I blogged before about how we have setup our Android tablets so that we can manage them and how we have installed Meraki to do this. I have had questions about what we have done next. There has been an interesting learning curve, it hasn’t been difficult, in fact it’s been rather enjoyable. Someone comes to me asking how they can achieve a certain goal, I then set about trying to accomplish it.
Before the children (or staff) got their hands on the tablets, there were a few things I needed to install. My plan is to blog about each app separately and will add to the list as I find and use more key apps, but we basically needed tools for the following:
- Blogging – WordPress
- Audio recording – Hi-Q MP3 Recorder (free)
- A Flash browser – Flashfox
- A video/still camera but this was already included
These core apps are then installed onto every single tablet. Teachers can install their own later on or ask me to deploy some, but I needed these as a basis. It also helped with staff training for the less confident! These were all installed via Meraki.
I also needed to setup a “homepage” so that the children could get to key links such as Sumdog, the school blogs, Educaiton City or whatever without having to constantly type in the address or remember a login for each one. We have used Airhead to create a page that contains links to the sites that we use. The address for this page is then put into Bit.ly to make it shorter. This is not essential, but when you are typing it in on 100 tablets, every letter will save time! Once we visited the page we wanted, we added it as a shortcut and then put this shortcut on the main page of the tablet.
You can see below that the “blue head” icon is on our home page. This will take the children to a page containing the links that they will need. Incidentally, along the bottom are the other key apps that I mentioned above.
To ensure that we could access the sites that we wanted to use, we have installed FlashFox. This is a Flash-enabled browser which unlike Chrome, will give us the ability to load Purple Mash, Education City and other tools that are still Flash-based.
As I said above, I will blog separately about the different apps we have installed, but this is how our default tablets look at the moment.
