Teacher Looking For Setup Advice

[Rigwald]

Hello,

I am researching the possibility of getting sets tablets (probably Nexus 7's) for our classrooms. One of the questions that is coming up is related to apps and getting them to the devices. We have access to a great free cloud management system (Meraki.com which can be used by anybody to manage multiple devices - give is a look), but it will only blast free apps to all the tablets. If there were any paid apps we wanted to use, the service doesn't work.

While doing research on the net, I found that I wasn't the only person in this situation. Most of the recommendations centered around having the same Google Play account for each tablet, thus the devices will automatically sync when the teacher purchases an app. Since I currently don't have a tablet to play with, my question is:

Can the Google Play account be different from the Google Drive / GMail account?

Here's the reason. The plan is to go with Jelly Bean 4.2 and have a user profile for each class period. Each period, a student would log in to his/her user profile and have his/her own Google Drive and access his/her school GMail account. Is it possible to have the Google Play account be different (an account set up by the teacher)? The second part would be to not have a credit card automatically linked to the Google Play account on the tablets, so that students couldn't go out and purchase anything on their own by going into Google Play.

Thank you for your time and your expertise!

 

[Shadowriver]

No, one account can only support one personal data, this includes purchase list, so if you want to use app on multiple accounts you would need to rebuy it for each, thats why i guess Meraki does not support paid apps.

But there way around it, you can login templary all devices to same account, then using Google Play site order them to remotly download paid apps that you need (Google Play can do that), then log out and log in to personal account on all of them. Im not sure how Android DRM works (never used paid app on Android) but i know you can store multiple Google Accounts and switch them, if it works in similar nature like Playstation 3 all you need to do is store that common to all devices Google account in device, but you can be logged in to personal one and paid apps from other account will work.

 

[Rukbat]

1) The reason only free apps get sent to the tablets is that you have to purchase a paid app separately for each tablet. Purchasing the app is actually purchasing a single-computer use license, not the right to use it on any and all devices. (This is true with any computer software.)

2) The Google account is linked to the device, not to the user.

You could possibly pay Google to rewrite Android to meet your needs, but it wouldn't be cheap - unless they do it to bring out a "school" version of the system.