Device Management for Schools: How Small IT Teams Manage Big Device Fleets

The One-to-One Device Challenge: Managing Thousands of Devices

Steven Harwood spent five years with Riverside Unified School District as a manager of instructional technology. There, he managed more than 42,000 student Chromebooks. This is because Riverside is a one-to-one district, meaning one device for every one student. 

A fleet that size presents significant device management challenges: “Broken Chromebooks, authentication issues or students trying to work around content filters: Anything that happens, when you do that at scale, it just gets exponentially more challenging,” says Harwood, now manager of solutions engineering at GoGuardian.

A manual approach has consequences for student learning. “If admins are focusing so much on actually making the devices work, they can’t optimize the devices for instruction,” says Tom Chapman, product manager for ChromeOS at Google. “We don’t want them to be focused on technically configuring these devices when they should really be focused on allowing the teachers to instruct using the technology.”

Provisioning at Scale: Automating Device Enrollment and Identity Setup

With modernized tools and strategies, IT teams can get out from under a crushing manual load, freeing themselves to support student learning more effectively.

At Longview Independent School District in Texas, IT manages some 13,000 Chromebooks across multiple charter schools. In the past, “we were doing everything manually, and it was very labor- and time-intensive,” says Laura Horn, an instructional technology specialist there.

During the pandemic, the district brought in 4,500 devices in one month. To deploy at scale, “we went to the white glove service then, and we really haven’t turned back,” says Jennifer Large, supervisor of instructional technology at Longview ISD. “With zero-touch enrollment, they literally come out of the box already serial numbered and enrolled for our campus.”

Now, devices come bulk packaged, configured and ready to deploy. “That really helps with getting them to campus and getting them in the students’ hands efficiently,” Large says.

Chromebooks today “allow for schools to reach out to their resellers and say, ‘I want 100 devices at this location.’ And the resellers can zero-touch them, meaning that as soon as those devices come out of a box, those devices enroll themselves,” Google’s Chapman says. “There’s no manual policy required to make those devices function in the environment, and it’s seamless.”

In support of identity management, “we have really great partners in this space, such as Clever and ClassLink, that allow students to use existing credentials and even QR codes to scan and log themselves in,” he says.

Google Admin Console Deep Dive: Smart Configurations That Save Hours of Manual Work

A strategic use of configurations within the Google Admin console can significantly reduce the time and effort needed to deploy and manage student devices.

• Location alerts: Harwood encourages schools to leverage the console to elevate security by automating the response to suspicious logins. “If my IP address pops up and says I’m in Mexico City, it’s going to trigger an information in the system saying, ‘Hey, based on your physical location of this login, you only have access to these specific tools,’” he says. “It will quickly and easily shut down application access, and it will also alert the IT team to look into that.”
• Provision by organizational unit: At Longview ISD, Large has the console configured to push out applications at scale, with precision. “We have our devices grouped in different OUs, and we have our students grouped in different campus OUs,” she says. “We can push out those extensions and applications to the Chromebooks and target just the ones that we need to target.” For example, kindergartners don’t need access to email.
• Alert management: The console can be configured to streamline device management efforts. “Whether it’s a role change, an admin login or a password reset, you can set it up to send you a Teams message or a Google Chat or a Slack chat,” Harwood says. “You can get alerted to all of that directly through your preferred communication channel in the moment.”

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Device Refresh Cycles: Decommissioning, Wiping and Redistributing at Year-End

With a manual approach to the refresh cycle, “managing a large fleet is literally a full-time job,” Harwood says. Automation eases that load.

“You can easily just push a wipe to the devices through the Google Admin console,” he says. “It’s going to go in and clear off all of the student information on there, so that when the next student gets it and they’re back on the district Wi-Fi, they are ready to go.”

That can have a major impact. With automation, “the intent isn’t just to save a couple seconds here and there; it’s to save minutes and hours. And an hour here, an hour there, over the course of 40,000 devices — that equals full-time employees,” he says.

In support of automated refresh, Large uses Gopher for Chrome, an add-on that allows Chrome device data to be imported, filtered, analyzed and bulk-updated using Google Sheets. “We regularly clear profiles on our devices by the OUs,” she says. “Gopher touches directly into the Google Admin console and can do those commands in bulk.”

Remote Troubleshooting and Help-Desk Automation for Student and Teacher Devices

For districts with limited IT staff, the ability to remotely troubleshoot problems and to automate some help desk functions together can dramatically reduce the device management effort.

With automated troubleshooting, “one of the easy automated remediation techniques is to say, ‘Wipe the device.’ If you do that automatically, it’s going to clear out all the student caching, all the old student history on that device,” Harwood says. “The student is able to log back in, everything they need is still there, and nobody has to touch the device.”

When a district leverages remote and automated support strategies, it maximizes IT team productivity. Crucially, it also minimizes downtime and keeps students learning.

“These devices are critical for instruction, and we don’t want to take a device away from a teacher or student,” Chapman says.