Chromebook management - ideas

[SteveB_NI]

We have 4 trolleys here of Chromebooks. (Against my suggestion / ideas but that's another story grr). I'm noticing despite my best efforts there is a constant movement of Chromebooks towards other trolleys and just abandoned there - so for example a trolley of 30 easily becomes 40 with the excess left sitting on top

 

I've tried colour coding them using paint markers, and coloured insulating tape - indicating a colour per trolley but the problem seems to be the ignorance of users not to bother returning them correctly, not the fact they don't know where they go to!

 

I'm tempted to look into restricting certain numbers of Chromebooks to certain WAPS to keep them in some sort of a restricted area but seems a lot of hassle to do this, and not even sure if it will be an option with our site wide Meraki WAPS.

 

Any ideas / strategies you can recommend? Problem seems to be the trolleys are just left open and the culture seems to be just walk round until you find one left open & take away.

[mavhc]

Ask the headteacher if they want to give you more paid working hours or if they want to remind the teachers to put the laptops back correctly

[Alis_Klar]

Maybe have a sticker design competition for each class/subject and then use that to customise the look of each batch of Chromebooks.

 

Give them a sense of ownership.

[dhicks]

I'm noticing despite my best efforts there is a constant movement of Chromebooks towards other trolleys and just abandoned there

 

We've had similar problems. We have Chromebooks stored in classrooms, originally in Lock-n-Charge cabinets with the 5-device buckets. Our first batch of Chromebooks I did a custom lid cover for each classroom on sticky-backed printable plastic, with a matching image (cupcake, tiger, antelope, etc) on each of the storage buckets so they were nice and easy to match up. That did work okay, but did take a lot of time to set up / manage, and of course as soon as you have devices that need repairing / swapping around you can spend a lot of time trying to switch images around and so on. We now have devices "assigned" to each user, by the simple mechanism of having them write their name on a sticky label at the start of the year and stick it on "their" device. I need to get around to writing a report using the last-user-login report from GAM so I can records who's using which device to make it easier to track when children turn up looking for their device that's wandered off.

[PotNoodleTech]

It basically comes down to classroom management. If the teacher can't be bothered to make sure pupils give pencils back, they won't bother making pupils give Chromebook back either.

 

it won't work unless it's an Headteacher / SLT Mandate > "You will ensure pupils put back and plug in or else."

 

I've only been to one school where the head is beast mode to accomplish this - every single classroom I walked in had the trolleys plugged in and chromebooks all perfect. I guess they didn't want their P45s over some chromebooks.

[JATSO]

Planning and Preparation should be part of their lesson plan if they haven't done it then it's the teachers problem.

 

I just go around collecting them when I see them lying around and place them back by their trolley, I don't have time to keep plugging them in for them, thats their job for the lessons they are needed for.

[mikes]

Ours are a nightmare; I heard about a script that writes the hostname/asset ID and the logged on user into a google sheet every time one gets logged on with (preferably the IP address too would be good) - but can't find this anywhere - does anyone know if this exists?

We have a special problem here in that our Chromebooks are supplied by and enrolled into the Hwb Welsh Govt system, but we log onto them using our auxiliary school domain - this means that the last username, last IP address etc does not get populated into Google Admin - so tracking who has last used a chromebook and when, is a nightmare. Same with Impero, their hostnames don't show up so we can't track individual chromebooks at all.

I even thought about giving our Impero server a public IP address so we can at least see if any are used off site but decided against it for security reasons!

[TwistedHelixis]

We put a coloured label on the case, trolley and also the power cable. We have about 300 Chromebooks and that seems to work ok.

 

I wouldn't get involved in putting them back into the correct cases, look up who last logged onto it and hand it back to them.

[ThatBoringBloke]

We have a departmental management system. Each device is assigned to a dept and labeled as such. If a device isn't where it is supposed to be then the HoD can ask for the device to be disabled. its not perfect and does rely on departments to look after them, but for the most part works.

[jthompson]

We have a custom login wallpaper applied per device OU in Google Admin that is like a watermark of the trolley name, so that no amount of sticker/label removal can be used by anyone as an excuse for not knowing where a particular device belongs. If devices need to be reallocated, then we don't need to peel or scrape any physical labelling off.

 

We also have some custom scripting that logs each sign-in, which can make attributing lost or improperly returned devices much easier. I think the native Google Admin logs for that have got a lot better (they were utterly useless not that long ago, hence our custom scripting). We do that using a combination of a custom Chrome extension that we force install, a Google AppSheet app for the extension to write to via API calls, an Apps Script function or two for writing each incoming entry out to a log file and a Shared Drive full of said txt files. The files are needed because a Sheets file (or AppSheet database) needs to be emptied daily to avoid exceeding the storage quota.

 

Ultimatley, that's all in service of the very human policy of stuff getting put back in the right place. It sounds like you need senior management to be expecting more from your staff, so to speak.

 

- edit -

We also have a Google Docs file shared with all staff which is an up to date list of which Chromebooks belong in which trolley. This allows department staff to check for any missing devices, and to also look up where any unexpected extras should be returned to. I wrote some Apps Script to compile that document automatically each day, based on the actual devices in each OU.

Edited February 26, 2024 by jthompson