Enabling a profile when the students are out of school

[ccarpio]

Hello, everybody.

There's a profile we are supposed to enable outside of school hours. Meaning, everyday when the students leave school until they come back. That includes weekends and holidays, of course.

How should we go about doing it? 

It seems there's an option to do just the opposite of what I need: "don't install this profile during the configured holidays".

Thanks in advance.

[AJPinto]

If the devices are offline, they won't get any profile changes. Just keep that in mind if it matters.

I would approach something like this with network awareness. If the device is on or off your schools network do the thing.

[ccarpio]

Thanks a lot.

If the devices are offline our problem doesn't exist. We a have a group of parents that want their kids' iPads as dumb as possible (e.g. almost no Internet) outside school hours.

But I find the thing about network awareness really, really interesting. It should be much easier than defining school hours, holidays, weekends, kids being sick at home, etc. 

Where could I find documentation about that?

Thanks in advance.

[AJPinto]

As a parent myself, you cannot use MDM to supplement actual parenting. If the parents want their kids to not be absorbed by the iPads, then the parents need to actually parent and take the iPads. These kids should not be using the devices unsupervised to begin with and that is a parenting problem not an admin problem. Just my 2 cents.

As far as making something "network aware" You can just make a smart group for if the IP address equals whatever your schools IP range is. I don't use Jamf School so this may be different, but Jamf Pro also has networks you can setup in settings (basically just predefined ranges), and they can be used as scopes for configurations and buildings. 

[ccarpio]

Thanks a lot. I agree with your views, but after almost a decade my school has decided to give in to the parents' demand and try this approach for the school year.

I bet we will be back to normal in a few months, but in the meantime I have to look for ways of implementing it. 

It seems that Jamf School doesn't allow defining IP ranges, so I'm out of luck there.

Thanks again.

[alexandern]

We have many time-based profiles for stuff that we want to allow or deny during school hours only. So once a year you have to set the holidays for the coming school year. (Although strictly speaking you can add them any time you want.)

That said, for parents, there is the Jamf Parent app, which has some of the possibilities of the Teacher app: you can allow or deny apps, also by category, based on time or location. Allowing or denying websites is not possible there, but we advise parents to simply take the iPad and configure Screen Time, setting a code that the children don't know about. That way, you can leave the parenting to the parents and not pollute your configuration with too many exceptions on rules and groups.

Students who are ill at home have the same restrictions as students in school. If they want to watch tv, they should watch, uhm, tv. 😉

[ccarpio]

Yeah, I have a Text Expander snippet with a complete explanation of how to use Jamf Parent and Screen Time. Up until this school year if a parent wanted more control over their children's iPad, that was enough. Or so I thought.

But it seems that the pressure has been mounting and this year it will work the other way: every student will have their iPad really, really restricted (no web navigation except for a few websites, no web searches, most apps disabled, etc) unless they parents ask for it to be more open.

And that's the problem: the time-based profiles are really easy to set up to work during school hours. but not so easy if I need to be enabled outside school hours.

For example: if i create a profile active from 17:00 to 08:00, will it work as I expect? Or will it break?

Thanks anyway :)

[David5vor12]

Let them use ScreenTime. Allow private Apple-Ids to enable Family Sharing, this way ScreenTime Restrictions can be set remotely by the parents. Or tell them to configure ScreenTime on the device itself.

You have enough on your plate to keep these devices under control during school.