Setting up a cartful or two of iPads
Pine Glen was very fortunate to receive 60 iPads this school year on two Bretford Power Sync Carts! The Carts will make management of the iPads easier, because they provide a central place to store, recharge, and sync the iPads to the iTunes library on my laptop. It was quite a bit of work to get the iPads ready to go for the students. I made a few mistakes a long the way, but here’s the most efficient method that I’ve found for getting all the iPads up and running in a uniform manner, particularly if you already have a bunch of free apps and apps purchased from the Volume Purchase Program:
1. Unbox all the iPads and place them in the cart.
2. Connect the cart to a laptop. Go through the process of registering each iPad and getting them started syncing your apps
3. Rename one iPad and disconnect it from the cart. This will be your primary source iPad for the initial setup.
4. Send the iPad cart off to your super-nice librarian who will barcode them all and tag them by whatever naming convention you decide on. We numbered each device and assigned them a color depending on the cart they were in.
5. Move apps to appropriate pages and folders. Sign in to any accounts you want to set up on all iPads. Set up wi-fi.
6. Reconnect the iPad to your laptop. Encrypt iPad backup! This saves all your passwords so you won’t have to type them in on each device!
7. Pull the connections for each iPad on your cart and then connect the cart to your laptop.
8. Plug one iPad in on the cart. Right click on the iPad in iTunes, and choose to “Restore from Backup.” Choose the backup for your encrypted primary iPad, type in the password, and let it do its thing. Note that this is much faster than using the Restore button on the main screen and would have saved me tons of time if I’d found it sooner.
9. Rename the iPad to fit your naming convention.
10. Repeat steps 8 and 9 for each iPad until done.
11. Change the wallpaper on each iPad to fit your naming convention. I’m trying to build as much redundancy into the system as possible so the children can always locate the iPad they previously used. You can access all of the wallpapers I created here, if you don’t feel like spending an hour or so creating them like I did.
a. Visit that page in Safari http://bit.ly/pgipadwp
b. Find the wallpaper you want, tap and hold a couple seconds to save the image
c. Go to the Photos app, choose the image, hit the arrow, select “Set as wallpaper.” Set it as both.
12. Collapse. Smile. Get them into the kids’ hands.
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#6 written by tievoli 7 months ago
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Huge timesaver is to go into Terminal (on Mac) and set your machine to activation mode. Plug cart in and all iPads will activate at once. Saves the trouble of touching each one to get it going.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4335
Second suggestion- if you have multiple carts, set each one up with a different iTunes account. I made the mistake of using a generic account for all, now the schools have to wipe them and start from scratch with their own accounts. If i had done it right the first time, they would have just had to add to or delete the apps I started them with.
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#9 written by callahan 7 months ago
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#10 written by Erica 7 months ago
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#12 written by John Dyers 3 months ago
This is terrific. Thanks.
One of my colleagues used the procedure you suggested but we did it on some carts we got from Datamation Systems. (www.ipadcarts.com)When we rolled out our first pilot of iPads, we bought one of the carts Apple provided, which is very nicely designed. But, as we started to get more iPads, we realized we do not sync every cart and every iPad every day (or even much more often than once or twice a semester). So we decided to find a syncing method we could use in a central location. This not only saved us a huge amount of money, but it let us control our iTunes and content better.
Anyway, now we are putting charging carts and cabinets in each room, but sharing the syncing.
The procedures you described were really helpful and worked just fine with this strategy.
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#13 written by Rich P 3 months ago
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Dan,
GREAT job! Just went through the same process last week-your instructions are clear and easy. Did you set up VPP too? We set it up 3 tier (1 overall VPP [with its own Apple ID and email], one facility manager [same person-me and with its own Apple ID and email] and one Apple id for our pilot cart) as we envision our IPad pilot increasing dramatically over the next couple of years to throughout elementary. The only tip I would add is putting settings and other items into an “admin” folder buried on the last page.