success Stories we move

“The Greater Belfort agglomeration community has decided, along with its 52 municipalities, to regain digital school competence,” explains Mathieu Fournet, chief information officer (CIO) at Grand Belfort.

“The ambition was to drive a project across the whole area with ease. Technical and educational work teams were formed to build the digital school project and ensure its use”, he continues.

“On the one hand, technical teams were mobilized to seek how to standardize a solution spread over 48 schools. A brainstorming on the industrial scale of infrastructure, equipment and security was carried out. On the other hand, educational teams were brought together with all the members necessary to create new uses for their equipment.”

The deployment of idruide solutions took place in several stages. A proof of concept (POC), which aims to show the feasibility of a process, took place in two schools.

For this POC, four suitcases of 15 tablets each were used to test the deployment, the proper functioning of the floating accounts*, and the adoption of the solution by the classroom.

The other step is to deploy the remaining tablets (nearly 600), purchased in August 2020. This step is scheduled for spring 2021 or the start of September 2021. The objective is to put into circulation all the Grand Belfort tablets, 2160 Huawei T3 tablets.

“On the CIO side, the technical management was simple,” Mathieu Fournet explains. “As for the educational part, the project turned out to be too restrictive. Therefore, we have decided to reopen the working groups to deepen the reflection.”

“A problem has arisen regarding the authentication of students, especially in the first grade. Indeed, the students can neither read nor write when they arrive in the first grade. Therefore, a username and password were not a sustainable solution. The proposed solution, which was one of the key elements of the project’s success, was based on authentication by QR code. Teachers loved this feature allowing students to access their personal interface.”

So one of the major challenges for idruide was to ensure the interconnection with the ENT of the schools of Grand Belfort, iTop Education, and to then use these QR Codes generated by the ENT to authenticate on the tablets. Authentication is done in SSO between iTop and idruide.

“On the CIO side, the management of student identities remained secure thanks to the interconnection with our ENT, iTop. idruide has done an advanced job of synchronization with a single QR code to access the platforms. At the same time, we made sure that there were no technical restrictions so that the teacher did not find himself in difficulty in front of his pupils”, the CIO says.

For the Grand Belfort, there was the need to create nominative, ephemeral and floating accounts. Thus, the entire working environment for users is generated during their authentication. The student retrieves their work via the ENT Oze application and they can easily save it on the school’s cloud

The challenge is to take any tablet while still ensuring that it remains operational after its use by another student. For this reason, there is always a full erase when a session is disconnected. So, for example, if a student takes photos with the tablet but does not save them in the ENT’s Oze app, those photos will be deleted upon logout.

* floating account: an account that can be used on several devices from a login by username and password

“Web filtering that processes data both inside and outside the facility is very welcome due to the period of health restrictions related to Covid. It is also perfectly applicable for outings on holiday or extra-curricular equipment”, Mathieu Fournet testifies.

“On the teachers’ side, they were very excited to present their teaching session accompanied by new technological interactions that did not exist before.”

“From the start of the Grand Belfort digital school project, we already had a fairly extensive network allowing us to discuss directly with academy related DANE and DESDEN. It’s important for projects to rely on companies like idruide, which have the network and contacts in scholar academies. It’s particularly true for the first degree, to set up a real relationship around the project, and to set up partnerships with academies and communities and to drive change.”

“The last point is the support afterward. The project group realized that teachers should be strongly supported. The number of teachers training has been increased. We set up a dedicated training room where teachers came to learn, to emulate…”

“And there, when we see the room constantly occupied, we understand that the project was successful, accomplished, because all the users were involved”, the CIO concludes.