Magic Mice and Wireless Keyboards

Hard one. I assume they are all school owned? I think you may have to set up some type of check in and checking out process for students?

Hey Lisa,

We stickered all of our iMacs, their wireless mouse and their keyboard with a number so that each was a complete set. We then bought some simple storage - a wire dish rack for the keyboards and a few small compartmentalised boxes for the mice - these were labelled with the corresponding numbers too. At the start of each session the learners collected their mouse and keyboard from a desk at the front (where they were kept at all times when not in use) and pupils were responsible for retuning them at the end. Generally speaking no one was allowed to leave until all had been returned as part of the 'pack up' routine ('Time to pack up, log off, mice and keyboards back then go and stand beside your Mac' - then I could quickly check from a glance that all the rack and compartments were filled). I think we used someones Demo to make all the number labels - five per Mac (one each for the Mac, the keyboard, mouse, keyboard rack and mouse storage).

We also printed on A4 the number of each machine to display clearly above it and had a table for each class which we filled in at the start of the year with which pupil was using which machine, they were expected to use the same machine every time they visited the Mac suite. This allowed us to keep track of exactly who had used which machine so if anything went wrong we could have a reasonable chance of finding who might be responsible. It wasn't perfect but better to have ten users across ten classes tied to one machine than trying to investigate from a pool of 200+ pupils.

We kept all the cables locked in the teacher desk and only gave them out when things needed charged which wasn't that often as I also identified a time where each month or so I could ask the pupils to leave either the mouse or the charger plugged in at the end of the lesson (usually when I could leave them over lunch or an empty period) so that the next bunch to use them would start with the keyboard and mouse in front of them but first thing they did was unplug and return the cable.