Pushing PDF's to students?

[jackb]

Hello,
I work in a school district that is rolling out iPads in the fall (1:1 for about 1100 students) and have a few concerns that I am hoping someone has experience with. We sent our textbooks to be scanned and converted to PDF files with plans to distribute these to students on the first day of school. My concern is the large file size and the number of students trying to download these PDF files at the same time. Would it be better to preload the iPads with the PDF files as part of the imaging process? I thought perhaps we could create an image by grade level that would include the basic texts for each.

We are using a JAMF server with the Casper Suite (sorry if this is not stated correctly...I'm new to this end of education...trying to get up to speed)!

Any advice is appreciated!

[AndyBeaver]

Are you using Apple Configurator or iTunes to set the devices up?

[CasperSally]

Is that legal, scanning textbooks to PDFs?

You can push PDFs via JAMF, but not in any grouped manner. I asked them to provide this in the future.

For example, we have 150+ PDFs we have to make available to our KG iPads, and we want to organize them by lesson (so Lesson 1 has 10 PDFs, Lesson 2 has 10, etc) versus a laundry list of 150 PDFs. We were setting them up in iTunes and organizing them on a master iPad in iBooks by Lesson, making a backup, restoring the backup to others. It worked but iTunes restores are 1 device at a time so it was way too time consuming in any scale. Apple confirmed this can't be done in Configurator (organizing by lesson).

So, now our webmaster is making the PDFs available on an internal only website that only the student iPads can hit. He can organize them any way we need, and we just put a shortcut on the dock for student iPads to that site. Students can browse the PDFs or open them in iBooks.

[jackb]

Andy,

We are using Apple Config...