Mooresville Graded SD Uses MDM for Application and File Management
Mooresville Graded School District
(GSD) in North Carolina has implemented a mobile device management system to
simplify management and distribution of applications and files for the
district's laptops and tablets.
Mooresville GSD manages more than 5,000 mobile devices. Every student in
grades 3-12 has a MacBook Air, as do all of the teachers and staff.
Students in kindergarten through grade two, as well as special needs students,
have iPads. Manually distributing software to all of these devices, which are
located in eight different buildings, was unmanageable for the district's IT
department, so they looked for a solution that would let them install
applications remotely on thousands of devices at the same time.
The district selected FileWave as its
mobile device management solution. According to information on the company's
site, districts can use FileWave for "for app and profile deployment, resetting
passwords, data protection, remote wipe and full inventory reporting" on iOS,
Android, Mac and Windows devices.
"Through FileWave, we're able to reach out and touch 5000 machines at one
time," said Mark Edwards, superintendent of Mooresville GSD, in a prepared
statement. "So it's not the human infrastructure that we're having to invest in.
That's a huge cost-savings in terms of IT and total cost of ownership and what
is going on technically in our department."
As a result of the implementation, the IT department has been able to spend
time on other projects, such as its student-run help desk. Interested students
can earn class credits learning to troubleshoot and repair computer problems for
teachers and classmates.
The district-wide 1-to-1 initiative has also enabled the district to shift to
personalized and project-based learning using all digital resources. "So we
moved to provide every student with a device, we moved to all digital resources
and we've created an environment where personalized learning, project-based
learning, interactivity and collaboration are the daily norm for all students
and staff," said Edwards in a prepared statement.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].