Self Service Smart Laptop Trolleys

[David44]

Has anyone had any experience with something like this?

 

We are moving away from 1:1 devices and instead going back to laptop trolleys. Looking around, I like the idea of students being able to collect a laptop themselves using biometrics. There seem to be products that do this...

https://www.lapsafe.com/loaning

 

With an example of one in use here...

https://www.gcu.ac.uk/currentstudents/essentials/library/usingthelibrary/borrowing/borrowinglaptops

 

I wonder if any schools have implemented a system like this and what the costs were? Or did you look in to it and find it was prohibitively expensive?

 

Any thoughts welcome.

[mavhc]

Why are you moving from 1:1? It's been the best thing to prevent damage: Oh you broke the keys off the laptop assigned to you? Sucks to be you I guess. Give me £200 and I'll fix it

[simpsonj]

Love the idea of this, would really help with our day loans (we're currently a 1:1 device school). Also interested in how much it would cost, I suspect not cheap!

 

Incidentally, why did you move away from 1:1?

[Millgate_Jimbo]

David and Simpsonj drop me a PM and I can take a look at costs for you if you'd like Depending on what sort of size and trolley you are looking for as well as quantities I can get some preliminary pricing over to you.

 

With the biometrics would it be thumbprint access that you are looking for the students to access the devices with?

 

What's the reason for wanting to move away from the 1:1 ratio though out of interest?

[David44]

Hi James,

We are moving to shared devices because the school was paying 100% cost of the devices (Chromebooks) and in some cases 100% of the repair costs too. We can no longer do that. We currently use Biostore for finger prints but are looking to move away from that (to what, I don't know, that's another new thread for me to start). This thread was really just to get a rough idea on prices, but I wonder if we purchased a locker that could hold and charge say 30 Chromebooks and maybe purchased 5 of them what the cost would be. This is with the 1 trolley per classroom mindset, I suppose it might be better in some cases to have lockers that can hold 60 Chromebooks and have them in the corridor so I would be interested to know how much a single 60 capacity unit would cost too.

 

It always annoys me when a question asked by someone else that I am also interested in gets taken to PM so I have posted details here but if you'd prefer to reply by PM, please feel free.

 

Thank you.

[psydii]

We've leaned into the 'virtual' one to one model. By which I mean we've gone all in on bookable laptop trolleys and have 16x 15 bay units that are booked in advance and deployed by the IT services team. Some are managed by department with demonstrated competency at managing their own expensive assets.

 

Only students who are managed by the SEND team are allowed to pick up and drop off laptops at will. Always done through the IT office, and tracked.

 

We've had a few periods where all devices were deployed.

 

Because we get hands on with the devices each time they are moved we are finding that they are extremely well looked after, which was not the case when we were not so strict at collecting devices back to the IT office (they were previously returned by teachers or students, and often left with a department if they had an intermittent booking that spanned a few days).

 

This only works because everything else (hardware and software) is sufficiently reliable that we can allocate a specific individual to manage this day to day, and the physical layout of the building/site allows for swift access from the IT Office/Store(s) to any classroom.

 

To make the suggested model work, I would plan to have every unit checked every day. Also given that they will be in a public space, these cabinets are likely to be metal? How would wifi work inside them? For us our trolleys are laminate/chipboard and so the laptops (thanks to the intune shared-pc/education policies) are able to phone home each night and update etc as required in order to be ready first thing every morning.

[Richard_C]

We are a 1 to 1 school, parents do however contribute towards the cost of a laptop device which then allows us to claim gift aid to help support the scheme financially and keep costs down. We're therefore not generally plagued by the device management woes that laptop charge & storage facilities present. We do however have a requirement for around 40 students to collect a school device daily from us, for the reasons listed in other posts we want / need to keep a close eye on these devices to prevent damage and hold students accountable where necessary. After having looked after these laptops for several years and suffering the pain of manually checking out and checking these laptops back in every day we installed a Lapsafe Envoy cabinet last summer, link here: https://www.lapsafe.com/envoy

 

Although expensive (£9,999) for the 32 bay model, we have really cut down the amount of daily technician time required to administer these loan devices from around an hour or two a day to virtually nothing, so from our perspective this is a massive win! The unit integrates nicely with Active Directory and allows us to allocate specific bays to students or indeed setup a pool of bays for shared access on a first come first serve basis. This is all managed through a web browser allowing us to report in real-time who using what and when they are or aren't returned. Our students use Mifare cards for a cashless catering and door entry systems which in turn we use on the Lapsafe cabinet. This system works for, us pretty sure this might be cost prohibitive on a large scale but works great for targeted environments i would suggest.

[BKGarry]

We did have laptop lockers that came with BSF, each child from year 9 upwards had a locker (with mifare card) assigned to them.

 

These were from Traka, but costs creeped up over time, locks were £70 to replace (ourselves) and then 2 years ago the big news came, after having these lockers for 12 years, they were going completely end of life, to replace them was going to cost over 120k we decided let the students take them home and pay extra for remote filtering.

 

We already have an agreement the students and parents have to sign to say they are liable for the costs of repairs, and we go with 11" Chromebooks where we can get screens (the most commonly broken thing) for £25 each