The prevalence of technology in the world has brought about its integration in every economic sector, including education. Schools and universities around the globe are enthusiastically exploring this fusion as it offers countless benefits over age-old methods. Educational institutions have begun implementing classroom devices for faster and advanced learning. Some institutions have also adopted the idea of providing school/university-owned learning devices such as laptops, tablets & smartphones to students which they can carry around and learn from anywhere, even beyond school hours.
While this practice eases the burden on students to carry bulky study material and also enables a faster exchange of notes and assignments between teachers and students, it certainly has its set of associated risks. Institutes need to ensure that the devices being provided to students are only used for learning purposes and not as sources of entertainment.
As schools and universities around the world aim at providing low-cost one-to-one devices to all their students, the search for easy-to-use, budget-friendly learning devices becomes inevitable. Android tablets bag the top spots compared to other operating systems owing to their cost-effectiveness, ergonomic design, and compatibility with the G-suite. Since Android is an open-source operating system, it can be flexibly managed by Android MDM solutions making it an all the more convenient choice. However, the main question that arises for schools and universities is how to manage multiple android tablets.
Mobile Device Management (MDM) is a modern-day concept that enables IT admins of educational institutions to secure and manage university-owned or student-owned learning devices intended specifically for academics. This solution is favored by schools and universities since it reduces the burden on IT admins to secure, track and manage each device individually.
Reasons Why Android Tablets Are Preferred by Schools
- Google Play for Education
Since the field of education has progressed with digitalization, both traditional classroom teaching, as well as remote learning are heavily dependent on mobile devices and applications. Google and Android share a strong compatibility. Android devices come with built-in Google PlayStore and Google Cloud services, which offer a plethora of educational apps, books, videos and other learning resources for students. - Economic pricing
Android tablets are economically priced compared to other leading OS. Institutes that are looking for a budget-friendly deployment of digital devices definitely benefit from choosing Android tablets for their schools. You can purchase the latest Android tablets on the market for your students and yet use the saved money to invest it in efficient MDM solutions to manage your Android devices effortlessly. - Functionality
Android are easy to navigate and designed to be fit easily into backpacks, carried around the campus and sized perfectly to scribble notes. With the right MDM software, school and push their desired security features for a monitored usage, and also to instantly locate devices in case of device loss, something children are easily prone to. With its open source operating system, Android tablets are easy to customize and their usage can be tailored on various levels using Android MDM solutions to deploy and provision them for a large number of students with ease.
How to Manage Android Tablets in Schools: The Answer Is Simple
Educational institutes can manage their numerous Android tablets from a single unified dashboard simply by implementing an efficient Android MDM solution. IT admins of schools and universities need not be concerned about how to manage multiple android tablets anymore, Android MDM solutions offer extensive device management and security features.
1. Website & App Moderations
Managed devices allow selective educational websites to be whitelisted on the device, enabling students to access and use only those specific resources. Conversely, certain malicious websites can be blacklisted, disabling their usage on the device. This protects the device from malware due to the use of harmful sites and disables entertainment or unauthorized sites.
2. Application Management
MDMs empower school IT admins to remotely control the applications that students can access on their learning devices regardless of their locations. IT admins can push selective apps and tools from Playstore and private apps intended for educational use which will only be allowed to run on the device. Additionally, IT admins can also lock classroom devices in ‘single app mode’ for planned workshops or lectures which compels a single app to run on the device to ensure that students focus better.
3. Remote support for student & staff devices
MDM solutions offer convenient cloud-based platforms for IT admins to configure and manage students’ and staff’s devices. Admins can organize devices into groups, schedule routine software updates, send push notifications over the air. Incidences of device malfunctions or breakdowns can be resolved by the institute’s IT teams with the help of remote casting.
4. Easy content sharing
Students need not worry about carrying heavy backpacks and study material across the campus as managed devices offer simplified sharing and storage of files and learning material. Teachers can share learning resources like notes, presentations, and reference books with just a few clicks, without having to waste time and paper in printing out hard copies for students. Not only this, assignments can be submitted and corrected faster using cloud platforms enabled by MDM.
5. Security against theft/loss
Managing Android tablets in school is a task trickier than perceived when it comes to securing the school’s devices against loss. When learning goes out of the bounds of classrooms, learning devices are always at risk of theft or being lost. MDM solutions feature location tracking capabilities that help IT admins monitor device locations and the overall physical security of the device fleet. Besides, several advanced features can be leveraged such as setting geo-fences on devices that alert the institute’s IT admins when the devices span out of the allotted virtual boundary. This, including several other security measures such as passcode policies, factory reset protection and more can be delegated. In cases of loss or theft, IT admins can remotely lock the Android learning devices and wipe the data off them, rendering the devices useless.
6. Monitoring vitals of device fleet
IT admins can micro-manage parameters on their device fleets with the help of comprehensive reports available via MDM. These reports go a long way in minutely tracking device vitals such as data usage, storage space, battery usage, location, sim swaps, account activity, and more.
7. Device inventory overview
A consolidated combination of all the device reports can be obtained on a single platform on the MDM dashboard. Scalefusion MDM offers a DeepDive analytics tool to enable IT admins a comprehensive quick view with deep insights about the device fleets. IT admins can have data regarding platform summaries, last connected stats, available storage space, compliance violations, and much more at their fingertips.
Closing lines…
Scalefusion is one of the leading MDM providers that cater to the educational sector amongst many others in managing classroom and learning devices with diverse operating systems compatibility. It can not only be deployed with ease on a fleet of devices but also offers Android Device Management solutions to effectively manage bulk devices with ease. In addition to Android, Scalefusion MDM is compatible with several other popular operating systems like iOS, macOS, and Windows 10 too.
