Curricular planning and student assessment with Jamf Teacher

What is the Jamf Teacher app?

The Jamf Teacher app is a free application that teachers can use to manage student devices in the classroom. It's available in the Apple App Store.

When integrated with Jamf School, teachers can use Jamf Teacher to:

• Manage student use of iPads in the classroom
• Plan lessons and share them with other teachers
• Communicate with students in and outside of the classroom.

What is Jamf School?

Jamf School is a Mobile Device Management solution for K-12 schools and districts. It offers education-focused management and security for school IT admins, teachers and parents.

Jamf School offers:

• Classroom management tools for teachers
• Automatic access to subject-specific materials for students
• App request functionality for teachers to ask for apps from IT

The Jamf Teacher app aids in curriculum planning.

With an understanding of how Jamf with iPad works, curriculum planners or teachers can start to just think a little bit differently about how they're getting the most out of Apple devices when they're in the hands of students. It also helps teachers to maintain some of that classroom management that every classroom is going to need, especially when it comes to the role of technology.

Now if I just join a normal class, I have the ability to allow websites, allow apps and change restrictions on individual students, groups of students or all students.

What I want to focus on specifically is how to use this for curriculum development, and to support how that curriculum is being rolled out across the school for an entire semester.

Lesson templates

Perhaps you are thinking about creating a lesson or a set of lessons which use many bespoke apps, website usage and more. You could create a lesson template and share this amongst any of the teachers that might need to use it.

Simply go into 'Create lesson template' and name it whatever you're going to call your lesson. When you create it, you can allow websites, allow apps and even bespoke restrictions.

This means that at the start of a lesson, students only need to tap a button; teachers don't have to worry too much about what they're doing with the devices.

To begin, educators enter the lesson template, and determine:

• Which apps such as AR, calculator and Clips that students will need for the lesson
• Restrictions needed for the lesson such as blocking the camera, spellcheck/autocorrect or Airdrop
• Websites necessary for the lesson
• Groups of students who will use these settings

Any of these lists can be edited at any time.

New for websites

An update that has recently dropped changes how curriculum leaders or subject planners can take advantage of entering website URLs as a bulk upload. Previously, Jamf Teacher required that each website be entered in manually. This could be a problem for a teacher creating an entire sequence of work with multiple websites. Now, educators have the option to upload it from a CSV file.

That way, in just a few taps the curriculum leader knows all of the websites are going to be useful and can find them all in the same place.

Sharing with other educators

Some of the most important curriculum work is sharing with and learning from colleagues. After a lesson template has been completed, teachers can simply tap 'Share,' choose recipients and choose how to share the template. Some place lesson templates in a central digital location for all to download; sometimes the best way is to Airdrop it to a specific colleague.

From there, other teachers can use it for their own purposes: rename to share it themselves, duplicate or create a bespoke lesson for their own use with the template as a starting point.

This way of using templates can be a powerful curriculum tool to support how teachers use these tools in their own classrooms.

To see this process step by step, view this brief video.

Supporting digital assessment with Jamf Teacher

The Jamf Teacher app can also be a powerful tool for assessing students using either an individual teacher's lesson plan or a shared lesson template as outlined above.

Ordinarily, educators would set up a lesson to think about the intention of the lesson and how to get that lesson across with app and website access as well as restrictions to keep students focused on learning.

Let's switch this up a little bit and start to think about how to tailor that solution for assessment.

This type of assessment allows students to use some great learning tools to demonstrate their learning in a range of different ways.

As this is for assessment rather than an in-classroom lesson, teachers can set up what resources they will allow students to use with time limits.

Some tools that teachers could use to set up assessments might include Showbie, Microsoft teams or Google Classroom.

Applications for student assessment through Jamf Teacher

Showbie or other similar tools can be very useful when it comes to assessing students in that pupils can demonstrate work using, perhaps, Clips and FreeForm or Keynote to showcase what they've learned.

Educators can set up a specific student device with these tools, restrictions and time limits.

Perhaps teachers don't want students to use the internet outside of a specific web page. This is simple to set up.

An example: a teacher adds Safari to the tools students may use during a test, but restrict Safari down to the specific page the student requires for testing, such as a testing website.

If a student attempts to go elsewhere, Safari will tell them the site is blocked.

Other restrictions that teachers may or may not want to use for assessments might be to disable spellcheck or autocorrect for a language test, or to limit other Apple Intelligence tools meant to assist with writing.

Having the ability to be define exactly what each device can be used for using Jamf Teacher means that teachers can set these parameters up within their lessons to make sure students are fully on task.

Assessments for individual or groups of students

Many times, an entire class takes the same test at the same time. For that, instructors can simply set the parameters for all students.

However, in order to meet certain students' personalized learning needs, many educators will need to offer different tests for different groups of students-- even if they are all testing on the same subject.

We encourage instructors who are thinking about summative or formative assessment to think about how they might set up those devices to meet a student's individual needs.

How Jamf Teacher saves educators' time

At the end of any session, be it a classroom period or a test period, Jamf School with Jamf Teacher can clear off the restrictions and tools to allow for full student mode.

There is no need for teachers to file Help Desk tickets after sessions, no need for them to individually adjust each iPad and do their own troubleshooting. Instead, it is all automated allowing teachers to focus on teaching.

For an example of one way an educator could use this tool for assessments, view this brief video.

Transforming the classroom and test environments

These are just two examples of the power of Jamf Teacher. Jamf School also has other free apps to solve common classroom or school problems such as Jamf Student and Jamf Parent. We invite you to explore all of these options when choosing an MDM solution for your school.