* Posts by JSBPS

1 publicly visible post • joined 30 Mar 2018

Apple, if you want to win in education, look at what sucks about iPads

JSBPS

I'm currently working with a mostly 1:1 deployment in an independent school, deployment wise I'm happy with the setup now via DEP/MDM, one of the most irritating issues we face is pupils entering the wrong passcode until the iPad asks for connection to iTunes at which point we end up wiping and recovering from backup.

Managed AppleID has been a bit of a car crash, being unable to purchase anything including storage has made managing it all particularly difficult - until now we've had many users who've filled their 5gb storage causing their devices to stop backing up until we convince them to clear some photos - We we've been met with nothing but "thats just how it is" whenever I asked about additional storage.

Within education I think its the teaching side that needs a helping hand/push these days - we're pushing staff training and getting them to go through the Apple Teacher programme as part of their CPD targets but its difficult to get them to be enthusiastic in many cases. I'm hoping the Everyone Can Create curriculum will help with this along with the new school app/Class Kit.

Hardware wise I'm glad Apple have settled on providing lower cost kit to schools, Having to fork out for 64GB Air 2's back when 9.3 was released due to the lack of a 32gb model was disappointing, especially when shared iPad turned out to be such a flop at the time and MDM support was poor at best!