Why should schools partner with parents to ensure there is a good technology experience at home as well as at school? Looking at a sports metaphor, Finish the Drill is a saying that the University of Georgia football coach, Mark Richt, often says. Finishing the Drill with your technology deployments is 
probably something that you’ve not heard before.
I’m going to coin it today for schools to go that extra mile to ensure deployment satisfaction among parents.
Parents are key stakeholders in your schools. It’s important that schools go the extra mile to make sure they have a good technology experience at home and at school.
1) Get better Wi-Fi
Challenge: Let’s face it, most home Wi-Fi is junk. A lot of folks use terrible routers from their ISP that probably only work on 2.4 Ghz.
Solution: Try to educate parents about Wi-Fi technology. Help them understand why they don’t want a free or cheap router. If kids’ bedrooms are far from the router, this will cause their iPad to get subpar data rates and cause media to load slower.
2) Clearly state who is responsible for damage
Challenge: If kids drops their iPads at home, who is responsible? If kids drops their iPad at school, who is responsible? If the iPad is owned by the student and it’s damaged at home, how long is it acceptable for the student to be without an iPad?
Solution: Don’t leave these questions up for discussion. These situations need to have black and white answers.
3) Communicate how backups are being done
Challenge: If you are using apps that backup to iCloud, are the parents aware of how much free space they have from Apple? Do they know how to check to see if it’s working? If you are using apps with third party syncing services (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc), are parents aware of how to login and verify their data is backed up?
Solution: Prompting parents to investigate answers to these questions empowers them with information.
4) Filtering home Internet
Challenge: A popular product for filtering home Internet is OpenDNS Family shield. It works well, it’s free, and it’s easy to configure. The main problem is that it is easy to bypass. I always say that OpenDNS Family Shield is a way to keep honest people honest. It’s the screen door of content filtering.
I’m a big fan of curbi for real content filtering for iPads. It gives the parents excellent control over what kids can and can’t do when at home, but it’s not active when at school.
Solution: curbi has a curbi for schools program where IT folks can input their IP address and Wi-Fi SSID, and parents will receive a special installation of curbi that will deactivate when on campus so that the school’s filtering is in effect. This requires no network changes for schools.
Don’t leave you parents in the dark when it comes to technology. Take time to educate them on new social 
networking apps, new trends and new opportunities. Parents are partnering with schools on their child’s education.
Technology is just another part of that partnership.
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For further reading on this topic:
Social Media: To block or not to block, that is the question.
Schools: Don't simply block Social Media on campus Wi-Fi