Best practices for non-school owned devices (BYOD)

Impero Classroom supports non-school-owned devices or home devices (also know as BYOD or Bring Your Own Device). While school-owned devices can enforce software and settings preventing students from making changes that could impact Classroom, home-owned devices generally work differently.

This article covers some of the recommendations and best practices when deploying our software to home-owned devices to ensure the correct running of the system.

Standard Users

When users are added to Windows 10 based home devices, by default these users are called "Administrators". Administrators have full access to all software settings on the computer and can make any changes they like. If a student has our software installed then they have the access rights to uninstall or remove the software. They can also perform any number of other actions such as deleting files or stopping services that would also stop our software from working.

Impero recommends that student users are added to home devices as "standard users". Standard users can perform many tasks classed under "usage" such as run applications, browser the internet, check emails etc. However standard users are prevented from making any system level changes such as removing software.

Standard users can sometimes be referred to as local user accounts. A guide provided by Microsoft explaining how to set up user accounts can be found below.
Create a local user or administrator account in Windows 10

Firewalls and Content Filters

Firewalls and content filters are used for protection and defense against internet-based threats. Sometimes these are software-based and installed on your computer, such as Windows Firewall. They can also be external services provided by companies such as your internet service provider who may have enabled a safe content filter so that inappropriate content cannot be accessible on the internet by any device in the household.

If after Installing Impero your firewall and/or content filter is sending you alerts about something called backdrop, then this will just be our device client software trying to communicate with the Impero cloud system. These requests should be approved to allow the software to function and once you have approved them the system should operate correctly and not warn you again.

Common alerts will refer to the following which should be allowed.

backdrop.cloud

iothub.azure-devices.net
(or variations of the above)

For a complete breakdown of requirements and why they are needed, please refer to the article below
Impero Classroom - Minimum Requirements Explained

Screen Share Permissions

Screen share permissions allow for the device to connect to Classroom and display the screen content to the teacher in real-time. Depending on the type of device used, the student will need to accept a screen share permission. Until that is accepted the device will not connect and show up in class.

The guide below explains screen share permissions in detail for all available operating systems

Impero Classroom - How do screen share permissions work?