Moving to 1:1 devices

[_techie_]

Hi.

We are possibly considering moving to a school owned 1:1 device per student plan, due to a few things. This is mostly however that our new Y7 might not be in school and we need to provide some kind of school system that they can use in school. We already have managed Chromebooks in school, so just expanding on this slightly with the new intake.

 

I have done some work on delivering this to students but just needs refining.

 

My questions are:

1) do we enforce timed hours of use (not useable between 10pm and 7am?)

2) do we setup connect for Chromebooks using Smoothwall so that a filtered connection and reporting/safeguarding, even when at home?

3) offer a choice of devices to give done options?

4) deal with:

a) Johnny forgot to charge his Chromebook, can he have another one?

b) Johnny sat on his Chromebook last night can he have another one?

etc etc

 

Thoughts and experiences please?

[rogerdnixon]

We do 1:1 Chromebooks and our approach to those questions is:

 

1) no - and we have the option to allow private accounts outside of school hours for devices that have been purchased (we have buy/loan options).

2) we use Securly - so they get the offsite policy at home and the guardians can control this with the Securly app (allow/block certain apps and allow/block website and even turn off the internet).

3) for each new Y7 cohort they get whatever Chromebook we can get at a decent price. So no choice.

4a) we have around 30 spare devices - so they would day-loan a device - but get a detention. Day-loan devices are set to only connect to managed networks - so useless offsite. Devices not returned are disabled at the end of the day.

4b) repairs are done at cost. So if it needs a new part - the cost goes on Parentmail and the guardian pays and we then fix. In the meantime - they day-loan.

 

We have this 7-13. It takes a bit of management, can be transformative if implemented correctly. We went 1:1 Chromebooks with staff first. Having all users on the same platform is important and things like Classroom and the use of G Suite embedded is key.

[dhicks]

1) do we enforce timed hours of use (not useable between 10pm and 7am?)

2) do we setup connect for Chromebooks using Smoothwall so that a filtered connection and reporting/safeguarding, even when at home?

3) offer a choice of devices to give done options?

4) deal with:

a) Johnny forgot to charge his Chromebook, can he have another one?

b) Johnny sat on his Chromebook last night can he have another one?

etc etc

 

Thoughts and experiences please?

 

We've had 1:1 on-site, school-owned Chromebooks for the past 3 or 4 years. We're a prep school, 1:1 provision is currently for Years 4 and above, with lower ratios in reception to Y3 classrooms. We've had them both as assigned devices and as a pool of decies per classroom. We've found the pool-per-classroom to be easiest to deal with, there's then less issues with pupils forgetting devices, not charging them or them getting broken. However, for when pupils (possibly) come back we're going back to individually-assigned devices.

 

We don't currently limit usable hours, although we can report on usage times.

 

We use Lightspeed for filtering, in the same way as you desribe above. It means we can assure parents that there's filtering in place when their child is using a school device, and seems to have worked well so far. Bear in mind things like filtering and browser add-ons actually follow the user, not the device, so you can actually still have filtering on a Chrome browser running on Windows - we've just been trying out the new Google Credential Provider on Windows, and it does actually seem to work.

 

We have a couple of different models of device. All them are "flip"-style devices that can rotate their screens to become tablets. Actually, "tent" mode is more popular than you'd think - handy to have a device next to you while you do hand-written work for research or video conferencing.

 

We have charging stations in each room. We try to get teachers / pupils to take responsibility for sotring and charging devices - a Chromebook monitor who checks the device are in the charger and set to charge overnight seems the best idea.

 

We haven't had too many breakages. The most common issues have been keyboards failing - on our cheaper £200 devices some seem to just fail after a few years - or cracked, but not completly un-usable, screens. The newer devices, designed to be more ruggerised, do seem to have faired a lot better. We suspect the majority of the screens being cracked are side-on taps as the devices are grabbed out of the charging cabinets of a morning, with over-eager children pulling them out of the charging buckets and banging them on the underside of the cabinet. Hence we tend to prefer the simple shelf-style cabinets - they're cheaper, and tend to keep the cables neater, too.