Mobile Device Management | News

Mooresville Graded SD Uses MDM for Application and File Management

• By Leila Meyer
• 08/07/14

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.