We are currently running JSS 9.101 with a sync coming from PowerSchool >
Apple School Manager > Jamf. That helps us make good use in the meantime with the
Shared Model and Classroom. However, we are steadily moving towards a
1-to-1 environment for 10,000 students and 2,000 staff and should be complete
in the next 4 years. In light of that, we are hoping to make the automation
part of this process more...automated.
Right now with the Shared Model we still have to manually go import all the
classes, then edit each class and assign a group of iPads to the class. Not
a big inconvenience for onesies/twosies, but every teacher has an average
of 7 classes so it adds up a bit. This issue goes away once we go 1-to-1,
but we are then looking at the task of how to get students signed into
their iPads and then get groups created so that we can assign
apps/books/etc.
Is there a way to automate group creation? This would likely have to be
tied into the PowerSchool sync that contains the scheduling information and
of course there's the catch-22 that we can't assign groups to apps until
they exist. I'm pretty sure it's not available now but is it in the
pipeline as a feature request? Or is automated group creation simply not
possible?
Bottom line - it's an automated sync that still requires a lot of manual
input and time and we are wondering if/how that can be reduced. We are
using a staggered approach to get to 1-to-1, bringing on approximately 25%
of the load over the coarse of 4 years. But that still requires setup of
iPads for 50 teachers at a time over a period of time multiplied by 30
iPads per teacher = 1,500 iPads that staff has to touch. We've done this a
few ways so far:
(1) We sent the iPads directly to the teachers with instructions to login
as a user on all of them - then we can capture those iPads in a group. Then
they reset them and login accordingly, in most cases as a student user
(sometimes the students are capable of doing this part, sometimes not),
other times it varies if they're using Shared Model or have K-2 ages
students who aren't capable yet.
(2) We coordinated with tech and trainer staff to do the same setup
procedure. We log into a set of 30 iPads, capture the group, then reset and
login accordingly. There is also some setup for the Classroom app.
(3) If you hand the iPad directly to a student, you could look that student
iPad up in Jamf by searching for username. But that creates a manual
problem of adding that student to a teacher group to assign apps/books/etc.
Note: Some of the Classroom setup involves cleaning up a few user issues.
There's a little mud in our database from prior years, last year's import
of users and classes from beta testing, etc. Sometimes we get duplicate
users that didn't sync correctly and create another user with a -1 on the
end, and sometimes we have users who don't mesh because of actual different
naming conventions between Active Directory and PowerSchool. Active Dir has
a character limitation of 20. This mostly affects folks with hyphenated
names. At some point I suspect you have to focus on the bottleneck. It was
suggested today that we update systems to make the student ID # (or
employee ID#) the focal point of our systems, which should remedy such
issues.
So our question is if there are things that can be differently for a mass
rollout of iPads? Are there things other districts are doing to make it
more efficient and better use staff time? Our biggest bottleneck at this
time is getting iPads in groups so that we can assign apps/books.
Thanks!
