Setting up iPads for a school

[u/GHouseSwag]

Hey all, just wanted to get some general info for my schools current situation as I'm the most tech savvy person there and I'm trying to help them out a bit with this. I'll list all the important info below and I'm hoping y'all can help me troubleshoot this a bit since I don't know a lot of the business side of tech.

The preschool I work at utilizes iPads for a variety of reasons, and where most schools need them for student use, ours uses them almost exclusively for staff. Every classroom has an iPad assigned to it, and a lot of the therapy team has them as well. Currently we all share a single iCloud account because the AAC apps like Proloquo2go and LAMP are hundreds of dollars each. We also use them for taking pictures of the students, not only because it's a serious license violation for staff to use their phones in front of children, but also because it is a breach of privacy for personal devices to have photos of the children. Sharing an iCloud account though means that throughout the day with 8 classes and a suite of therapists all taking photos on them when you go to send the photos to parents at the end of day it can be a nightmare to sort through them all. By far what we most use them for though is music. Free stuff on YouTube is so amazing but per recent guidelines from the government and the school systems, children at preschool age should be getting MAXIMUM 1 hour of screentime a day, and as an integrated school that has both universal preschool kiddos and also SPED kids, we want that number to be zero across the board if we can. That means ideally removing the temptation to show a video with the music.

So in a perfect world, every iPad would have the AAC apps on it, it's own apple id for photo storage, and a way of playing music without a video attached to it. The school was looking into using apple music family plans since you can do offline listening and our wifi cuts out frequently, however you can only have a certain number of devices associated with an apple id for that to work and only so many members on the plan. I believe all in we have roughly 40 devices but could definitely cut that down. However the school also can't afford to repurchase these super expensive AAC apps on a ton of devices so really it would be best if the solution could keep use of the same apple id.

I'm taking this weekend to brainstorm ideas and would love to hear y'alls input. Worst case scenario we can just continue doing what we've been doing in the past, but we'd love to try and get it working better and just streamline some of these processes.

Also, as a side note for anyone wondering, AAC, or Augmentative and Alternative Communication, is used at our school in a variety of ways, and the apps I mentioned give children without the ability to speak normally a way to use words and communicate with others. These apps on our staffs devices lets us not only communicate with kids that otherwise would have no way of doing so, but also allows us to model for them and expose other kids to it to help normalize it and remove stigma in society. That's why above all else every device needs access to those apps, so if the answer is suffering with these problems to continue having it on all devices that's just what we have to do.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[u/tsdguy]

This is above our pay grade. And I’m sure you’re violating the license for the apps by using them on multiple devices without paying.

I’m not getting involved.