Printer Distribution in school

[Little-Miss]

Again, another dodgy subject description.

 

What i mean is, how many printers do you have and how are they shared between classes, if at all?

 

I'm in a primary school where they do a lot of printing. Apart from obviously having them in our little ICT suites, each classroom has at least one computer and one laptop. Most classrooms had/have a manky deskjet each. But they're getting old, and im sure at some point it isnt going to be easy to get cartridges (if we can at all!).

 

I've just been browsing though a dabs magazine and noticed that laser printers are getting cheaper, which started the cogs in my brain and was wondering how easy it would be for me to have a printer for each workgroup.

 

How do you do it?

[SYNACK]

One of my primary schools has the obligitory manky colour inkjet in each class - which the teachers refuse to do without - and a central colour laser along with a central black and white laser. This school also gets through several achers of rainforest a day as they desperatly try to print out the whole internet. There are about three classroom computers and a staff laptop in each room which all share that rooms printer.

 

Another of the primaries has networked black and white laser printers split one between two classrooms along with a centralised colour and centralised black and white laser in its ICT suite. This school has two to three computers plus the staff laptop in each room and both schools have around 20 classrooms.

 

I share out the printers by using a VBS logon script that detects which groups the user belongs to and then maps the appropriate printers for that group, this allow the teachers and students of each room to be chucked into the room specific group.

Edited October 10, 2008 by SYNACK
More information

[jamin100]

I work in a 2 form entry primary + nursery and ours is set out as follows

 

> KS1 ICT suite (15 PC's) has a network'd colour laser

 

> Nursery (seperate building) has a networked colour laser

 

> 60 laptops spread accross 4 trolleys - each set of 30 laptops have access to a networked black and white laser which are located ontop of 2 of the laptop trolleys

 

> Every classroom has at least 3 PC's and 1 teachers laptop

 

> Every computer in the school is also connected to the colour photocopier and the black and white photocopier so they act as printers too.

 

> Offices, head etc all have their own networked laser printer

 

I did away with all the deskjets when i got here 4 years ago.. Didnt give them a choice just took them away one summer holiday.. Only a few people noticed.. I still get asked where there little printers have gone 4 years later :S

[kesomir]

Networked BW laser in Lab1

Networked BW laser in Lab2

Networked BW laser in KS2 area

Networked BW laser in KS3 area

Networked BW laser in Teaching shared resource room

Networked Colour laser in Teaching shared resource room

Networked BW laser in Admin

Networked BW laser in Bursar

Networked BW laser in Head

 

No printers in classrooms, 1 whiteboard computer and minimum of 2 thin clients in each.

 

I use a vbs script on logon that clears all printers and assigns a set of printers based on location:

 

Lab 1: assigned Lab1 BW and Staff Colour (students don't have print rights to the colour so the assignment silently fails and they just get BW laser).

 

Lab 2: assigned Lab2 BW and Staff colour.

[AndyD]

We have 3 HP Colour LaserJet 2605dn printers, 1 in the ICT Suite, 1 in key stage 1 and the other in key stage 2. Between them, there are 60 computers and 10 laptops. The Haed, Deputy Head and Office, each have their own networked printers.

[bossman]

We have 42 various size laserjet printers those in the IT suites have mono and colour shared printers with subject depts have a shared printer usually mono as they all have access to the colour printers in the ICT suites.

All Admin have their own shared printers mono and colour if they need colour.

The subject depts and Admin pay for their own toners out of their finance budgets but ICT comes out of my budget they order through me as bulk orders which we get discount on.

colour printers are as follows:

HP4600n

HP4650n

HP4700n

A3 printers colour for art and technology Kyocera FS8008n and Kyocera FS8025n

Mono printers are as follows:

HP4100n

HP4200n

HP4250n

HP1320n

HP2015n

HP1100

 

Hoping to get reprographics on-line so teachers can just print from home to the photocopiers and the cost is automatically taken out of their budget allowance for the student handouts.

[Little-Miss]

Hoping to get reprographics on-line so teachers can just print from home to the photocopiers and the cost is automatically taken out of their budget allowance for the student handouts.

 

ooohh fancy....

