[ipad] Authentication on shared iPads

[localzuk]

How do you all handle user authentication on shared iPads? We've introduced a more modern wifi system, so have a bit more flexibility with how things run now, and are looking at forcing authentication on all devices.

 

With 1:1 devices its easy - 802.1x with radius accounting to our smoothwall. Chromebooks are also easy - they have to log in.

 

But shared iPads? How do you handle this? 802.1x would be too cumbersome, especially for our youngest children.

 

Do you use a captive portal? Or something else?

[steveg]

I'm currently re-configuring our ipads here for this reason. 1:1 iPads the children authenticate to the wireless with their own account. The shared iPads I have made new accounts for this purpose - For example IpadG01, IpadG02 etc, which is infinitely more useful than smoothwall telling me the ip address of the ipad like we had before.

 

Now each trolley will have a log book on it, and every pupil in a class with have an iPad number assigned, so they know when their class uses the iPads they will always use number 6 for example. This combined with the record of which class has the trolley when should be enough for us, but time will tell. Normally with the email alerts we can respond to them in minutes and they are still on the same iPad.

 

Any system for logging on with iPads has never gone well with our youngest children.

[ITGuyNW]

We only have a small amount of iPads so just leave them to use the captive portal on Smoothwall as they're used sparingly.

 

This was the other option Smoothwall have come up with. Not entirely fool proof.

 

Minimizing the Need for Users to Log in When Using Shared iPad Devices – Knowledge Base (smoothwall.com)