Dear ES Teachers,
As Elementary School have classroom laptop sets that students have to share among grade or location, login the students as "themselves" to the school laptops requires a high amount of network resources to display their accounts from remote servers (Network Homes). Logging 20+ students at the time can take up to 8~10 minutes to have a whole class logged in.
Because of this, we recommend only having your class log in as themselves only if the work for that time requires the students to save files in their documents. Otherwise, having students log in as the "Student" user if they are only going to visit websites or do some "Google docs" (Google Drive) will allow the class to be ready for this in a much faster time.
If you're required to have student to log in as themselves, please try to do the following to mitigate logging waiting time:
- Have 5 or so students log in at a time, (not the whole class at the same time).
- When working in big Keynote or Pages files that contains lots of pictures, save the files on the "Multimedia (Non Server)" under "Macintosh HD", then after they have finish for the time being, have students move the file from the "Multimedia (Non Server)" to a location in their own "Documents".
We in the IT Office will continue to investigate in ways to improve our performance in "Network Homes" log in times.