Other+conciderations


 * Other** **Considerations**

One issue that has to be dealt with from the outset is establishing a policy which prevents staff and students from registering the public school district owned devices to their own personal accounts and buying apps and syncing them. We are a local education agency of the state govt, and are bound by their restrictive guidelines for procuring and disposal of capital assets like ipad's. Unless donated to the district, personally purchased software is prohibited on district-owned devices which are state property. However, privately funded academies and charter schools would not be bound by this restriction and are better positioned to pursue alternate deployment models. I know of one district which is beginning to allow students to bring their own smart phones, ios devices and personally purchased apps into the classroom as engaging learning tools. According to the most recent mobile learning survey data from project tomorrow, approximately 62 of parents would buy their child an ios device or smartphone if allowed to use it in the classroom for educational purposes. As educational technology budgets become tighter, public school districts may wish to consider this low-cost approach to implementing a 1:1 mobile learning device program.

So we've had to revise our sign out sheet to inform staff and students that they are not to register or sync district devices with personal accounts, or purchase any apps personally for these state owned devices. During the process of recalling these in from the field for reimaging, we found that some students had taken them home and bought apps for them, as well as some staff. The political fallout for reimaging a device that had a parent's purchased apps on it is considerable, and should be avoided by districts from the outset through policy controls.

You should also enable the following passcode restricted settings to comply with CPIA, Title II -D, and/or the wishes of a conservative community/Gov Bd: It will also serve as an added security measure to prevent inapp and other rogue purchases, and you can disable the iTunes and app store icons. Another advantage to enabling these restrictions prior to backup is that it will apply those same settings to subsequent devices restored from that backup.