Immaculata-La Salle High School is in its third year of a 1:1 iPad initiative. Last year’s deployment of the newest devices went off without a hitch. In just two hours, over 800 iPads were fully configured and ready to be rolled out to students and staff. Unfortunately, this hasn’t always been the case.
The first year the Miami, Florida-based high school introduced iPads into its classrooms, it took about two months for the devices to be completely ready for distribution. The whole process was such a nightmare, that Fredy Padovan, the high school’s executive director for Advancement and Technology was practically cringing at the idea of having to go through the process again when it was time for an upgrade.
“I was dreading, dreading, dreading switching to the next generation,” says Padovan. He spent the summer of 2011 working on those original iPad 3’s the school had deployed. It was just Padovan and one technology coordinator so Padovan “bribed 16 students with Chipotle and Sushi,” to work two or three, eight hour days getting the devices ready. It was a grueling process.
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“We manually had to touch every single device to get it to install the initial MDM profile,” says Padovan. “That took five to seven minutes interacting with every device.” Next, they had to assign the devices based on user input so some devices were tagged specifically for grades 9, 10 and 11, etc. He then had to manage the inventories of those devices and make sure each had the programs they were supposed to. Needless to say, this entire process took quite some time.
A New and Better Way
Last year, Padovan heard rumors that Apple was about to introduce something that would revolutionize the way iPads were deployed. The school still had one year on its lease with Apple on the iPad 3’s, but Padovan was willing to break that lease and upgrade sooner if this new product was the miracle solution he’d heard. This new solution was Apple’s Device Enrollment Program (DEP), which allows school-owned devices to be automatically enrolled in mobile device management (MDM) without anyone having to ever touch the iPads—a marked improvement from Padovan’s last deployment.
“I told my Apple rep the moment that this goes public, if you can show me that it works and the MDM vendors are behind it, then I will break my lease and send everything back to you,” recalls Padovan. ”
That is exactly what Padovan did. He returned the iPad 3’s and upgraded to the iPad Air. The enrollment process for these devices was much easier using DEP. “We opened the boxes and the iPads were already enrolled and I didn’t have to do anything. There’s no other way to describe it than magical,” says Padovan.
MDM
The other half to this “magic solution” was the high school’s mobile device management program. Padovan had switched MDM vendors since the original iPad deployment and is now using AirWatch, which handles both the profile and application management piece of the iPad deployment. One of Padovan’s favorite features is the internal app store catalogue he can set up on each device via AirWatch. Now, he no longer needs to send students a redemption code to download the apps they need for class. He can simply assign the apps student need to appear in their app store and those can be downloaded on-demand. Padovan has the option to push out apps, but has quickly learned that is not the best method for application management.
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“I try to avoid pushing them out because teachers were complaining. Since I work all hours, students would get an app notification at 10:30 am in the middle of taking a test. Now it’s on-demand. Students just go in and push the button themselves to download the app.”
