iCloud and Schools

Bradley Chambers thinks iCloud should have better support for the education market:

Now you may be saying that personal iCloud accounts is just the way it is and get over it. In the iOS 3 and 4 days, we said the same thing about managing iPads. Apple has DRAMATICALLY improved this process. In iOS 5, they released a lot of MDM (Mobile Device Management) APIs and they also released Apple Configurator. Apple Configurator made it a lot easier to work with the Volume Purchase Program. It also dramatically improved the work flow for loading apps and settings onto iPads in bulk. This was a breath of fresh air for schools with even a few iPads.

Apple has made serious improvements to volume purchase programs and device management in the past few years, so I guess that with iCloud, they simply need more time. Still, this has been a real concern for educators and IT since last June.

Apple is thinking about iCloud in education, but they haven’t made significant improvements recently. For The iPad Project, Fraser Speirs noted how iTunes U supported iCloud sync for notes, albeit with standard individual Apple ID management.

Primarily, this is another nail in the coffin of the “shared Apple ID” deployment model that we’ve been using up until now. If you have multiple pupils and devices all using the same Apple ID, you’re going to get sync issues all over the place. Pupils’ notes will intermingle, their read/unread statuses will get mixed up. It will be a hot mess.