Asset Tracking for Teachers in Community and Public Schools

Based in Indiana, Richmond Community Schools says on its website its vision is “to guide students on pathways of learning to a future of limitless possibilities.” The school district includes several locations and buildings, with almost 5,000 students from preschool through 12th grade.

We’ve only been using Asset Panda for four months at Richmond, but so far, we’ve implemented it across the several elementary, two intermediates, and one high school buildings in the city of Richmond. In order to do my job, I need to make sure the computers in my classrooms are up and running, so communicating these needs with our IT department is vital. Before Asset Panda, we used a different ticketing software. It was more cumbersome to enter tickets, and its main problem was that it had (or we didn’t implement) an email notification system. I would also say that its lack of mobile interface was a problem given the hindsight of my current Asset Panda experience.

Now, using both the web- and mobile-based versions of Asset Panda, I submit tickets to our IT staff on a daily basis to cover our building of 550 students, 50 adults (all with school-issued laptops and iPads), and four computer labs. Having a teacher do front-line troubleshooting, including attaching photos of problems means our IT guy has to make fewer trips and can make more efficient trips to the building.

Asset Panda’s mobile device bar scanning feature has been incredibly useful! Because of it, I used a web tool to generate a barcode of the text “Julia E. Test” (the name of our school). Then I printed that bar code in a tiled pattern on letter-size paper, cut the pieces apart, and ran them all through the laminator. Now, I have a stack of laminated barcodes for our building.

When I create a ticket with a mobile device, I pull the laminated building bar code out of my wallet and scan it into the Building Field instead of typing the whole name of the school. I might be somewhat obsessed with barcode scanning. I haven’t tried enlisting anyone else in my barcode obsession. 😉

- Christopher Blinn, Exceptional Education teacher