Printers in Classrooms

[Stuart_C]

I was wondering what your schools policy about Printers in classrooms is?

 

We are, as I'm sure most places are at the moment, being pushed to save as much money as possible. One area I was looking at is removing, or stopping the use of the little deskjet printers in classrooms. We all know that the cost per page is much higher than our network printers or leased photo copiers but I was wondering what you actually had in school.

 

Do you allow staff to have their own printers in classrooms? Does every room have a printer in it?

 

Answers on a post card please.

Edited March 9, 2010 by Stuart_C

[Jamo]

We have 53 printers logged on my database. We have around 900 students.

 

We are trying to replace the more expensive ones with lasers of the same type! Hopefully, gradually, we will reduce the number of printers.

[Stuart_C]

Sorry, It's just the one sitting on teahers desks in classrooms, do you have them?

[maniac]

1 B/W laser printer per department. If it's a large department or has a specific need, they may get a colour laser as well. These are as centrally located within that department as possible, and are networked and controlled by our print management software. No questions, that's what they get. All inkjets are banned as of last year (Except for one in the library for printing labels on)

 

Works well here, saving a small fortune on toner so far this year.

 

Mike.

[bossman]

@Stuart_C:

 

Each department has its own laserjet networked printer and they budget for the toners, so depending on their budget they get a printer which will serve their needs.

 

I have gone down the route of HP because they are so reliable and get all our toners from a company called XMA as they are the cheapest I have found in the country and they also do very good compatibles.

 

Most departments have HP 2015n in one room and share across the other classrooms unless they have the budget to sustain more.

 

I think they retail at around £180 from XMA if my memory serves me right.

[SYNACK]

I am convinced that the official policy at one school I deal with is based on a race to see who can use the most paper. Each room has a colour inkjet and there are centralized lasers (colour and black and white) as well.

 

The inkjets are forever breaking down or being broken but it is apparently direly important for all teachers to be able to print out full colour photos in their rooms without leaving their desks. This is an ingrained culture with both the staff and SMT which no amount of logic or maths will correct.

 

I hate printers

[K.C.Leblanc]

It depends on the department, if they're willing to pay the running costs they can have it.

[6Foot2]

For the most part we have one network printer per classroom. Some staff have demanded their own network printer even though there is a network printer already in the room.

 

Occasionally we are sharing network printers between adjacent rooms.

[elsiegee40]

We're primary and the school has networked printers with none (belonging to the school) in classrooms.

 

Some teachers have brought in their own printers, which have been installed locally by me. To do this they have to register the printer with the Bursar, who arranges for a PAT Test and for me to install it. Our Policy for Electrical Equipment states

Schoolname will not normally insure, maintain, service, repair or replace any electrical equipment covered by the definition at the start of this document that is not owned by Schoolname.

 

This includes the purchase of parts, cables or consumables such as printer cartridges.

 

Electrical equipment to be used on the school computer network must be installed by the person responsible for maintaining the network after PAT testing. It cannot be installed until testing is complete and installation must not be attempted by anyone other than the person responsible for maintaining the network

 

we stick to that... once installed, the equipment is PAT tested annually and I don't touch it.

[sparkeh]

When I started pretty much every class had its own little inkjet. This really didn't work as they were always going wrong and the ink bill was sky high.

 

We removed all these and gave each year its own laser printer in an easily accessible area. To start with there was a fair bit of moaning that they had to walk somewhere to pick up their printing but when they realised that the lasers where so much more reliable they were much happier than before.

[dhicks]

Do you allow staff to have their own printers in classrooms? Does every room have a printer in it?

 

We use HP LaserJet 4650s and HP Business Inkjet 1100s around the school - we have 24 of the inkjets and 7 of the laserjets, 4 larger leased multi-function devices, plus a few other printers that have so far escaped my standardisation drive. The inkjets tend to be on individuals desks, mostly admin staff and teachers with their own offices, although we do have some being communual, networked printers.

 

Ideally, we'd just have half-a-dozen large multi-function devices scattered around the school, teachers would display worksheets on classroom projectors (which we mostly don't have yet, so you can see why they don't), pupils would hand in printed work by printing to a networked PDF document printer, etc. In practice, when we tried setting up the new staff work area without a printer, figuring that this would cut down on printing being done, we simply found that no-one used the room.

 

We buy all our printers second-hand off eBay. The inkjets all take the same cartridges so there's only one type to buy and we can leave them in a big tub in reception for people to come and grab as needed.

 

--

David Hicks

[lionsl2005]

we are primary, we have dell 1100 ( They do pretty much well) in each class room for teachers use. also we have 3 Hp 3505dn accross the school and a xerox copier networked. also an un networked Xerox colour copier.

 

No inkjets

[_Adam_]

Currently we have a HP 2015dn or equivalent per computer pool, no printers in classrooms if it's not a pool. Over the next couple of years we are moving to 1:1 notebooks to students and so I am watching the replies with interest. To go either the large printer per building or to place a smaller laser per classroom is yet to be decided, cannot wait till this paperless idea gets in.

