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Well this is my first post here. I wanted to share the journey of the Trust we have. A little bit of background on the Trust. We have 30 schools, based in the UK. We cover Primary, Secondaries and Special schools. With over 11,000+ students, the trust wants each individual pupil to reach their full potential by offering tailored learning experiences with the help of a one-to-one iPad program.

So where were we:

  • 3 Schools had no Wi-Fi
  • iPads in 1 of the 26 schools
  • Average internet speed across the Trust was 4mb
  • Limited ‘teaching with technology’
  • No centralised contracts
  • No focus on IT across the Trust
  • Average age of IT equipment was 7 years old.

Where are we now:

  • iPads now in 21 schools in the Trust (11 of those are 1:1)
  • Digital Strategy launched in January 2022, with an 'active use' framework
  • All Schools now have Wi-Fi
  • Average internet speed across the Trust is 90mb
  • Average age of IT equipment is now 2 years old
  • ‘Teaching with technology’ now part of every school with cross-Trust hubs focussed on enhancing practice.

Positive Benefits

•Lesson start time in iPad schools improved from 6-minute average to  1-minute or less

•Disengaged groups shown to be more engaged with digital means (reduction in low level disruption by 60%)

•50-500% improvement in achievement grade in all settings with 1:1 devices

•Reduction in photocopying and 'physical' medium requirements, reducing burden on budgets

•Electricity usage down 22-30%

•Photocopying/Printing budget reduced by 50-90%

•Reduction in 'repetitive' tasks for teachers being proven through digitally engaged methods of delivery.

•Greater wellbeing reported

•‘Gives me an hour a day back’

•Marking takes minutes, not hours.

I'm keen to talk to others and see how they are doing on the journey. How is everyone else taking things forward?

Currently we have a small Jamf School instance with about 1300 1:1 devices in it across 5 schools.  I did not set this up, and is flat with 1 location, only LDAP groups (nothing from ASM) and are not using Jamf Teacher/Student portals and it's doing most things by device name instead of user.  This works okay, but is a little awkward and will not scale to what I've been asked to do.

I've been tasked with re-creating a new environment for the rest of my large inner city school district (70+ locations but 140 in ASM because programs).  Overall, we have about 30,000 kids, I'm about to have 13,000 iPads (all 1:1) + some other devices such as Apple TVs and Macbooks. 

I'm finding the Jamf School documentation to be terse and incomplete (the touted new learn.jamf.com portal is literally the old documentation copied and pasted with a different background color).  I've seen a number of bugs already, that I'm told shouldn't exist, but do - such as device groups saving and applying themselves without actually hitting the save scope button. 

Our Jamf School support has thus far been underwhelming, and the clock continues ticking as this has to be ready within a few months. We have not fully committed and could still stay with a much older and convoluted base which is currently running the rest of my district (we have 2 MDMs right now). 

I'd be very interested in any resources you could share which helped you on your transformation.  I am most interested in things like how shared profiles work across shared locations, how portal scoping works, etc.  I currently do not have test accounts where I can try these things on my own.  Even simple things like why do two User is a Member of a Group filter rules not work the same way as 1 + defined group which is something we've seen in our live instance, are not documented anywhere.

The most useful Jamf thing I've seen thus far was a webinar video on the Jamf YT channel about merging data from different sources for maximum flexibility in terms of users/groups/locations/classes and this is what I'm working towards right now.

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