Today’s Contributor: Minda Anderson
Minda Anderson is the Becker Elementary Librarian. She enjoys travel, dance, and reading until the wee hours of the morning.
My story starts with locked school iPads connected to personal email addresses of teachers who are no longer here and left no contact information. Argh!!!
Our principal purchased 10 new iPads over the summer for new teachers. I am a newbie with tech and once I started the school year I realized we needed to be using generic logins with these devices. I knew there had to be a way! I found out about the device management systems Meraki (for our Samsung Galaxy tablets) and Casper (for our iPads), thanks to my Technology Design Coach.
I am excited to learn more about Casper & Meraki, so that we can have school-approved apps on our school devices and so that teachers do not have to use their personal credit cards to purchase apps. We decided that at my campus our bookkeeper will have the app-purchasing power, while I will have the administrative powers.
I sat down with my TDC and another helpful TDC to figure out whether our old iPads & Galaxy tablets could be set up with Casper & Meraki…turns out, most of them could! We still were not able to “break into” the locked iPads, but Casper will be our saving grace with the new ones. As long as the district renews the contract when it expires, we will be sitting pretty!
I have been working at a snail’s pace among all my other duties at getting these iPads into teachers’ hands. I want to do it right! I don’t want to end up with more locked devices. Learning a new system takes time that I do not have during the normal school day.
I finally figured out that I needed my principal to give me administrator’s rights within Casper. I had planned on finishing the set-up on parent conference day, but when I sat down to get it organized I found out that I needed our bookkeeper, the Tech Department, and the Finance Department to sign off on various steps. Argh, once again!
I am finally to the point that they will get done this Friday, during my vertical team’s Professional Development day. Wish me luck!
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