The story of Hartley ISD

The story

Located in the Northwest Texas, Hartley Independent School District is one of the two public schools in Hartley County, providing K-12 level education. The school mascot is “Tigers” and it suits so well with Hartley because the young people are being brought up just like those majestic cats – brilliant and powerful.

The teachers have school-provided iPads that contain educational apps and learning games installed on them to make learning fun and effective. Since the school doesn’t have a solid IT department to handle the device inventory, it is the teachers that manage these devices that are deployed. The main job of an admin is to deploy new learning apps to the teacher’s devices. Larry Franks, the IT admin/Social Studies teacher of Hartley ISD, was looking for an MDM solution that would help him manage and deploy apps to the devices. Though he tried many solutions, he could find one that was simple enough to use. That’s when he found Hexnode MDM. The solution seemed to be easy, and the trial proved that it was! With the simple UI plus a few support calls, Larry was able to implement the solution by himself and manage the devices easily.

For five years, Hartley high school went along with the traditional way of manually adding the apps to each device, that had different usernames and passwords and all that jazz. The first, second and third grade teachers used different set of learning games and educational apps for teaching. Often, teachers requested the best apps that other grades were using. So, the admin needed to add these apps to the devices, or the teachers had to do it themselves. Handling all these devices with a different set of requirements was getting tedious when Larry Franks started looking for an MDM solution.

The app distribution for different grades was simplified beyond expectations with the easiest device group management feature in Hexnode. The devices could be assigned to different groups based on the grades, which enabled the admin to push the apps to their corresponding device groups. The MDM implementation considerably reduced the hours of boring work to just a few minutes. Any apps the teachers required were provided so quickly, which made them very happy. The Hexnode support team helped Larry Franks to implement the solution in the best possible way that suited their requirements.

In a nutshell

Bringing all the iPads which were deployed to the staff under a single console put a big dent in the admin's workload. Teachers had their apps delivered to their devices whenever they demanded it, and no waiting involved this time, which made everyone happy. Hartley ISD is one example of the perfect integration of MDM in education.