Norfolk Public Schools Implements Mobile Device Management System

Norfolk Public Schools in Virginia has implemented a new system to manage more than 900 mobile devices used by the students and teachers in the district.

In May of this year, the school administrators started looking for a solution to manage the devices without taxing the district's limited IT resources. They wanted something that was easy to use, could scale easily as the district adds more devices, provided timely upgrades and updates, and offered 24/7 support.

After testing AirWatch for a few weeks, administrators decided to adopt the tool, and within a few months the IT team had installed AirWatch on the district's entire fleet of mobile devices for faculty and students. The district has been using AirWatch to monitor devices on the network, provide secure e-mail capabilities, and track mobile assets.

"With AirWatch we're able to easily manage our entire fleet and keep track of where the devices are and how they're being used," said Joakim Jader, directory service engineer for Norfolk Public Schools, in a prepared statement. "Since all of our devices are the property of the school, we need to ensure that they're being used correctly and that we can keep track of inventory. The asset tracking and reporting functions are crucial for our team to report back results and have a complete picture of our mobile investments."

AirWatch employs a multi-tenant architecture for managing hundreds of devices based on user roles, device type, or location groups. It enables administrators to maintain control of the entire device fleet while also enabling individual schools or departments to control their own devices. According to the company, a small team, or even an individual, can manage the entire mobile environment.

Norfolk Public Schools is located in Norfolk, Virginia and operates more than 45 elementary, middle, and high schools serving over 31,000 students and employing over 3,000 teachers.

Further information about AirWatch is available on the company's site.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

Featured

  • abstract smartphone translucent screen displaying AI interface

    Apple Unveils Redesigned Siri AI

    At its recent Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced Siri AI, a redesigned version of its voice assistant that Apple describes in its own announcement as "a profoundly more capable and personal assistant." The update is intended to make Siri more conversational, more context-aware, and more useful across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro.

  • Abstract Network Connection Structure with Glowing Nodes and Lines on Dark Background

    Rubrik, CrowdStrike Announce Expanded Integration to Speed Identity Recovery

    Cybersecurity companies Rubrik and CrowdStrike have announced an expanded identity-security integration designed to move compromised identity environments from threat detection through clean recovery with less manual intervention.

  • Young Woman Programmer Uses Laptop To Analyze Neural Network Models

    AI Leaders Warn of Risks at United Nations Security Council Briefing

    The heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face recently joined AI researcher Yoshua Bengio at the United Nations headquarters in New York to warn the UN Security Council about the security risks of increasingly capable AI.

  • Human Hand Assembling Digital Data Blocks

    Report: AI Impact Relies on Strong Data Foundation

    High-impact AI implementations are more likely to treat data architecture, governance, and operationalization as strategic requirements, according to the 2026 Blueprint report from TDWI.