Going completely mobile device

[unixman_again]

Is there a college (preferably) or a school that has moved completely to mobile devices, who are prepared to share their experiences, both good and bad with my boss? If you could PM me, so I can pass your contact details on that would be swell. We're in the Black Country and he may want to arrange a face to face meeting at some point.

 

I think the plan is to ditch all desktop PCs for both teacher and students, have a dock installed. Obviously this will mean choosing a standard device, which I suspect will be a dockable laptop in the 12" range.

 

Thanks again.

[hardtailstar]

My last primary school had a laptop 1:1 scheme back in the days of chunky laptops before cloud based apps too.

 

It worked well but was also a pain.

 

We only had docks in classrooms for teachers. All students had to charge laptops ready for next day, classrooms did have spare chargers for student laptops with and extension lead to charge any up at lunch etc.

 

The scheme was stopped for students as it was a nightmare but secondary could be different.

 

The docks the Teachers used were usb and all the AV plugged into the dock so they only had to plug one usb in.

[Brimstone]

I have 2 primary schools with 1:1 iPads, every teacher there only has;

 

1 x iPad Pro 12.9

1 x Apple Pencil

1 x Keyboard Case

 

Each school has retained their ICT Suite

[mthomas08]

We had a device scheme years ago if you want any advice?

 

It was for our year 7, 8 and 9.

 

The parents paid for the devices

We supported them

Windows Netbooks then tried Android Tablets (big mistake)

 

It wasn't pretty if I'm honest and the problems were well beyond the positives.

 

In the end it got scrapped and we never looked back.

 

More than welcome to PM me, I've got some old reports for the schemes if they help. We had it for about 5 years and well.. wasn't pretty.

Edited July 2, 2020 by mthomas08

[dmj]

@unixman.

Have a look for Google Reference Schools in your area. Many will have trod this path with Chromebooks which are both touchscreen tablets and fully functional linux laptops:

https://edudirectory.withgoogle.com/search?expertTypes=schoolOrDistrict

 

 

Are you allowed to say Black country these days? I think 'Cole seam country', 'Very dark shade of grey country' or even 'west midlands' would be more woke.

[paulkerton]

Are you allowed to say Black country these days? I think 'Cole seam country', 'Very dark shade of grey country' or even 'west midlands' would be more woke.

Ha. As a black country boy myself, no one's taking that off us. Huge parts of it aren't even on the coal seam. My end of my street isn't, but the other end is!

[Brimstone]

We had a device scheme years ago if you want any advice?

 

It was for our year 7, 8 and 9.

 

The parents paid for the devices

We supported them

Windows Netbooks then tried Android Tablets (big mistake)

 

It wasn't pretty if I'm honest and the problems were well beyond the positives.

 

In the end it got scrapped and we never looked back.

 

More than welcome to PM me, I've got some old reports for the schemes if they help. We had it for about 5 years and well.. wasn't pretty.

Sounds like an aweful BYOD Scheme to me, lack of consistant platform, teacher's expected to teach to multiple devices.

 

Netbooks and then Android, a receipe for disaster

[Zammo]

Can you believe I am still occaisonly going into schools and being told "we have x trolleys of netbooks that barely get used as the staff say are they too slow. Is there anything we can do with those?"

 

[DrBeaker]

Can you believe I am still occaisonly going into schools and being told "we have x trolleys of netbooks that barely get used as the staff say are they too slow. Is there anything we can do with those?"

 

After still dealing with these as of 2015 and some in 2020... Yes I can.

[Zammo]

A large secondary I visited a year ago had over 350 of them. I could have cried.

[Sheridan]

I was a big fan of netbooks back in the day - they were quite cheap, portable and ran Windows. The battery was about 5-6 hours and they had a decent keyboard. I wouldn't touch one with a bargepole now though, although we've gone down the route of Chromebooks which offer similar benefits

 

I can see us going 100% mobile but it will mean all Teachers getting an Ipad (about 75% do at the moment) and replacing all ICT suites with Chromebook trolleys. Although our new MAT is keen on o365 so this may change!

[dmj]

I was a big fan of netbooks back in the day - they were quite cheap, portable and ran Windows.

 

"running windows", that is a bit of a stretch. Given enough time, they could load windows as long as you didn't need any applications!

[2ilent8cho]

We dumped our Teacher Classroom stations back in 2013 and went MacBook Air + iPad + Apple TV Airplay, then slowly introduced iPads 1:1 to students so every student now has an iPad. We use Office 365 mainly with these devices.

The MacBooks are just coming up to 8 years old now, have been used almost daily in that time , been workhorses and staff are only just starting to say that the battery is not as good as it was and they only get 4 to 5 hours out it now instead of the 7 they use to get which you cannot grumble at due to the age. Once those new Apple Silicon Mac's start becoming available we will start refreshing the Teacher MacBooks as the Apple laptops have been the best laptops we have ever had way better than the HP's, Acer's and Dell's we have had before.

We still have 3 IT Suites with iMacs in them. This is mainly for computer programming, music and the odd thing that a desktop class OS works better than mobile.

The Teachers like the freedom Airplay brings, it means they can have their desks where they want without having to have the room layout dictated to by network cables, docks or power sockets which also improved classroom management with some by the teacher sitting behind the kids so the kids cannot see where Teacher is looking. Apple Pencil + iPad and Airplay is very liked for annotating documents and this is what is used instead of expensive interactive TVs, as an iPad + Pencil + 75" TV can be had for half the price of a touch screen TV of that size.

Before you go mobile I would seriously look at your infrastructure first and get 100%, especially WiFi and switches. Luckly the 2013 MacBook Airs supported Wireless AC, and our previous Wireless did too so we had decent Wireless bandwidth, and this summer we put Wireless AX in to see us through the next 10 years. But it does not matter which platform you pick either Apple, Microsoft or Google it will fail if this part is not correct first.

Is your Internet bandwidth enough for that many devices to all start wanting updates at the same time? Plus what caching options are there? Apple for example have Apple Caching Server so all Mac and iOS updates and apps from the App Store get cached locally so it does not saturate your internet connection. What do Microsoft and Google offer in that area?

The responsibility for updates also now gets pushed more to the end user. When you have desktops you can push the updates after school or in the holidays no problem, but when you go mobile you rarely ever see these devices again, so how is patch management going to happen? With iPads being like giant phones the kids and teachers know how to update them easy and it rarely goes wrong, plus if they are supervised you can force the update via your MDM and iPad Apps can me updated automatically to latest version without the user knowing. If you pick Windows devices how often to updates break something? how often do Windows updates go wrong? How painful will keeping the apps updated be on that platform?

 

Are you also using Cloud Storage at the moment? As that becomes a must when you go mobile.

 

Going mobile can be very successful but you have to have all bases covered or it will likely fail badly.

[Antai]

We have some schools in the trust that just use docks (Primary and Secondary) and everyone wishes they had desktops again. Everyone that works at a school that has a desktops, wants docks.

 

Whichever way you stay/go you will regret it. In my opinion I prefer fixing desktops than I do laptops/docks.

[dmj]

You've found that rule in schools/education IT where, whatever option you take, you can only please 50% of the people and the other 50% will hate it.

[paulkerton]

You've found that rule in schools/education IT where, whatever option you take, you can only please 50% of the people and the other 50% will hate it.

 

It's those who jump on the Kubler-Ross Change Model Curve and ride it like a rollercoaster. The same people who somehow think they job they enter at 21/22 will be exactly the same at 60+. Some manage it, that's the saddest part!