Parental engagement is always a critical factor enabling positive learning outcomes, but sometimes it can be difficult for parents to gain insight into their children’s internet browsing and online activities. While we associate many positives with 1:1 iPad deployments in schools, parents and caregivers may have concerns about the potential for distraction and exposure to inappropriate content posed by school-issued devices.
The Jamf Parent app, which works in tandem with both Jamf Pro and Jamf School mobile device management (MDM) solutions, allows parents and caregivers to set rules and restrictions on children’s devices in order to keep them safe and focused on the right activities. At the JNUC 2022 session “Parental Engagement in 1:1 iPad Deployments is Crucial to Student Success,” Christina Gremillion, Adam Mahmud and Tracey Joyce of Jamf offered several use cases for the app. These examples, spanning the worlds of both education and healthcare, demonstrate how Jamf Parent works as a flexible and easy-to-use tool for end users that ultimately frees up IT admins to focus on weightier tasks.
Parental engagement
Parents and caregivers all have different standards for how children should use technology and what kind of content they should be free to access, based on highly individualized factors like family values and developmental needs. Jamf Parent makes it simple to take an active role in shaping and enforcing rules and timetables for internet use. The user of the app simply takes their device – Jamf Parent is available for both iOS and Android – and captures a QR code from the student device in order to pair the two. From this point forward, the parent or caregiver can apply and fine-tune various controls to protect the student’s safety and focus.
Some of the actions that end users of Jamf Parent can employ with respect to kids’ devices are:
- Restricting games, apps and social media services, which can be accomplished by using category-based filtering
- Creating custom rules (for example, the student device can be set to only access the Notes app and a spelling app during designated spelling practice time)
- Locking an iOS device into one or several apps
- Managing one or multiple student profiles
Student safety
Giving parents the ability to help shape students’ learning experiences is great for both producing better outcomes and increasing communication about education inside the family. But Jamf Parent can also help to ensure that students don’t use their devices at inappropriate times that could jeopardize their safety. One way this works is through motion-based restrictions. Jamf Parent users can set student devices to lock when they detect that they are moving at a certain speed, so that they aren’t available to cause distractions while driving, cycling or even walking.
Location-based restrictions and custom rules are also handy tools for ensuring safe device use. In addition to setting different rules for home and school (for instance, iMessage isn’t available at school but is always available at home so kids can contact parents in an emergency), Jamf Parent users can designate additional locations with custom rules. A grandparent’s home or community center can have its own rules that facilitate the correct balance of safety, focus and freedom.
Pediatric care
While most Jamf Parent users employ the app in an educational setting, the increasing prevalence of iPad deployments in hospitals has opened up new opportunities to use the app in pediatric cases. Jamf Parent works alongside the Jamf Pro, Healthcare Listener and Jamf Reset solutions to empower parents and caregivers in the hospital setting. With the exception of location-based and school-specific actions, the same functionality is available for school-owned and hospital-owned devices. While parents may not be able to be present at the bedside for the complete duration of a child’s hospital stay, they can take comfort in Jamf Parent’s ability to ensure the appropriate use of technology.
The ability to clear a device’s passcode is one particularly salient feature of Jamf Parent in a healthcare setting. Applications on a hospital-issued iPad may store personal health information, causing security to be a major concern, but at the same time, children have a hard time remembering complex passcodes. If they forget, it’s easy for the Jamf Parent user to reset the code instead of tracking down hospital IT to resume device access.
Device journeys in hospitals tend to be much shorter than those in schools, so making sure that Jamf Parent access to a device is revoked at the correct time is paramount. With Jamf Reset, hospital staff can wipe the device at the end of the patient’s stay and disconnect it from the Jamf Parent user’s device as well.
Setting up for success with MDM
At the end of the session, Christina and Tracey walk the audience through some of the configurations in Jamf Pro and Jamf School that IT admins can make in order to maximize ease of use and empowerment for end users. Watch the entire session to get a firm basis of how to keep parents engaged and students safe with the Jamf Parent app.
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