Manage printing in your High School?

[Lippy]

We're wanting to rethink printing and wondered if anyone had any recommendations or thoughts?

 

e.g printers in every classroom? one in each dept? Mono only and colour only in repro dept? MFDs everywhere? Forced duplex? Follow me printing? Allowance per dept/per teacher?/ per student? Managed service? Leased hardware? etc etc

 

I've seen on comments about printing in schools but can't find anything online where schools have considered all options and come up with the most effective strategy.

 

Would be really interested to hear of any information or experiences people have

[todd]

I work at a university, so it's a little different, but I think one printer in each department and then at least one in each computer lab would be the best bet.

 

Most of our printers are MFDs that support color. We have two shares for each of those printers. One has the manufacturer's standard PCL 5c driver. Anyone who needs to print color is given access to this share and the share name ends in "C" to indicate color is allowed. The other share for each printer is the manufacturer's standard PCL 6 driver and we used their driver modification program to block color. We give access to this queue to more people. All access is requested by department heads, but this way we can limit color usage to those who need it and people will give some thought to whether they need something in color or not.

 

We also set duplex as the printing default. If people know they don't want duplex, they can turn it off. As for allowance, I'm not sure how you guys have your budget separated, but here, each department pays for their own supplies, so they manage their own "allowance" because they know that it costs their department money to print.

[dhicks]

printers in every classroom? one in each dept? Mono only and colour only in repro dept? MFDs everywhere? Forced duplex? Follow me printing? Allowance per dept/per teacher?/ per student? Managed service? Leased hardware? etc etc

 

I think print-to-VLE or similar is an idea that's worth developing. It's easy enough to set up a Samba / GhostScript server to take print jobs and convert them to PDF or JPG files, you could then have those documents sent to the VLE or straight to a user's iPad, Kindle, etc. People understand printed materials, and have the hang of producing them with Word, Publisher, etc, and seeing the VLE as a printable destination might be a good way to ease people into using it.

[GREED]

If you are talking about not physically printing, then training of users to save as pdf ( nearly all common apps can do this now) and then save to a common

Location, such as VLE or cloud store, or wherever. Almost zero extra cost. A good number of VLEs allow for coursework/ homework submission and even online storage.