A New Venture Into Mobile Learning

I'm in the middle of a new venture at school. We are the proud new owners of an iPad cart with 30 iPads for students to use. It has been a process setting them up. Before beginning the process of setting up the iPads, I did some research online and came across some helpful resources including: iPad deployment: Backup/restore deployment strategy and steps and http://help.apple.com/configurator/mac/1.0/.

Here are some things that I have learned are important.

1. Set up an email account dedicated to the maintenance of the iPads. You will need this to create an Apple ID to sync the ipads with iTunes. 
2. Set up an email account dedicated to the maintenance of the volume purchase plan if you intend to purchase apps from the iTunes store. In order to apply to purchase apps through the volume purchase plan, you'll need this email address to create yet another Apple ID.
3. Download Configurator on an Apple machine that can be dedicated to syncing the iPads. This doesn't mean that the machine can't be used for other purposes.
4. Wait to label each iPad/iPad case until AFTER you set them up initially. When syncing the first time, the iPads are NOT numbered according to the slot they are in on the cart. I didn't know this until after I had already labeled each iPad and wrote the corresponding number on the case. This meant that, after the initial setup, I had to take all of the covers off, put them on the correct iPad, and put them back in numerical order.

I'm sure there are other things that I will be learning as I keep working through this process. I'll update this post with other tips and ideas that seem important as I come across them.