[cooper]

I work for x2 2 form entry primarys

 

Both of these has inkjest in each classroom when i started

 

This changed to networked lasers

 

Now its changing again to networked photoscopiers and lasers in the offices

 

One of the schools is going to print to 1 colour copier apart from office staff have a HP laser for backup

[Geoff]

We have mostly laserjets now, with a few photocopiers.

 

Any room with a decent amount of machines in has a Laserjet P2015n

Most offices have a P2015n too.

The 'admin' office has a beefy LaserJet P3005x in it

There's a Colour LaserJet 5500 in Technology.

Art is still relying on a cruddy A3 inkjet. As is textiles.

The library has a colour photocopier

The staffroom has a b/w photocopier

Repographics have a b/w and a colour photocopier.

 

Generally though we're trying to get rid of the rest of the inkjets and anything dangling off the back of a PC.

[teejay]

If any of you want it, I have a script which assigns a printer per machine, rather than per user, so you only have to run it once and the printer is permanently installed for any user of that machine.

 

We have ditched all non networked printers, even if it is in an office for a single user so we can monitor them easily. Nothing impresses teachers more than if you turn up with a toner before they've even realised their printer has run out!

Edited October 10, 2008 by teejay

[maniac]

I'm in a secondary, and we have one colour and one B/W printer per department, unless the department is particularly small like French, where they just have a B/W laser printer.

 

All our ICT rooms have a B/W laser printer, with 2 colour ones available between the 4 of them. There is a Fast Xerox B/W laser printer in the staff room which all staff get mapped on their laptop, we prefer them to use this for printing, as it's very cheap to run. We also have a networked colour copier in the library, which acts as a colour printer for Admin and SMG, and a fast B/W laser printer in there as well. Most offices have a networked 2015 laser printer, apart from a few who have non-networked ones that were brought a long time before I started, so we're kinda stuck with them.

 

Printer allocation here is a bit poor, as like everything else there was no one rationalising it until I started, so teachers were ordering any old printer from their own budget, so we've ended up with a lot of different makes and models of inkjet printer learking around the building. However we don't support them and this was made perfectally clear when I started. IMO inkjet printers are totally un-suitable for a modern school environment, particulalry secondary schools where the sheer volume of stuff that gets printed continues to astound me!

 

Mike.

[Little-Miss]

Allocation! thats the word i was looking for!

 

I hate the inkjets, gonna do my best to get rid of them. May do a reshuffle of the printers and then see what the situation is. Haven't thought to ask if our photocopiers are networkable...

[dhicks]

How do you do it?

 

Printers. Uurrrg. Twitch. Shudder. We have random inkjet printers scattered liberally around the school. It's horrible. I have managed to at least mostly standardise on HP Business Inkjet series printers that all take the same cartridges (and have separate, replaceable print heads and can potentially be upgraded to be network capable). Unfortunately, HP have now discontinued the line, meaning we buy any new printers from eBay.

 

We have some shared laser printers. Unfortunately, our current print server is the cook's old home PC pressed into service - it only allows up to the Windows XP limit of 10 or so simultaneous network connections. I'll fix that just as soon as Microsoft sort their license system/server out and let me install more than one Windows VM on our Xen-based system...

 

--

David Hicks

[contink]

Well you did ask...

 

13 classroom primary with the following setup:

 

2 x HP L7780 (multifunctional printers with 600 sheet cap + duplexer)

1 x HP K5400dtn (600 sheet capacity + duplexer)

3 x HP K5400n (network only)

2 x HP K8600dn (A3 format + duplexer)

1 x RISO photocopier (nothing to do with me but it's there and network printer capable)

 

Early years (nursery, reception, yr1) each got a printer in their class (K5400n) for safety (ie: no children need to leave the room unsupervised)

 

the L7780's were put out in the 2 corridors (1 for early years and 1 or later years) while later years also got the K5400dtn in the corridor to provide extra capacity. The L7780's provide a simpler colour photocopying and scan to network (pdf output) function too which is getting a lot of use.

 

The K8600's are deployed with one in a staff workroom and the other in a public/child accessible area.

 

They are inkjet printers but every single one has a continuous ink supply system installed at a cost of £150 each (1 litre of ink comes with that). The down side is that there's a little user interaction required to reset the printers but cost per page is less than .5p.... and because they're shared (and the staff have had training!) printers they don't sit there idle so they don't clog.

 

Inkjets may be nasty for most folks but if you train the staff right and get a CIS in you're laughing and about £2k better off in the first year alone. Working well for us..

