Making The Grade

Back in 2014, the headlines around Apple and K–12 education revolved around the cancellation of a major contract with the Los Angeles United School District. When Apple announced the contract in early 2014, there was a lot of excitement around the project. The approved deal allotted $115 million for deploying between 40,000 and 70,000 tablets to classrooms for use by students and teachers. One of the main drivers behind the project was standardized testing. As someone who just finished up another year of standardized testing on iPad (and getting back the results immediately), I can empathize at the benefits of using the device for testing. The LAUSD project ended up being a massive failure. We covered it extensively throughout the process, and while there were a lot of mistakes, I want to look at it from a technical point of view to explain the LAUSD iPad hacking scandal.

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One of the key technology trends in the enterprise over the last decade (thanks to iPhones and iPads) is a collaboration and work anywhere mindset. Long gone are the days of employees, students, and teachers logging into desktop computers at work or school. Now, work is wherever we are. Work isn’t a place, but a state of mind. You should be able to work anywhere. You can, and that has led to companies who are distributed around the world. My concern today is that a world where it’s “cloud-first” from a services standpoint has left Apple as vulnerable as Microsoft was when they missed the smartphone era.

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Apple’s spring hardware release season has come and gone. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen Apple update the iPad mini, release a new iPad Air, and launch new AirPods. One iPad didn’t get an update, and that is the low-cost 9.7-inch iPad aimed at education. The budget iPad was released back in March of 2018 at Apple’s education event. While I was underwhelmed by the actual event with how it related to Apple in the classroom, the $329 9.7-inch iPad is an excellent iPad, and nothing changes that today. With the education buying season kicking off, here is some information to consider when looking at the 9.7-inch iPad for education.
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Deploying and managing iPads and iPhones today is drastically different than how it was a few years ago. Today, it’s a known process. You enroll the devices into Apple School Manager or Apple Business Manager, get them enrolled into your mobile device management system, and then you can go from ordering the device directly from Apple straight to handing them out still shrink wrapped. Jamf calls this a zero touch deployment. It wasn’t that long ago that the process was much more complicated than it is today. Let’s take a look back at Apple Configurator 1.0.

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One of the key challenges for K-12 schools with Apple products is management and deployment of an identification infrastructure. While Google has their solution with G-Suite, companies like Clever are also making a play to become a schools centralized identity solution.

Google offers email, document management, calendars, and works as a single sign on provider as well. Clever works directly with software as a service application vendors to sync your data between companies that don’t normally talk together. Yesterday, Apple launched their identity solution for K-12 schools with federated authentication for Microsoft Azure Active Directory.

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Over the years I’ve talked with hundreds of schools about their technology deployments. While I don’t do any paid consulting officially, I love to go and visit other schools to share ideas, talk about best practices, and to see how their technology stack is set up. I’ve noticed schools that struggled to get off the ground and maintain traction all have one key trait that they all share. Here’s the one simple thing you should do before buying a single iPad or Mac to avoid major education technology mistakes.
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One of the trends we’ve seen over the years in K–12 is the move away from native applications for the desktop. In fact, outside of Microsoft Office, I don’t know of a mass market application that’s launched as a native app on macOS in my entire time as an IT Director in education since 2009. Content/development firms for K–12 have always wanted a write once and run everywhere approach. It was tried with Java. It was tried with Flash. Both of those worked for a time, but they had clear faults. I would argue that we’re just now in the post-Flash era in K–12. Now, with Marzipan, Apple is giving a shot to the write once and run everywhere strategy. What will be the impact of Marzipan in K-12?

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There is an old saying that goes “an enemy of my enemy is my friend”. This saying has certainly been proven true in the technology world. There have been periods when Apple has been a friend of Google, but an enemy to Amazon and Microsoft. Currently, Apple seems friendly with Amazon (Apple Music on Echo devices and Microsoft (Azure AD logins on macOS using Jamf). Of course, in K–12 those relationships can often take different forms and we are seeing the unlikeliest of partnerships between Apple and Microsoft in education.
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Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) promises to bring a lot of changes to enterprise networking in 2019 and beyond. While none of Apple’s devices yet support it, it’s just a matter of time, and it’s important for IT administrators to begin planning for how the latest 802.11 standard from the IEEE will impact networks. While 802.11ac was focused on raw speed, Wi-Fi 6 and 802.11ax is focused on capacity and optimization. I’ll refer to the technology as Wi-Fi 6 for the remainder of the article, but it’s simply the marketing name the Wi-Fi Alliance has given 802.11ax.
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Google has been ridiculed over creating and shutting down various applications over the years, but when it comes to enterprise software applications, I would prefer that over letting things die a slow agonizing death. Apple, on the other hand, has done the latter with two of its K–12 focused software applications: iBooks Author and iTunes U. Apple has let these apps suffer from software rot.

About Making The Grade: Every Saturday, Bradley Chambers publishes a new article about Apple in education. He has been managing Apple devices in an education environment since 2009. Through his experience deploying and managing 100s of Macs and 100s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple’s products work at scale, stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for students.

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One of my major tasks for January was to decide my next steps with my Apple lease on all of the gear at my school. We’re coming up on the end of year three of our four-year lease. When we originally took out the lease, I always had in the back of my mind that we might trade in all of our gear at the end of year three (March 2019), but I couldn’t come to a conclusion about the best steps forward in the fall of 2018. My main concern is with the butterfly keyboard reliability of the new MacBook Air.
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When I first started in education IT, I could already see the multi-device world coming. The iPhone 3GS had just been released, and the iPad was rumored to be coming soon. At the same time, I also could sense enterprise networking moving to cloud services. Google was making headway with its Google Apps for your Domain product with schools, and the days of running onsite servers seemed to be coming to a close. A few years later, as everything moved to “apps,” I began to see a new trend. Security was moving away from the network and more to the device and corresponding apps. At the time, I called it “zero trust” networking, and I think it still remains supreme today.

