iPad 1:1 End-of-Year Processes

[VT-Vincent]

In your 1:1 schools, what are you guys doing for end of year processes? I'm on the 3rd year of our deployment at our middle school and I followed the process of simply wiping/updating each device at the end of the year. At the start of the new school year, each student starts fresh and none of the cruft from the previous year is carried over.

For the next year, we're going to make a big jump in the number of devices by bringing the HS onboard as well. Our JSS instance has been running since the beginning of our deployment and we have the option of wiping it out and starting it fresh. Has anyone done this as a practice or have any recommendations?

[lazyGhost]

All we do at the end of the year is nuke the 8th graders' iPads and assign them to incoming 6th graders. We nuke seniors' iPads and hand them to incoming freshmen. This is as simple as having a smart group that is tied to the student's graduating year attribute that comes from AD and issuing a bulk remote wipe command.

Apart from the annual recycling of graduating students, we do not touch all devices since the device follows the student through the years. We only touch devices that are way out-dated and/or devices that still need critical apps installed.

[RLR]

We have 2 lots of leased iPads. This is over 2/3 year period and upgrade to new ones at the end of each lease. This means we have to deploy new iPads every year. It's very challenging but last year was our best by far. We had about 7 stations which students went to in order. These stations included getting device asset number/serial number, checking for damage, making sure they've got an icloud backup (writing down their icloud username), handing in the device/charger, getting new device, restoring new device from iCloud backup. We did this for about 450 iPads over a day. It went quite well. The worst part was not spreading students out enough for network to cope with the restore.

[burkeyc]

@lazyGhost Can you go more into your process of Nuking the Devices? are you using the wipe command with clear activation lock check box, or do you have the students remove their find my iphone and icloud accounts and do a erase all settings and content before handing in the device.

We are about to do our first end of year procedure and I wanted to get an idea of how everyone else is doing this.

Thanks!

[dsitter]

I'd be interested in the nuke option as well. With steps. This is my first end of lease round and I"m not sure how we plan on getting the devices back into the hands of our K form our 8th graders.

Also, we lease ours, but have kids buy them as well. Is the best option just clicking unmanage for the kids who buy them and that's all we really need to do?

[rusty_adams]

If you are using DEP, don't you need to remove any "sold" iPads from there as well?

FWIW, we are switching our high school from iPads to MacBooks this summer, so we are having all students sign out of iCloud and do an erase all settings as they turn them in. Don't think we've really messed with trying to do it en masse through Casper, but it is something to look at, though I'd be worried someone would zap a bunch of devices unintentionally.

It kind of works for us to have a face-to-face with the student as they turn it in anyway.

LOL at actually getting working chargers back from take-home users...our staff may actually be worse than the students in that regard.

[lazyGhost]

Back when I was managing iPads at the school site level, the activation lock option did not exist. Any devices that unfortunately were locked with a student's iCloud information were phoned in to Apple. Luckily, it was only a handful that had this issue since I had locked down modify account settings.

The way I approached many moons ago was that I had a smart group to target 8th grade devices by graduating year(An AD attribute that JSS mapped to Position)and I would issue a bulk remote wipe command to all devices; nuke from orbit. If I were to have to do this again, it probably would behoove one to check the clear activation lock checkbox. Again, clearing activation lock was not an option a few years ago.

[atabique]

We asked our students to log out of iCloud, iTunes and turn their passcode off. We plugged them into a cart, and restored them using configurator. For students that couldn't remember their iCloud password, I wiped them through the JSS, using the Activation bypass lock code. When our high shool students return next school year, they will not receive the same iPad. Should I delete these iPads from the JSS? Since they will be issued to different students?

[mmcallister]

@VT-Vincent No experience wiping the JSS and starting fresh - are you having issues you are trying to correct by doing this?

@burkeyc In my experience, wiping the devices with Casper (using the Clear Activation Lock option) is fastest, but we found that clearing the lock was not 100% successful. Thankfully we maintain records of which AppleID is used on each device. (All AppleIDs were created by us via a script.)

@atabique Deleting the iPads from JSS shouldn't matter either way if you are using DEP - they will re-enroll when you set them up again. That said, we leave ours in to maintain history on the device and user(s).

[VT-Vincent]

@mmcallister We're not experiencing issues currently, but I'm curious if any tend to crop up over long-term installations such as ours. If we were to pave and nuke, this would be the ideal (and probably only) time to do it.