 

Only student accessible colour printer is in the Library. We use PaperCut to monitor student use and after their quota is used they pay for more use.

 

We have had good success with refilled toners, a possible money saver as they are pretty much 50% the price of HP toners here.

[fiona_b]

I bet you could save a lot of money by getting rid of these little USB prints and getting some well placed MFD's

That and enforcing B&W print outs only and educating users on how much printing costs.

 

plenty of software packages to do this (already mentioned in the thread)

[CraigM]

We have a number of small HP MFP Lasers dotted around the school, something I find quite irritating and costly. We have found that the staff are just too ingrained to luxury to walk to a central spot to get the print outs.

 

While some departments cover their own toner, most of it comes through us, and boy oh boy is toner becoming more and more expensive. We just don't trust generic toner enough, which could probably save us quite a bit.

[fiona_b]

lazy staff are often happy using follow or find me printing solutions so they can pick the print up out anywhere. Perhaps its worth looking at.

[witch]

When I started pretty much every class had its own little inkjet. This really didn't work as they were always going wrong and the ink bill was sky high.

 

We removed all these and gave each year its own laser printer in an easily accessible area. To start with there was a fair bit of moaning that they had to walk somewhere to pick up their printing but when they realised that the lasers where so much more reliable they were much happier than before.

 

 

Goodness me, are you me? That is exactly what I have done. They still moan but mostly all is well. The only thing I would like is a printer that GOES ON printing in black when one or other of the colours has run out

[andyturpie]

We have just disposed of around 80-90% of our individual inkjets in favour for a managed print system with maintenence contract. We have one mono laser per department, 1 colour laser shared between the science depts and one other colour in our IT office which we monitor.

 

Yes there was a few moans and groans, but generally its now been accepted that no one really needs to print in colour here all the time.

 

They're all on our network with software we monitor ink levels and page counts. We also have a four hour on site repair with a 24 hour replacement if it cannot be repaired and the printers Email the company and us with issues and meter readings. Which we are looking to save around 20-30% on our consumables budget.

 

Its lifted a whole lot of pressure of the department.

 

If you are around the London area and are interested PM me and I will send the contact details over.

 

 

Andy

[contink]

There's really no excuse for a printer in every classroom now unless it's for a nursery or high risk group of children where leaving the room to collect work is just not viable.

 

I've got four primaries now with CIS enabled printers (the CIS part just makes it cheaper) but the bottom line is that the printers are more centralised to the lab or a specific classroom/area so that three or four classes can collect their work from these shared printers.

 

There's always grumbles but in this day and age with so much buget funding disappearing it's worth pointing out that the savings can mean the difference of a teacher having TA support or not...

 

If nothing else I would strongly recommend keeping a log of the costs involved including:

- hours spent fixing printers

- cost of replacing printers

- cost of consumables

- number of actual printouts that go through these printers (and others)

 

... then do a cost/benefit analysis based on those figures against a comparable school or other centralised printing done within the school... You can bet that the individual printers will be costing the school in the region of 3 - 5 times the amount being spent on centralised printing and when that figure gets totted up it's a LOT.

[mrbios]

Each department here is charged for the toners for there individual printers, they also pay for the printers they want on teachers desks / there departments specifically. All the ICT rooms have leased printers which we pay a set price per month for, support from the leasing company is included, then a price per print (set amount for B&W, set amount for colour) and they send us toners automatically when a printer reports a toner low.

 

The ICT room printers are Canon LBP5970s and are all set to default to 2 sided and black and white printing, the kids can choose to print colour if they wish but they have to manually set it in the print options else they just get black and white. but soon we'll be annoying the teachers even more by using a proximity cards / authentication system where by if they book an IT room, no kid can print until the teacher unlocks the printer with their card/code then all printing done in that class is charged to them and reports are sent direct to the finance department (and to the HODs to monitor print costs for their department) on either a weekly or monthly basis.

 

Hopefully it should all implement well

 

EDIT: oh and we'll also be implementing it so that anything over say...50 pages (don't know yet) will automatically be directed to an MFP in reprographics, the reprographics department is being replaced soon as the lease is almost up on those too, so we're getting them implemented into our automatic toner/waste container/replacement part ordering system.

Edited March 11, 2010 by mrbios

[jsnetman]

Here we have a HP colour laser for each computing area. We create two printer drivers for each printer for instance A1_Colour and A1_Mono, we disable printing in coulur on the A1_mono and deploy that to each user as the default. The staff also get the A1_Colour deployed but the pupils have to gain access to the colour driver via a web page, you can set this up via web/internet printing via the print server. We password protect each colour printer for pupil access and the password for each colour driver is maintained via each department using a change password script. We also have PapercutNG to audit and provide print credits for pupils and restrict how many pages they can print at once, we also disable printing directly from a web page.

 

One more advantage of having all HP printers is the all in one Universal Printer Driver specially with server 2008 64 and windows 7 32 bit clients, one driver does all printers 64 bit and 32.

 

We aslo have a Reprographics dept with a colour copier on the network with an accountancy module and we encourage staff to send large jobs to that via the network.

Edited March 12, 2010 by jsnetman