Getting results with strategy and student support
Since its inception in 1979, Catholic College Wodonga (part of Sandhurst Catholic Education) has continually strived to build a sense of belonging, involvement and initiative within its students. The co-educational school, which serves more than 1,170 students ranging from seven to 12, has found great success through developing and fostering a strong community focus. This has led to consistent growth over the last two years. As one of the leading academic facilities in the area, Catholic College Wodonga is always striving to improve - to offer the best they can for their students as they prepare for the future. A significant piece of this puzzle is technology. Unfortunately, a roadblock halted their progression.
Understanding the need for change
Catholic College Wodonga knew it was essential to continue providing Apple devices to their students, but a climbing enrollment presented new challenges for ICT. “We have more than 1,800 devices across our school, so their management is quite a task,” said Hayden Middlin, ICT manager, Catholic College Wodonga.
At the time, the school had a painful deployment and management process – one that wasn’t sustainable for a growing population of students. “The challenge was particularly acute when we were rolling out new devices at the start of a school year,” Middlin said, explaining that they previously installed preconfigured standard images onto each device, one at a time, before they were issued to students.
Aside from the countless hours of work from the ICT team, Middlin said the method didn’t provide the students with any problem solving skills. “We looked at how we could increase our student’s digital resilience,” Middlin said. “We wanted to improve their technical skills, not only while at school, but also for all of their technical activities away from school.” So they shifted gears and involved the students.
Discovering the large deployment solution
As a Jamf customer for the last 10 years, Catholic College Wodonga was familiar with the capabilities of the product. “We had been using Jamf Pro for asset management and device maintenance tasks and were keen to determine how it might streamline the rollout of new devices,” Middlin said. Determined to shorten the time spent on deploying devices, they began using the product in a new way. Working with Jamf, the ICT team linked the school’s existing Jamf Pro Server with Apple’s Device Enrollment Program (DEP), which gave them the ability to make a detailed record of each device in a central database.
“We wanted to deploy new 11-inch Apple MacBook Air devices to our year nine students who would be going into year 10 in 2017,” Middlin said. “And we wanted to complete this process before Christmas school break, as this would give students time to get used to their new devices in a relaxed timeframe.” The school knew that deploying each device one by one wasn’t an option. In order to meet their deadline, they had a new solution – the students would help.
Each student received a MacBook Air in a new, shrink-wrapped box. They opened their own device, and with guidance, created an admin account based on their school Microsoft Active Directory credentials. After connecting to the school’s wireless network, the real fun began.
“At this point they were able to connect to Jamf Self Service and select the applications they wanted to install on their new device,” Middlin said. “We didn’t want to give the students fully pre-imaged notebooks. We wanted them to improve their IT skills, while also receiving more of a sense of ownership of the device.” The students, and the ICT team, were happy. Middlin said the Jamf-based deployment and management platform reduced the time the ICT spent on the rollout by between 60 and 80 percent. He said, “What used to take us days can now be completed in just hours.”
Enjoying the benefits
Catholic College Wodonga students now log into Jamf Self Service whenever they have to to get the apps needed for their studies. “It has effectively become our internal app store,” Middlin said. “It has transformed the way that devices are used and managed.” Each MacBook Air has just 128GB of storage, so students must proactively manage their active apps through Jamf Self Service to ensure adequate space is always available on their device. It teaches students valuable lessons, while saving the school valuable time.
As an additional benefit to the new process, the ICT team spends far less time troubleshooting issues. They said knowing the status of their devices is the key to more strategic work. Also responsible for processing all warranty repairs, Middlin said they’re glad to be working on the best product available. “Apple devices are more reliable,” he said. “The repair and warranty service is great, and they are easy to manage.” They continue to use Jamf Pro to deploy applications in the background, update operating systems and apply security patches to all devices across the school.
“I do not think that trying to do this type of rollout in a managed way would have been possible without Jamf Pro doing the hard work in the background,” Middlin said. “We would certainly not be able to manage our 1,800 devices across the school without Jamf, and management would be a nightmare.”