 

 

... as for the RISO.. yeah, ok it's cheaper than a laser but erm... That 11k contract?!!! Erm... wish they'd asked first.

[User3204]

We have b/ laser in each computer room, usually a HP 4xxx or Brother HL 7050.

The classrooms have nothing,unless the department have bought one, in which case they supply the ink, but I am in the process of removing single computers from classrooms, as they're useless for a class of 30.

 

We are also moving staff offices over to Brother HL 5270s.

This is because we also started to give the staff access to print from their wireless laptops, and it made sense to put a printer within their base/office.

 

The only colour printers on the student network belong to Art, Tech and Languages.

The only colour printers on the staff network belong to the Key Stage offices for the reports.

 

Some departments have inkjet colour printers, but I don't support them.

[witch]

3 form entry first school (years Recep to 4). Used to have random inkjets everywhere.

Now have: networked colour laser in IT suite

Colour Inkjet and B&W laser in staff room (but can print to colour laser if needed)

Inkjet in Library (which the staff used for printing stuff off their laptops)

That's it!

Apart from the 12 or so inkjets of varying vintage lurking under the desks - what do I do with them anyway?

The problem I had to overcome was teaching the staff that actually having to walk a little way to access a printer wouldnt kill them

 

4 form entry middle school (years 5 to 8)

Each IT suite has a n/w colour laser

Art has a photo quality beast, also networked

Years 5, 6 and 7 have a computer/ inkjet printer set up

Library has a new little laser beastet - really cute and as you say, quite cheap

Fabric has its own A3 printer on a standalone computer (no network in the portakabin!)

BUT Science has a.....colour printer/copier scanner that I did not buy and refuse to support or use my printing ink budget for

Edited October 10, 2008 by witch

[Trapper]

At the primary we support they have four accessible for teaching staff and students:

 

1 x Konica Minolta Colour LJ in the Infant Library

1x Konica Minolta Colour LJ in the Junior Library

1x HP LJ 4000 Mono Workhorse in the Junior Library

1x Konica Minolta Colour LJ in the ICT Suite.

 

Default printers for client desktops are set through a registry key and mapped through the batch logon script based on that reg key with CON2PRINT.

 

For staff laptops on the Ghost image all of the printers are mapped, and the default is set to the mono laser. Staff are briefed on how to change the default, or we or the other schools who support can easily change the default for them.

 

There's two in the admin office mapped to the office machines and the senior management laptops. Permissions are set so only authorised staff members can use them for budget reasons etc with NTFS security permissions.

 

All are shared from the DC, with Print Manager Plus providing the audit trial and costings. All are networked with static IPs. The staff OU has permissions to clear the print queue as well. So if there's a problem they do not have to hassle the ICT Co-Ordinator when teaching, or have to wait for a techie visit.

 

There's a couple of old DeskJet's floating around, but they are for specific use only, such as the SENCO. As only one member of staff uses it, it's simply connected locally to their desktop, and shared for their laptop.

 

We basically use the same thing at our secondary, only far more.

Easy to set up, easy to monitor and administer.

Edited October 10, 2008 by Trapper

[SpuffMonkey]

We're a secondary (1300-ish) - and have 40-odd laserjets of various configuration - the toner bill is humungous. Fortunately - that seems to have registered at last, so are going to activiely use PCounter in the future and also looking at bringing in Ricoh printers/multifunction jobs on contract as a replacemernt for all the printers (anybody else done similar? How did it go?)

[Jamman960]

We're an independent prep & pre-prep

 

Each department has to buy their own printers, in the past they all brought inkjets but I've now got them into buying £50-70 Brother mono lasers. They all look after their own printers and have to buy consumables with their own budgets.

 

There is also a colour laser in the IT suite/staff room which they can print to.

 

Some still have Canon inkjet printers which were provided by the IT department a few years ago before I got here, baring the occasional paper tray switch problem they've been fairly solid.

 

Every classroom at the Pre-Prep has Canon inkjets... as above they seem to just keep going

 

I setup 1 primary school in southampton with a networked colour laser in each room(hp2600).. just a bit excessive!

[Little-Miss]

lol a laser each is a little extreme.

 

We had a load of the Brother monos at my last school, nice little machines they are.

 

Just havent got my head around the colour lasers here yet.