In the classroom
Update – May 3rd 2012
For the last few weeks we have been using BlackBerry Playbooks for our own use and showing schools how they could be used. Kindle Reader is available as a free app – and it does update from inside school proxies. More information including costing etc. can be found here
Today, 17th Feb 2011, one of our school customers told us they had bought 8 Kindles for the use of their secondary pupils.
Everything sounds simple so far. However, in schools in our part of the world the internet is accessed via a proxy server. (The proxy server ensures that unsuitable material is screened before the pupils get to it).
The Kindle does not have any way of accessing the internet via a proxy server AND without a connection the device cannot be registered. So – the pupils currently have a very nice dictionary. Not the result they were hoping for.
Yes – the school could have bought the 3G versions, but then the pupils have an unfiltered access to the internet from inside the school. Defeats the object of the proxy server!
We can take the Kindles back to our office, connect to our link which goes directly to the internet and register the devices. That’s great as a one off, but we’ll need to do that every time the school wants new material on the Kindle.
We can link the Kindles via USB to the PCs in the school – but only after we’ve activated the Kindles. Our understanding is that each PC can only link to one Kindle.
Does Amazon have an answer to this challenge?
Does anyone?
Is a Kindle a useful tool in a school?
What are your thoughts and ideas?
The answer to your query is to set up a transparent proxy in the school that talks to the proxy. That way you still get the benefits of the filtered access but devices such as the kindle that can’t talk via proxies suddenly start to work
Enjoy.
Did you try out Stuart’s sugestion? Did it work? The our school is looking into buying Kindles so I am very interested if you have made any progress on the this?
Looking into this I spotted that you could use Smoothwall to set up an anonymous proxy. It would need a dedicated PC to act as the server with 2 network cards in it. One would be connected to the Schools network and provide proxy cover. The other card would be connected to a Wireless Access point, for the Kindles to access. That said, this PC and WAP would have to follow the Kindles around or the Kindles would have to be brought to that area to update.
I got here after a Teacher has tried using the Kindle App on a Windows PC. It can’t register his account through our proxy…..
It is unbelievable that Amazon have released a product which they must have expected to be used in schools and businesses, many of which use proxy servers for security. So why did they not include provision to enter proxy info in the wifi setup? It’s not rocket science!
People here are talking about setting up a separate server purely for Kindles!! Amazing! Spending hundreds of pounds on a solution for a £50 piece of kit? My school have a few Kindles and certainly can’t afford to have computers sitting there doing nothing but waiting for Kindles to connect!
Amazon should release free firmware to fix the problem.
It’s not that Amazon are don’t know how to add proxies to their own devices.
The Kindle Fire connects through a proxy by default, but I wouldn’t want that one near a school network either.
or… ask your LA to open TCP ports 80 and 443 to Amazon cloud….
apply any other firewall rules to allow direct access from your site (or all schools in your LA – if such rules exist to prevent this usually in your schools)…
problem solved.. no need for any other kit… no need for proxy settings from kindle.