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One of the buzzwords that we’ve been hearing for years in the K–12 environment is iBeacons. Apple introduced iBeacons back in 2013, but to be honest, I’ve yet to see a killer use case in K–12. I’ve seen some discussion around the iBeacons used well in retail, hospitality, and sporting events, but even that hasn’t taken over the world. Wi-Fi vendors have been building in beacons into their access points for a couple of years now, and iOS devices have had the technology in it for multiple revision rounds, so I am left with the question: Where are the killer iBeacon use cases, and why aren’t we hearing more about them in real life deployments? This week, I’m looking at some potential ways that iBeacons can be used in K-12 environments.
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Starting on Monday, I kick off year two of teaching Swift Playgrounds at my school. I teach this class once a year (for a quarter) to our 4th and 5th-grade students. Last year, I started with Learn to Code 1, and I had hoped to get to Learn to Code 2 by the end of the quarter, and then move on to Learn to Code 3 this year. I wrote about my experiences in year one in an article in May so you may want to read that as well. In short, the learning curve for students ramps up very quickly in Learn to Code 1. Follow along for the changes I’ll be making for my second year of teaching Swift Playgrounds and what I think Apple could do to improve the program.
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As I touched on previously, the concept of a device supporting dual iCloud accounts on iOS is something I had not thought of until recently, but I do think it’s something enterprise customers would like to see from Apple. One of the benefits of iCloud is how heavily it’s tied into Apple’s iOS devices, but for enterprise and education customers, this means they won’t usually be able to use their device for anything personal. This week, I want to look at this in depth and discuss why Apple should offer a “dual iCloud account” setup for managed devices.
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Even though my school mainly uses iPads, we still have a suite of ChromeOS devices in our library. There are 10 Chromebases (the iMac version) for students to use, and then we have a Chromebox for our librarian to use to check books in and out (she has a MacBook Air as well). We’ve had this computer in there for the past four years, and I have not touched it since it was installed. ChromeOS auto updates, it’s easy to manage remotely (not that I did much), and never once gave us a problem. Last week, it started shutting down randomly on us, so I decided it was time to replace it. I got on Amazon, found a similar model, and I ordered it. I then emailed one of my vendors so I could add the management license to it.

The process of replacing the machine was a breeze. I unplugged the old one, plugged in the new one, enrolled it in our management system by logging into a managed account, and then it restored everything like it was before. If anything, Google has nailed the web terminal experience. If you need a device to access your current web apps inexpensively, you’d be hard pressed to find a better machine. A lot of schools are pondering iPad vs Chromebook for upcoming technology refreshes, so I have been thinking about what the next decade of computing in enterprise/education looks like.
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As we head into the new year, I’ve been pondering ways Apple could improve macOS and iOS deployments in my school. Back in October, I wrote about the fact that Google was soon to be adding an LDAP feature to its G-Suite product. At the time, we didn’t know how the pricing would end up for K–12, but in the weeks since, we’ve learned that it’s free. In case you aren’t aware of what LDAP is, it’s a way for applications to lookup to another directory for populating user accounts in another. It keeps IT departments (and users) from maintaining multiple user buckets.

How does this impact Apple? Well, they’ve taken a different approach when it comes to populating data. For K–12 districts, they’ve started offering student information system (SIS) sync. They only support a few at this time, though. While Apple’s approach is a modern take on this problem (LDAP is legacy technology), I don’t think they’ve gotten all the way there yet.

About Making The Grade: Every Saturday, Bradley Chambers publishes a new article about Apple in education. He has been managing Apple devices in an education environment since 2009. Through his experience deploying and managing 100s of Macs and 100s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple’s products work at scale, stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for students.
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It’s getting to the end of 2018, and I am excited looking ahead to 2019. This point in the year is when I start thinking forward to what the next round of iOS updates will bring to my day job and my computing life. I am likely looking at purchasing 250 of whatever non-pro iPad Apple releases in the spring, so I am starting to consider what software these devices will be running soon after school starts. Based on rumors we’ve heard for a while, iOS 13 looks to be an “iPad focused” release, so I am expecting big things. When I think about my current challenges with iOS and iOS device management, here are some items on my iOS 13 wishlist.
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For the most part, the K–12 technology market has revolved around Apple, Google, and Microsoft. One of the major players that has been non-existent is Amazon. While it does have its Whispercast service, I haven’t heard much about it in years. This week, I want to look what might happen if Amazon focused on education.

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Because we’ve kicked off the Christmas season, and I know many of you will be looking for gift ideas for your child’s teacher, I wanted to give you some great tech items that you can purchase for them as Christmas gifts. Whether it’s the latest accessories for their iPad or some fun Wi-Fi enabled gadgets, these gifts will no doubt be a hit! Be sure to follow @9to5Toys on Twitter for all the latest deals during the Christmas season!
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The story about the past few years in K–12 has been iPad, iPad, Chromebooks, iPad, and more Chromebooks. There’s a major product category from Apple that is often not mentioned in K–12 anymore: the Mac. What’s the situation with the Mac in K-12? Is it something school districts should consider? If so, which model of the Mac should be the go-to for school IT departments? Let’s take a look at the modern history of Apple in Education.
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