If some of you were lucky, you may have received a brand new laptop this holiday season. I was in this situation, and looking for ways to use my brand new machine. “Of course, I’ll use it for school!” This is a very reasonable thought and Penns Valley has a very lax Bring Your Own Device policy so you can essentially use whatever device you want, as long as it isn’t a distraction issue and you aren’t using it to do anything against school policy. There is, however, a huge problem.

You Can’t Print From A Home Laptop.

When I say that Penns Valley has a lax BYOD policy, I actually mean that Penns Valley has no BYOD policy. The school will allow you to use your own laptop as much as you want, but there is no IT framework to support this. The most glaring issue with this is, of course, that you cannot print. In past years, all the printers in the school were simply on the network like any other printer. It was a little more difficult, but you could print from them with a bit of work and technical knowledge. Now you cannot print from a home laptop without a special setup from IT, because the only way to access the large printers is through Follow Me Printing, which relies on being specially installed by the IT staff on computers administered by the school. Of course, you can always send an email down to Mrs. Weaver to have something printed, but that is always a bit of a chore.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could just print from your computer? The school could easily do this by simply exposing the large printers on the network. One might think this would open up the printers to “pranks”, but it isn’t any worse than what someone could do with Follow Me Printing.

So, this is an appeal to the school: Let us print!