Chromebook Booking System

[plumyeti]

How are people doing Chromebook booking systems?

 

Currently, we have the Chromebooks as a room on Arbor and staff will set up a general event on Arbor.

 

Is anyone doing anything better?

 

[TheHyperTechie]

We use Google Calendar for this, add the Chromebooks, iPads etc. as a resource in the admin console. Then when a class requests them, just create an event on the general "All Staff" calendar and invite the teacher of that class.

 

Works well for us.

[aydee]

We are using RoomBookingSytem, for all of our other rooms etc, and have our chomebooks on there as a resource, but we have them centrally, and teachers can book as many as they want at a time; so this might be different if you have stationed sets around your schools etc.

[SeeFights]

might not be applicable but our IT rooms are bookable by staff and because they are also class rooms they might clash when they book them so heres what we do;

We have a MS form that the staff fill out, include their class code, day they need it and period

This gets sent to me via power automate to approve or reject.

I look on Arbor for that day and period if theres any free IT rooms. if there is I approve and in the comments of the "approval" (this is what MS calls the powerautomate function) i put what ever classroom so say IT3

This then does 2 things, 1 sends an email to Data, Cover and the Requestee to say "hey I've moved this class into this room" 2nd, it sends an email to Head of IT and the IT teacher of that room to say "hey rooms in use, make sure its empty before it begins"

 

Then if any damage is reported, we can see what teacher used it and go from there.

[psydii]

Nothing as fancy as above.  Request sent to helpdesk, helpdesk create a calendar event, including the room, trolley, requestee, and sometime the tech who will do the delivery/collection all as attendees. 

We need to have this as a manual process as it there are some booking combinations that are impossible to execute even though we have enough devices. (moving 6 trolley/ 120 devices between 16 rooms across multiple buildings and floors is slightly beyond our capacity, usually; but if the moves are into adjacent or nearby rooms it *can* be possible, and if one of the requestee departments has a tech team (for example science, or technology) they can lend a hand to make complex moves possible.

 

Also if a trolley is booked out back to back all morning, we might want it out of circulation in the afternoon for a check up (and later in the laptop-set's life when the batteries start to wear out, a recharge).

[SeeFights]

13 hours ago, psydii said:

Nothing as fancy as above.  Request sent to helpdesk, helpdesk create a calendar event, including the room, trolley, requestee, and sometime the tech who will do the delivery/collection all as attendees. 

We need to have this as a manual process as it there are some booking combinations that are impossible to execute even though we have enough devices. (moving 6 trolley/ 120 devices between 16 rooms across multiple buildings and floors is slightly beyond our capacity, usually; but if the moves are into adjacent or nearby rooms it *can* be possible, and if one of the requestee departments has a tech team (for example science, or technology) they can lend a hand to make complex moves possible.

 

Also if a trolley is booked out back to back all morning, we might want it out of circulation in the afternoon for a check up (and later in the laptop-set's life when the batteries start to wear out, a recharge).

nothing fancy about it brother, just some lines of code using powerautomate. its really helpful for us as all the emails both rejection and acceptance and even the requesting is all automatic so theres no need for misinformation or "oh but the tech said i could" moments, its all there in writing in an email.

 

sadly i am a tech for a single school so i aint apart of a mat so not sure how to do it on scale but its really useful and helps tons, we even have the same system (built by me, insert smug face) for the school hall and minibusses that the caretakers use.

Edited June 12, 2025 by SeeFights

[psydii]

Ah, yes. I used to use little automations like that when I was a loan tech. Gets a little messier when the team is  bigger and SLT require more flexibility.  Probably starts to work again at larger scales. For us if they haven't received a calendar confirmation from the service desk, the laptops aren't coming.

 

As an aside, does the powerautomate stuff exist in your account's context or is it a tenant-wide thing? i.e. if you, say, switched roles to finance director (don't laugh, I've seen it happen), would the tech in after you be able to use the existing automation or would they have to recreate it? (I've bounced hard off powerautomate hard a few times, and never managed to really get even as far as  your "not fancy" code, and wondering where it is really kept, has been part of what's keeping me away), 

[SeeFights]

37 minutes ago, psydii said:

As an aside, does the powerautomate stuff exist in your account's context or is it a tenant-wide thing? i.e. if you, say, switched roles to finance director (don't laugh, I've seen it happen), would the tech in after you be able to use the existing automation or would they have to recreate it? (I've bounced hard off powerautomate hard a few times, and never managed to really get even as far as  your "not fancy" code, and wondering where it is really kept, has been part of what's keeping me away), 

so I thought a head when I was adopting powerautomate for a lot of things as the tech before me did it all via his account, so when we closed his account like 3 things stopped working. So because of this I made an account called [email protected] gave it all the standard licenses + power automate so now if i leave, change roles I can log in, see whats broken and fix it.

and that goes for the tech after and my boss, if we do anything Powerautomated its done on this account.

Edited June 12, 2025 by SeeFights

[speakercon]

Even less fancy... we just use a spreadsheet, each week a seperate sheet along the bottom with all trollies and lessons listed, staff just put their class in the correct box to book it.

[SeeFights]

13 minutes ago, speakercon said:

Even less fancy... we just use a spreadsheet, each week a seperate sheet along the bottom with all trollies and lessons listed, staff just put their class in the correct box to book it.

We tried something similar to this where Teachers would email and we would book them in but then HoD's got mad because "eh Im head of department i should just be able to do this"...we caved (more like got told to cave) and then all hell broke loose where HoD's where overwriting our bookings saying they are more important and it ultimately descended into chaos where several times teachers where thrown out their class rooms but hadnt been told their room was booked.

 

We moved away from this when the one HoD causing the chaos left and went with the PA system.