I’ve spent my evenings and weekends over the last three weeks working with a friend who is an IT manager at a local charter school preparing over 900 MacBooks for the school year. We’ve repaired, imaged, tagged, re-arranged and inventoried more laptops than most people will see their entire lives.
Work like this is back-breaking. Cables are run, carts are moved, laptops are stacked and passwords have to be entered hundreds and hundreds of times. No matter how good imaging tools like DeployStudio or Casper get, there’s still a lot of things that still require a manual touch.
In a past life (between working at Apple and my current job), most of my work was with Apple and its education customers across Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee. I’m no stranger to schools using Macs in the classroom. In fact, this school was one of my first (and biggest) clients.
I — like most people with similar experience — wish Apple would spend more resources on making the Mac, OS X and OS X Server work better in the educational environment. Sadly, with Mountain Lion, OS X Server’s balls have been removed, leaving admins relying more and more on third-party solutions like the ones linked to above.
Late last night (or early this morning — it’s hard to tell), I was arranging MacBooks according to the school’s re-shuffled homerooms. As they change the rosters every year, this is a tedious task. As I was combing through the lists, finding the corresponding MacBooks, I started recognizing some of the names from when I first set up this school’s Workgroup Manager server four years ago.
These particular students are about to enter the tenth grade. I’ve written about my sophomore year before, and consider it the year that I fell in love with so many of the things that have defined my career and hobbies. These kids are now that age (Oh, God, I’m old) and I hope they have the same experience.
I like to think their heavy usage of the Macs provided by the charter school will pay off. These students have been learning skills that most kids (even in 2012) won’t learn in school.
Schools like this one are showing that technology can be a central aspect in the classroom, and that (when properly managed) are well worth the investment. And it’s been really neat to be behind the scenes for so long.