Sunday, August 25, 2013

Setting up the new iPads

I will not forget July 9 2013.  That was the "birth" of my iPad journey.  That was the day that I received the shipment of the 60 iPads, 2 carts, 8 MacBooks, 2 Apple TVs and many connectors and cables and adaptors.  I immediately set to work.  For the next two days I unpacked all of the boxes and put everything in its proper place.  This took me about five hours.  We found a secure store room and locked the iPad carts and cabled them to the cabinets in the store room.

Two Big Hurdles

Now that the iPads were charged and organized they had to be set up electronically.  This process required decision making power that was outside my authority.  So here were the two big questions:  How were the iPads going to be initialized and secondly, how were new apps going to be put onto the iPads.  In the original proposal I wrote to my dean, I built in 50 dollars per iPad worth of paid for apps.

Apple has what it calls the Volume Purchase Program.  Many of the app writing companies have an agreement with Apple to sell 20 or more "copies" of their app at half price.   Apple sells vouchers that are redeemed through a special website.  It is best explained here.  But in a nutshell, after the voucher is redeemed for a certain number of copies of a certain app, the purchaser receives a set of codes that can then be used to purchase the apps from the iTunes store.  The vouchers must be used at the volume purchase website and  not iTunes. Also, not just anyone can redeem the voucher.  Each school must have a designated person with a school email and password that allows the purchaser to redeem the voucher.  This person is called the "facilitator."  So my campus had to decide that I was going to be one of the facilitators.  But we also needed what Apple calls a "project manager."  At our meeting we decided who we wanted the project manager to be.  All this person does is acknowledge who are the facilitators.  We opted to choose and academic dean to be our project manager rather than a person from the business/purchasing side.  We believe that it is the academic folks that should be making the top decisions.  Apple has a real nice webinar that explains this real clearly.  I watched it a couple of times.


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