Practical guides, product notes, and field-tested ideas for K-12 technology teams.
A practical checklist for getting laptops, hotspots, keys, and accounts back when a staff member leaves, and how to make sure nothing walks away.
A month of posts about why this exists and how it works. Here is where it is headed, and an honest word about being early.
Edventory is built by someone with a day job, and that constraint is part of why it works the way it does.
The repair or replace call is one of the most common in K-12 IT, and most of us make it on instinct. It should be made on numbers.
I have run technology in banking, healthcare, and at IBM. Schools are harder in ways the enterprise world does not prepare you for.
A platform holding school data has to take accounts and access seriously. Here is how Edventory does it, without the jargon.
The dangerous tasks are not the daily ones. They are the annual ones you forget about until they are late.
A tool that emails you about everything trains you to ignore all of it. Edventory tries to earn each message it sends.
A phishing simulation is not a trap to catch people failing. It is a teaching moment, and the design should reflect that.
I manage two districts, so Edventory was built from the start to handle many at once without mixing their data.
I ran the popular tools for years. Here is honestly what was missing, and why I ended up building my own.
How to track every software license and renewal date in one place, so a K-12 technology budget covers the full cost of running technology, not just the hardware.
Every Chromebook has an Auto Update Expiration date. Here is what AUE means, how to find it, and how to turn expiring devices into a replacement budget instead of a surprise.
Edventory pulls the roster you already maintain in Google instead of asking you to build and babysit a second copy.
Device collection is an inventory audit in disguise. Treat it like one and the summer gets a lot quieter.
September is the hardest month in K-12 technology. Here is how I try to make it survivable.
Loaner pools exist so that when a device breaks, the student keeps working while the repair happens behind the scenes.
Edventory is built by someone who uses it daily to run real districts. That is the whole difference, and it is where it is headed.
A flexible report builder and clean branded invoicing round out Edventory, because the data is only useful if you can pull it and act on it.
Staff leave and facilities booking are not normal inventory features. They are in Edventory because I wear all those hats too.
Backup and retention is a cornerstone of how Edventory is built. Nightly snapshots, redundancy, and the ability to restore a single district.
Phishing simulation seems like a strange thing to put in an inventory platform, until you realize I already had the infrastructure and a KnowBe4 bill.
Edventory started as a deliberately data-agnostic platform. Here is how that evolved, and how I think about student data privacy.
Repairs, device ages, Chromebook AUE dates, and license renewals combined into a year-over-year technology budget a school board can follow line by line.
The help desk in Edventory is versatile underneath and dead simple on top, including filing a ticket by replying to an email.
K-12 technology runs on shrinking budgets, board approval, and voter approval, while enrollment declines. That context shapes everything.
A short note for the Fourth of July. Enjoy the holiday, stay safe, and a quick thought on why schools matter to all of it.
Edventory grew one module at a time. There is no trendy framework underneath, and that has been a feature, not a bug.
One QR code does two completely different jobs depending on who scans it. That is the feature I am proudest of.
The core of Edventory is simple. Know what every device is doing, and know what it costs you as it happens.
A 600 student district and a 30,000 student district are fighting the same fires. The only thing that changes is how many of them.
I have worked in technology since 2001, and Edventory came out of my own daily work running IT for two school districts.