Giving Teachers Control of MDM: New Software Is Helping Migrate Mobile Device Management from the IT Department to the Classroom

Mobile devices give students instant access to interactive online learning resources, but they also create classroom management challenges for teachers, who can struggle to keep students engaged in the task at hand. Many districts with BYOD or 1-to-1 initiatives have implemented enterprise mobile device management (MDM) tools, such as those from AitWatoh, CoSoSys, MaaS360, Lightspeed Systems and MobiControl. IT departments typically employ these products across a district or school and use them to enforce security policies, track and locate devices, and monitor and manage mobile apps. While the IT department is usually in control of enterprise MDM, some tools also give teachers the ability to monitor students' online activities, restrict access to specific online resources and even reset device pass codes. We interviewed tech leaders at three districts to find out how they are moving MDM into the classroom. Helping Teachers Focus on Teaching Calvary Christian High School in Clearwater, FL, became a BYOD school in the 2011-2012 school year. Students were required to bring their own laptops. school didn't have the resources to provide any technical support for the devices, and teachers had to do their best to manage devices in the classroom. Jeffery Hutto, technical implementation coordinator for the school, said, 'This is our third year, and we've realized that the amount of time and energy required for our teachers to manage that process is excessive. According to Hutto, students were spending class time checking their scores on ESPN, playing games and shopping online. It was getting to a completely ridiculous he said, we needed to stifle that as much as we could. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] school considered restricting Internet access at the network level, but Hutto said, Anytime you create more security on the network side, you start blocking access to good things that we actually need our students to access. school decided to implement a classroom management tool that would give teachers control over the laptops. After an extensive evaluation process, Hutto selected NetSupport School because it supported test proctoring, so teachers could lock down student devices when administering online tests. NetSupport School also supports iPads, which the school plans to implement in the coming years--not to mention that its per-device pricing model was more economical for the school than the per-classroom or per-teacher licenses offered by competitors. NetSupport School will also enable Hutto to provide remote technical support and deploy applications to student devices. school is just starting the process of implementing NetSupport School and plans to have it in place for the beginning of the upcoming school year, but the response to the plan has been overwhelmingly positive. I literally had one teacher jumping up and down with his hands over his head like we had won the Super Bowl, said Hutto. The teachers are very encouraged about what this is going to do for them. They're looking forward to not having to worry about some of these classroom details, so they can just focus on teaching. Monitoring a Variety of Devices Brockport Central School District (NY) supports almost 2,800 student devices, including more than 1,350 classroom PCs, 500 Dell tablets, 390 iPads, 375 netbooks and laptops on carts, another 200 laptops and 80 iPod Touches. Like their counterparts at Calvary Christian High School, teachers at Brockport Central were having trouble managing students' online activities in the classroom. About eight years ago, the district started using a classroom management tool called Netop School, which was succeeded by Netop Vision Pro a couple of years ago. new version manages tablets as well as computers. Wayne Rickman, technical administrator for the district said, When they came out with Vision Pro, they simplified it and made it easier for teachers to use. …