We are a 1 to 1 school, parents do however contribute towards the cost of a laptop device which then allows us to claim gift aid to help support the scheme financially and keep costs down. We're therefore not generally plagued by the device management woes that laptop charge & storage facilities present. We do however have a requirement for around 40 students to collect a school device daily from us, for the reasons listed in other posts we want / need to keep a close eye on these devices to prevent damage and hold students accountable where necessary. After having looked after these laptops for several years and suffering the pain of manually checking out and checking these laptops back in every day we installed a Lapsafe Envoy cabinet last summer, link here: https://www.lapsafe.com/envoy
Although expensive (£9,999) for the 32 bay model, we have really cut down the amount of daily technician time required to administer these loan devices from around an hour or two a day to virtually nothing, so from our perspective this is a massive win! The unit integrates nicely with Active Directory and allows us to allocate specific bays to students or indeed setup a pool of bays for shared access on a first come first serve basis. This is all managed through a web browser allowing us to report in real-time who using what and when they are or aren't returned. Our students use Mifare cards for a cashless catering and door entry systems which in turn we use on the Lapsafe cabinet. This system works for, us pretty sure this might be cost prohibitive on a large scale but works great for targeted environments i would suggest.
