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Step by step process for setting up an iPad cart

I’m cross-posting this from my work blog. Original here.

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 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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7 Responses to “Step by step process for setting up an iPad cart”

1. Tech Chick Tips » Post Topic » 0092 TCT – Chock Full of Goodness Says:
   January 13th, 2012 at 5:47 pm

   [...] Setting Up an iPad Cart dancallahan.net/2011/09/19/step-by-step-process-for-setting-up-an-ipad-cart [...]

2. John Says:
   January 29th, 2012 at 12:59 pm

   We did the same procedure with our Datamation Carts. One suggestion: if you do not need to sync every iPad every day, you might consider using security carts in each classroom and sharing a syncing resource, either in a central location (to which the iPads can be rolled) or in a portable form (such as a syncing case). It can save a lot of money and give a lot more control to content. See: www.ipadcarts.com/solutions/DS-IP-SYNCCharge.htm

3. Dan Says:
   January 30th, 2012 at 8:19 pm

   Yeah, I sync all of the iPads on my laptop, so I just roll the cart down to my lab if they need a lot of work or bring my laptop to the cart if it’s going to be a quick job.

4. Lavenderwings Says:
   February 18th, 2012 at 1:27 am

   Any suggestions for settings? Such as, do you have it set to auto download apps? I thought I would be able to disable the ability to add and delete apps, but then realized I couldn’t even add or delete apps when plugged into the MacBook. Im trying to determine all of the nitty gritty before creating my seed iPod and iPad to be used for all of my cloning. Thanks for the dropbox numbers, definitely saved time.

5. Dan Says:
   February 18th, 2012 at 9:39 am

   I don’t have them set to auto download. Other teachers have access to that account for free apps, and I don’t want all their stuff showing up on my student devices.

   My settings are honestly very loose, since I’m in an elementary school and I trust the kids to not mess things up too much. They don’t have the itunes password, so I’m not worried about them buying new apps, and sometimes I’ve needed to delete apps in a hurry when running out of space while making movies in iMovie.

6. Dan Mayhew Says:
   April 2nd, 2012 at 11:00 am

   We have been using the new Apple Configurator with several 16 port syncing and charging hubs from www.ipadcarts.com. That way, we can control all the content but share the syncing resources.

   The Configurator makes it much easier and we have found that it will work perfectly fine with more than 30 iPads at a time.

7. Dan Says:
   April 2nd, 2012 at 12:26 pm

   Thanks for the tip. I’ve not yet had time to play around with the new Configurator tool yet.

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