Printing with 1:1 Chromebooks?

[Lee, Matt]

Investigating Chromebook printing solutions...and I'm reading a lot of negatives regarding the reliability of the Google Cloud Print connector. Curious if anyone is using it at scale with any success?

We are also concerned about the inevitability of students printing, whether accidentally or maliciously, tons and tons of pages. I see products like Papercut or PrinterOn that supposedly integrate with Cloud Print to disable printers at night and enforce quotas on users/groups.

Our current solution has been to save to Google Drive and visit a supervised computer lab/library to review and print your document...but the directive with our 1:1 implementation is to provide managed printing from Chromebooks.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions/anecdotes you can provide!

----------------
Matt Lee | Technology Systems Administrator | Cleburne ISD, TX

Office: 817.202.1146 | Fax: 817.202.1462

[Bjorn Behrendt]

Avoid printing if at all possible.   We do the library computer to print too and I think it has worked.  Basically I tell teachers that if they want something printed from a student then they will need to be the ones to print.   Teachers have to print to the photocopy machines using secure print, so there is no managed classroom printers.

I do have one English teacher who plans to personally buy and maintain their own classroom printer and wanted something compatible with Chromebooks.    I would up suggesting one of the HP printers because chromebooks can connect to them using a usb cable and print.

I am even considering changing out our library printer for one of the HP compatible ones.   Basically we are using the HP Print for Chrome.

Bjorn Behrendt M.Ed ~ Never Stop Learning

   b...@edlisten.com | Blog: Edlisten.com

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[Art Hughes]

All of our students use cloudprint to print. We have a print server in each building running the cloudprint connector. Students are in groups in our LDAP that are synced to google apps using GADS. The printers are then shared with the groups. We tried sharing the printers to the devices, but we could not get that to work (this was 2 years ago though, so it may work better now). We restart the cloudprint connector service once a week, and this seems to keep it running. This is simple enough to do (just click stop, then start on the server), so we just do it every Monday morning. We occasionally will need to restart it during the week, but it's fairly rare. If a teacher informs us of a large job, we can delete it from the print queue like any other job. We're just using windows server for our print servers, no papercut or anything else. It's not perfect, but it works well enough. Abuse of printing is handled by the teachers as a disciplinary action.

Implementation notes:
we have a "cloudprint" google account for each building. That account signs into chrome on each print server. That user then can add all of the print queues on that server to cloudprint and share them. That user is also the owner of each student printing group for the building - this prevents each student from having to "accept" the printer share individually, as printers shared by the group owner are automatically available to members of the group.

[Keith Mack]

I’d also try to wean everyone off of printing, but the reality is that it will take a while.

 

We’ve had good experience with Google Cloud print. All students in our K-8 school can print to library and their grade level printers in each classroom. I can provide details on how we set this up for anyone interested. All printers have static IPs.

 

It’s been solid except for a “bump” in December when it was down for about a week. I don’t think it was anything on our end, but hard to track down. Google tech will pretty much only tell you that Cloud Print is a (ahem) beta app and not fully supported and then send you to the FAQ page.

 

One thing I advise all teachers is to embrace Google Classroom. Assign ALL assignments in classroom by attaching a doc for each student to get own copy. Then teacher has complete access to monitor progress and then print anything via classroom dashboard. School provides each teacher with either PC or Mac notebook. Reality in our school is that I’m the only teacher using classroom full time, but got a couple teachers on board right at end of year. Next year will be a few more full timers. So we’ll get there.

 

Other thing is to teach and reteach what to do when something doesn’t print. We had a couple classrooms with 200+ docs in queue when down in Dec. Excellent teachable moment! The only way to delete queue is one print job at a time (sigh, repeat after me…it’s an unsupported beta app).

 

Thanks,

 

Keith Mack

Tech Specialist

Jacoby Creek School
Bayside CA

[Bernie McCormick]

We run it as a service on our last on-premise AD handshake, and restart the service at 4am and 8pm.  Seems to run pretty well, but I have absolutely blitzkrieged about stopping printing. +1 on using Classroom to stop killing trees.

Bernie McCormick Director of Technology Mary McDowell Friends School 23 Sidney Place Brooklyn, NY 11201 T 718-625-3939

[Bob Clay, 619-567-3237]

IMHO, do not allow students to print.  1:1 is a paradigm shift.  Make the printing change part of that shift.