Lewys

ICT Technician at Hymers College, Hull Salary: Around £15,500-£16,000 - dependant upon experience.

We do the same. Never had any issues with Namecheap, Comodo or the certificates.

Have you got a Smoothwall box already then? So you could just by a license for the anti-spam bit... We use Barracuda. Don't you get inundated with spam?

Where did you download the IPSW from?

Personally use 1Password https://agilebits.com/onepassword - very slick experience especially as a Mac user. They have a Windows version too along with iOS and Android apps.

Ahh I see! Can't help you there, as I don't know. Would be useful though

What web filter do you use? In Smoothwall it's fairly straightforward. You add the search term to the search term filtering section.

Could still be updates. There have been a number of fairly big ones in the last couple of weeks (although not 12GB big), and OS X has a habit of just downloading them whenever it feels like. You can turn off notification here: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18740?locale=en_US or for an unoffical, kill all switch - Permanently Disable Notification Center in OS X Mountain Lion (should work with Yosemite too).

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. The major advantage to using VPP is Apple Configurator. In a school with more than about 30 iPads; it becomes a godsend, easily installing and restoring en masse. You also have the advantage of MDM roll out for apps.

You can via single app mode on iPad. But I would have thought that would be a bit of a pain to do every single lesson. Not sure how useful one of these would be: https://www.raymond.cc/blog/prevent-program-closing-disabling-close-button/ - for Windows

Is it just student's that are having an issue? Staff/yourself are fine? Can you remove all the policies related to Chrome. Best to get it working first, before starting to apply those.

Yes it will I'm afraid. On the 'Supervise' tab in Configuator, when the iPad is connected, you can right click on it and select 'Unsupervise'. The bad thing here is going to be, you'll have to connect the devices, which will be wiped and Configurator will restore it back to the state it was when it was originally supervised. Only then will you be able to Unsupervise it, which will actually wipe the device again... I don't know another way around it I'm afraid.

I suspect (I know) that is the reason why Configurator wiped the devices then. When they were supervised you must have checked 'Erase be installing'. You'll need to remove the supervision if you want to manage them through iTunes and/or untick that box.

Had the devices been supervised in Apple Configurator previously?

As long as there isn't any flashing or flickering material being projected, they should be fine. The lighting in the room should be more of a concern. Fluorescent strip lights and light bulbs can trigger a seizure when they start to go or are faulty. I have worked with people with photosensitive ep. and projectors have never been an issue. Like TV's; as long as their isn't anything flickering being displayed on them.

Someone has enabled the accessibility options, namely VoiceOver. Taping once will select an item. (That's what the border is) Double-tap to activate the selected item. Use three fingers to scroll. I think you might be able to turn it off by pressing the home button three or four times quickly.

I find that Meraki takes a while sometime to update things like the device name, or OS version.

I've had a few, (less than 10 in the last year) passcodes set on them to date (out of 120). Just plug them into Apple Config and bam! the passcode is removed. Occasionally have students putting the iPad onto our 'Student WiFi' SSID but I've set the iPads up to work just fine on that too; so we don't have a problem with that. All the WIFI authentication/certs are setup in Apple Config and are then installed on the device when I supervise them. I guess we are fortunate enough to not have many rogue SSIDs around here. Staff and students alike are savvy enough to deal with Airplane mode; I've certainly never had an iPad across my desk for that reason.

On the whole, teachers here are happy with iPads and we have found that since the introduction of iPads fewer people are reporting errors on PC’s as they are now used much less. For example, most of our academic staff use their iPad to register their classes. So SIMS on the PC has mostly become redundant for this purpose. Teachers are 1:1 and we have 4 sets of 30 for students. The classroom sets were assigned to certain departments that bid for them and I believe that every single department put their own bid in, so there was a fair amount of demand. They are locked and during the holiday’s I go around and re-image, update or install any new apps that may have been requested. They are restricted so students cannot just install any app and we have VPP setup to allow us to purchases app licenses. Using Apple Configurator is incredibly quick and easy to use. Staff more or less manage their own iPads, we originally setup departmental Apple ID’s but we found this didn’t really work and instead staff have setup their own school Apple ID and use this instead of a shared one. Can’t say we have had much in the way of problems. Teachers like that they can book a set of iPads for students to quickly be able to do some research in lesson, without having to shift the classroom to an IT suite for the entire lesson. We have had no vandalism or malicious use on the student iPads. I don’t think a single one has been broken in the 12 months they’ve been in place. Around 10% of the original iPads we gave out to staff have since been broken. But they’ve had them 3 years now, so I do not consider it that bad.

The issue here is that you want an app to go into a folder; I am not sure their is any offering that will do that other than to use a backup. Meraki certainly isn't the answer. It will allow you to roll out apps/install them and the process won't involve needing to set the name again. But it won't put them in a folder for you.

There is no way to remove the option to set a passcode. However! If they are supervised devices; simply plugging the iPad into Apple Configurator will remove the passcode for you. Or else you can use an MDM to remove the passcode. We did experience some issues with that method though, in that if the device loses Wi-Fi then of course the MDM is useless. Apple Config has been fine though. This also has the added benefit of being able to configurer iPads en masse!

Are you using DFS at all?

Also. Where exactly is this guide.

This isn't available to anyone outside the US. The most you can hope (if outside the US) for at the moment is access to the VPP.

Yeah, at http://deploy.apple.com/ - when you've set it up you're suppose to have 3 options; volume purchases, device enrolment program and Apple ID for students. But when I log in or counterparts at other UK based schools; we can only see the volume purchase option. The useful stuff like Apple ID for students and device enrolment just doesn't appear for UK users. Edit: If you change country options at http://deploy.apple.com/ (bottom right) from UK to US, you'll see what I mean.