Chromebook and printing

[Mark Young]

I am "demoing" a Chromebook and have a question about printing.

First, I did setup my Chrome account and established my "local" printers via the Advanced Settings and I was able to print whether I was logged into Chrome Account, Google account, or my network or not.....

How do you setup printing for your network and students.

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Mark Young
Director of Technology
Santa Rita Union School District
831-443-7200 x 213
www.santaritaschools.org

[Bjorn Behrendt]

Install the Chrome browser onto your print server, log in with a generic school account.   Setup Cloudprint and share with students.

Bjorn Behrendt M.Ed ~ Never Stop Learning

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[Jaymon Lefebvre]

We did this and took it a little further.  We have 20+ school based print servers (all printers were moved to TCPIP over the last few years) so we created an additional "Cloud Print" server.  We added a service account in GAFE, and we autologon the account through a Windows service account and it automatically launches Chrome and signs in (and locks the session).

We are synchronizing groups at the schools using GADS with Google Groups.  We can now delegate school specific printers with school specific groups (school-administrators, school-teachers, etc).  This gives us a very basic approach to giving some reasonable access with reasonable control.

We have run into the Chrome browser crashing issue that causes the whole thing to break, Google has said they are aware and are working on creating a deploy able "Windows service" to help with this.  No confirmation, it was word of mouth, but sounded positive.

On top of this, we are showing our secretaries etc how to share printers directly, so when staff travel from school to school, they can get daily shared access to printers near them.  It prevents us from having to share all 200 printers with every staff and student member all the time.

It works; its not the best architecture in the world but it certainly suffices for now.

Jaymon

[Michelle Russell]

I am interested in knowing more on how this is done in a school that does not have print servers.  I recently posted this same questions to the Chromebook EDU Google+ Community.  The following link was share:

https://support.google.com/cloudprint/  I was told to specifically look at #12 in the first section.  I am still unclear as to how to set it up.  

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Michelle Russell

Technology Integration Coach

Lincoln Middle School

Mount Prospect, IL

Michelle Russell
Technology Integration Coach
Lincoln Middle School

700 W. Lincoln Street

Mount Prospect, IL 60056
(847) 394-7350 x5070
mrus...@d57.org

All e-mail correspondence to and from this address is subject to the Acceptable Use Policies of District 57, which may result in monitoring and disclosure to third parties, including law enforcement.  Any views or opinions presented in this e-mail are solely those of the author and might not represent those of Mount Prospect School District 57.

[Jaymon Lefebvre]

If you lack a print server, then you will really only have two options (AFAIK).

1) user based session print sharing.  The user with a printer attached to their station would have to share the printer via Chrome browser.

2) procure actual "cloud ready printers"

The article you link to is basically suggesting to create a print server using Linux.  This is following the basic same principle as I have done with a Windows print server.

Perhaps the nomenclature of "server" is what is confusing you.  You do not need to have some robust server hardware with a team of Linux/Windows gurus postulating formulas on graphing paper in order to make this work, or even have a server operating system.  What you to need to have a machine that has a dedicated Chrome browser session connected with Chrome running and Cloud Print enabled.  You could buy a $200 netbook running Windows XP to make this work (though the poor thing might be a bit overwhelmed).

The cloud print session through Chrome just needs to remain logged in, so a shared computer does not work (at least it would not work very well).

If you have locally attached printers (USB, LPT) then those printers will be more challenging.  If your printers are network ready, then you just need to have a simple workstation running with the Cloud Print sessions connected, and shared.

cheers!

[Joel Lowsky]

I have had much greater success with Cloud-Capable printers. 

-Joel

Sent from my iPhone

[Michelle Russell]

Thanks so much.  I was thinking actual "server".  The next question I have then is how do you share the printers?  Do you need to create groups of users and then share it via an address? 
Thanks again
Michelle

[Dave L.]

Hi,

Sharing to a group of users works very well, so long as you have an owner/manager of that group login to www.google.com/cloudprint and "accept" the share on behalf of the group.

Best,

Dave

[Ryan Collins]

What I did:

• I created a cloudprint user for each "group" of printers (for me, that's by building, but that may not work for you). 
• I also created a Google Group for each of these groups of printers and put all the staff and students in the building in the group. I made the cloudprint user the owner of the group.
  
• Here's the tricky part. There is a Python cloudprint server. Unfortunately, when it runs, it adds all the printers on the machine into cloudprint. For my initial testing it would give me errors when all 38 printers were on the machine, so I actually divided this up into 5 virtual machines for the different buildings. (I used Linux containers under Ubuntu 12.04, but it's the same idea)
• Each VM has the printers for the group, I started up cloudprint, logged in as the cloudprint user.
• In a browser, log in as the cloudprint user and share the printers with the Google Group.

It needs to be easier, and there is no accounting. All print jobs come from the local user running the cloudprint service. But now, on my Linux box (a re-purposed G4 Xserve, yay! a use for it!) I have 5 instances of cloudprint running.

Anyway, the key piece for me was finding the Python cloudprint, saves me from having to deal with Google Chrome. 

[Michael Cullum]

With our Chromebook pilot, we are also piloting the Hapara Teacher Dashboard - http://hapara.com/ .  With Hapara, there is a Google group created for each class.  We have it connected to our student information system so students are added and removed automatically.  We then have the "server" owner account share the appropriate printers with each class group. It is a pilot, but so far it's worked well.

Cheers,

Mike

Mike Cullum
Director of Instructional Technology
Tukwila School District
4640 South 144th Street
Tukwila, WA 98168


Phone- 206.901.8085

[Bjorn Behrendt]

Mark you should also take a look at http://www.gclassfolders.com. 

Bjorn Behrendt
http://www.EdListen.com/
http://www.AskBj.net/
http://www.VTed.org/