Read full article here:

Plano ISD manages a 1-to-1 environment with 52,000 Chromebooks. Here, two tech administrators share the five essential tools that make it all work.

With roughly 52,000 students and a slightly larger number of Chromebooks sharing the same classroom spaces, the Plano Independent School District recently joined the ranks of other K-12 organizations investing in large scale 1-to-1 computing environments. In our quest to connect teachers and students to powerful digital tools, content and ideas, the potential advantages of ubiquitous access to technology and the Internet proved too great to ignore. But so are the possible pitfalls too significant to disregard, as the specter of digital distractions accompanies every single device we deploy.

Dubbed the "One2Web" initiative, Plano ISD's 1-to-1 program is addressing the challenge of managing a fleet of enterprise Chromebooks and all their associated resources. Here are the five tools we couldn't do it without.

1) Single Sign-on
Our single sign-on tool,ClassLink, is used by nearly everyone every day. Beyond providing one click access to the products we use to learn, teach and do the work of schooling, we also glean invaluable insights about how often other tools are being used. Simply placing launchable tiles on our users' custom app dashboards serves to promote resources in a way that we haven't been able to achieve before now. Said differently, ClassLink helps us encourage usage because there's nothing that says "click me" quite like a shiny new tile that's pushed out to everyone's personal "my apps" page.