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Assigning devices to locations
Where it is, and who has it
A device belongs to a site (the school or building) and, within it, to a location: a room, a cart, a closet, a lab, an office. It can also be held by a person. Those are two separate facts, so a district that is not 1:1 runs its whole fleet by location, a 1:1 district keeps its carts, labs and loaner shelves beside the devices each student holds, and a Chromebook checked out to a student can still belong to Cart 3. On a device's page they are two sections: Where is it (site and location, with a Move button) and Who has it (the holder, with Check out and Check in). The Chromebook asset management page has the overview of locations, check-out and labels together.
Where locations come from
Nobody has to type them up front. A location is created at its site the first time someone names it:
- on a device's form or its Move dialog: choose the site, then pick a location or type a new name and choose Add “…”;
- at Check in: Where it goes picks or adds a location at the device's site (a device with no site keeps the room as text until it has one);
- in an import: the Room column (also Room Number, Room Name, Classroom, Cart, Area, Space) is matched to a location at the row's site, ignoring case, or created there. A column named Location is the site, as in an Incident IQ export, unless the file has no other site column;
- in the scanner's Place mode and on a bulk Move to location;
- from Google Admin: a device's annotated location names a site (“Lincoln High School”, or its code), a site and a room (“Lincoln High School - Room 204”, “LHS / Cart 3”), or a room alone (“Cart 3”), which goes to a location at the device's own site, or at your only site if you have one. See Chromebooks from Google Admin.
Administrators manage them under Admin › Sites: each site's Locations button lists its rooms, carts, closets, labs and offices, with Add, a rename and kind change per row, and Delete, which asks where the devices go (another location, or the site alone). Names are unique per site, ignoring case. Each location has its own page listing its devices.
Moving devices
- One: Move on the device's page: choose the site and the location (or type a new one). Leave the location empty to take the device out of its location, keeping the site. Who holds it is untouched.
- Many: on Assets, tick devices in the checkbox column, then Move to location in the bar at the bottom; up to 500 at a time. Filter the list first to find them (a site, a type, a status, or a search for the old room).
- By scanning: in the scanner (Assets › Scan, or s) choose Place, pick the site and the location once, then scan devices back to back; each one is moved as it is read and listed under the box. Check out mode does the same for a person.
Every move is in the device's history, with where it came from and where it went.
Finding devices by location
The Assets list has a Where column (site · location, the location linked to its page), a Location filter beside the Site filter (including No location), and Group by location, which shows the page grouped under each site and location with devices that have no location last. The counts by site are on the Reports page under By Site; filtering the Assets list by Site shows that site's total in the page count. Ask Beacon answers questions such as “how many Chromebooks are at Lincoln High School”.
Rooms that were text
Before locations, a device's room was free text. When locations arrived, every distinct room per site became a location and its devices were linked to it; the text itself was not changed. A device with no site keeps its room as text until someone gives it a site, at which point the text becomes a location there.