this, I have another (new) one that is showing as missing again with no one knowing where it may have gone.

[saggu]

Users! difficult to make them understand when they do not want to.

[XiJ]

Users! difficult to make them understand when they do not want to.

 

This! And staff are worse than pupils - in primary at least!

[DrBeaker]

Making teachers take responsibility for the kit they've been provided with to use to support the students education IMHO. In some case nearly £10K worth of kit!"

 

* Letting students vandalise, pull stickers off, draw over the devices.

* Not plugging them into charge and them blaming IT for it.

* vandalism of kit and claims "it's always been like that"

 

We've had staff take laptops from rooms they'd been allocated to, to other classrooms as they "needed" it somewhere else. It all comes down to classroom management and SLT policing that with teaching staff, otherwise I don't think we're ever going to win.

 

I've had photos, videos, audits, logs, CCTV footage, incident reports etc got to management and SLT and nothing was ever done about it - even when the students were caught red-handed. So if SLT aren't going to back up the IT team and enforce this onto teaching staff, we have no chance.

Edited June 22, 2019 by DrBeaker

[b4beef]

Thanks for you response.

 

You say at the end that money is a hard thing too, how much of the allocation of funds for technology is usually placed on renewal / refresh / repair of devices within your school?

[elsiegee40]

Thanks for you response.

 

You say at the end that money is a hard thing too, how much of the allocation of funds for technology is usually placed on renewal / refresh / repair of devices within your school?

 

Don’t forget that all your respondents are British so far. Our funding, staffing and system is very different to the USA

[jthompson]

The deployment/configuration side of things, after some thorough initial work, just kinda ticks along easily.

 

It's the human element that's hardest. For us, this is the lethal combo of petty vandalism (pulling off or swapping keys, drawing on screens, pulling up mouse buttons, etc.) and classroom staff not b****y reporting things.

[witch]

Thanks for you response.

 

You say at the end that money is a hard thing too, how much of the allocation of funds for technology is usually placed on renewal / refresh / repair of devices within your school?

 

UK Junior School...NO automatic allocation of funds for such things

[Koldov]

UK Junior School here too!

 

No rolling replacement/3 or 5 year refresh plans at all. No vision (or money in the budget) to keep up with the latest tech advances.

 

Equipment is only replaced when it is broken or it cannot be upgraded any further to work with newer OS or apps...

[LeMarchand]

Getting staff to report damages is hard. Although that may be different in some schools.

 

 

Let me know if you find a place where this is different. By PM; we don't want the rest of this lot applying to work there .

 

 

You say at the end that money is a hard thing too, how much of the allocation of funds for technology is usually placed on renewal / refresh / repair of devices within your school?

 

UK Junior School here too!

 

No rolling replacement/3 or 5 year refresh plans at all. No vision (or money in the budget) to keep up with the latest tech advances.

 

Equipment is only replaced when it is broken or it cannot be upgraded any further to work with newer OS or apps...

 

2 Primaries and a Junior. All like this.

[jthompson]

We have a rolling replacement plan that was originally based around 5 years, but that has crept up to be more like a 5 year minimum with some stuff sticking around longer if it's running well. I'm grateful that the school recognises the importance of having rolling renewal, but recent years have seen more than a few discussions around skipping a year of PC purchases and dealing with it down the road (the curse of reliable computers!). It's like a great big target for making savings, but interrupting the usual annual hardware turnover really risks getting bogged down longer term with too many ailing machines, putting you behind the curve.

 

As I keep telling people, it's not about how many new ones you have, it's about how many old ones you have.

[CalmBlueOcean]

Maybe it doesn't take the most time, but the most frustrating thing is the petty vandalism.

It's become far worse than it ever was, as most ICT suites no longer have a permanent 'in residence' teacher who looks after the room. So they get left unlocked, unsupervised at break times etc.

Since January, we've got through over 200 mice replacements. Considering we only have around 250 desktops, nearly one per machine in 6 months!

Also over 100 keyboard replacements, though that is often just missing keys (with a few keyboards snapped clean in two). Still, I then have to remove the keyboard and bring it back to the office in order to cobble a working keyboard together, so it's a pain.

And yes, we are seriously considering deploying CCTV into these classrooms. Though mhaddock's comments on SLT not doing anything when even presented with this kind of evidence is alarming...

[b4beef]

And in your opinion, in a world where budgets are not an issue, how often would you look to refresh your devices within the school?

[DrBeaker]

And in your opinion, in a world where budgets are not an issue, how often would you look to refresh your devices within the school?

 

IMHO the day the warranty has ran out and no longer supported under warranty. Same applies for kit and infrastructure. It's a risk after that and risk needs to be managed by the business and business management teams, not the IT department - unless it has an IT manager.

 

e.g. Look at the NHS cyber-attack because the NHS and govt FAILED to undertake the advice of the IT team there and replace equipment long past it's usable life.