By Jay Palter | March 21, 2025
Educational institutions at every level, from K-12 through higher ed, are looking for creative solutions to serve more diverse learners and environments. As cloud-based technology becomes increasingly important in education, many schools are naturally looking to the latest generation of mobile technology to do that.
Many edtech leaders probably foresee what happens next: growing your inventory of laptops, tablets, and other devices inevitably leads to new management headaches and strained resources. So the hunt is on for new strategies to support remote and diverse learners and the management tools to help keep IT teams afloat.
Intelligent lockers are one of the leading solutions many support teams are turning to.
How Do Intelligent Lockers Work in Education?
At their core, intelligent lockers are still lockers. However, they’re really designed to support device management, not just storage. They have many uses in education, but when it comes to device management, they can facilitate contactless pickups and returns, secure valuable equipment while idle, and eliminate many of the frustrations of manual device management thanks to integrated tracking and monitoring tools. In other words, the integration of smart technology has turned them into resources to support IT and educational operations.
Essential Intelligent Locker Features for Schools & Universities
Intelligent lockers are a platform that can be customized to benefit many different public and private sector organizations. However, many of their features are of particular relevance to educational institutions.
Secure Digital Access Controls for School Devices
You don’t need to rely on personnel or even simple, physical keys to secure your devices when you use intelligent lockers. Depending on your organization's security needs, you can use more comprehensive access controls. Some more commonly supported access control methods include RFID fobs, PIN codes for lower-security settings, biometrics, or swipe card access, which can often integrate with your institution’s existing ID badge system.
24/7 Student Access to Laptops & Tablets
Because transactions are automated, students can sign out a device whenever they need one, not just when support staff are on duty. This also means you can set up lockers as distribution points around campuses that you normally wouldn’t be able to staff. For example, a college could provide a smaller locker in each dorm in case a student needs urgent access during off hours.
Automated Device Tracking & Notifications for IT Teams
Intelligent lockers can function offline and unattended when needed, but their real power comes from cloud-based management. Networked lockers allow users to log information about devices and interact with management teams when needed. A student with a faulty laptop can return it to an unattended locker and log the error code, and the laptop will instantly be locked out of rotation. The management system will notify your IT break/fix team to retrieve it for troubleshooting.
Lockers Built-in Charging for School Laptops & Tablets
Modern intelligent lockers also come with integrated charging ports for all kinds of devices. Many provide integrated power and allow you to insert the charging blocks and cables you need for a particular inventory.
Asset Tracking & Surveillance for Education Technology
Monitoring devices at rest may not seem important, but it adds a valuable layer of control. You can verify that users take and return the correct devices using wired USB connections or RFID tags. If your institution is concerned about student accountability, this helps you verify that students are accessing the devices they claim to access. Instructors will know they don’t have an excuse for missing a device, and your IT team will always know who has which device signed out and when they’re due for return.
See Intelligent Lockers in Action for Schools & Universities
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Why Use Intelligent Lockers for Educational Device Management?
Broadly, intelligent lockers automate most of the tedious manual management tasks that can monopolize staff time. While that is clearly valuable, it is worth highlighting some of the specific ways they benefit workflows and concerns most commonly found at educational institutions.
Expanding Device Access for Students with Flexible Schedules
Intelligent lockers can play a crucial role in promoting equitable access to learning technology, particularly for students whose families have non-traditional schedules. Many family members don’t have the flexibility to pick up or drop off materials for their students during standard school hours. Intelligent lockers provide a flexible solution for distributing devices and other classroom materials outside the typical school day.
Imagine a parent who works a late shift and cannot take their child to the library during the day. If your school has intelligent lockers accessible to families during off hours, that student can pick up a reserved textbook or laptop at a time that aligns with their family's schedule.
How Intelligent lockers Prevent Device Theft & Loss in Schools
Budgets at most educational institutions are already tight and getting tighter. The last thing you need is for your procurement budget for expensive assets like laptops to grow. Traditional device storage methods often left too many security risks that could lead to theft, damage, or loss—basically anything that could incur unnecessary replacement expenses. Thanks to a few key capabilities, intelligent lockers can cut losses close to zero.
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Advanced Access Controls for Student & Staff Devices:
Intelligent lockers restrict access to individual devices or whole categories depending on the user. Students may access only one device at a time, teachers to a whole set, and IT staff could have unrestricted access. -
Real-time Monitoring & Usage Tracking:
Administrators can monitor locker usage through the software management dashboard in real time. -
Durable, Tamper-Proof Locker Designs for Schools:
Steel frames and doors and secure digital locking mechanisms offer a higher level of security than traditional key-based systems. Many systems are designed for interior and outdoor use for secure access, even on open campuses. -
Audit Trails & Alerts for Device Checkout & Returns:
Automated alerts from the system can notify you of late returns, failed signout attempts, or other irregularities. These provide a comprehensive audit trail, too, which may be necessary at some schools to help track government and grant spending on technology.
Reducing Administrative Workload for School IT Staff
Suppose all you have now is a laptop rack and an employee tracking signouts with a clipboard. In that case, laptop management will significantly drain your administrative resources. For edtech teams that are already stretched thin, you need to find as many efficiencies as possible. Intelligent lockers automate the most tedious aspects of device management so your IT staff, librarians, and teachers can focus on knowledge work and more directly supporting students.
Contactless Device Pickup & Return for Students and Teachers
As learning modes, student schedules, and family work demands grow increasingly challenging to navigate, intelligent lockers offer a powerful solution for getting students everything they need to learn.
Also, born out of health and safety concerns during the pandemic, contactless distribution has become an important consideration for schools worldwide. Intelligent lockers support blended and remote learning students by providing them with a secure and convenient contactless access point to interact with their schools.
Space-Saving Intelligent Lockers for School & University Campuses
Anyone who has worked in IT, let alone edtech, can tell you how fast a device inventory can go from an organized catalog to a pile in a matter of days. Students tend not to be the most conscientious about electronics they don’t own themselves. Keeping devices organized efficiently, in as little space as possible, is an ongoing challenge.
While their main benefit is their smart management, intelligent lockers make the ideal storage solution because they have a
- Compact, space-saving design that can easily fit into small footprints available in most schools for IT storage.
- Modular configurations so you can mix and match compartments to fit your specific set of equipment.
- Scalable configurations so you can add or remove lockers when your equipment inventory changes.
- Distributed setups so you can manage multiple lockers across large or even multiple campuses from the same management portal.
Common School IT Challenges & Intelligent Locker Solutions
The students may be different, but the technology headaches are the same. Whether public or private, K-12, magnet schools, liberal arts colleges, or grad schools, most institutions face similar challenges in device management.
When learning relies on technology, things can grind to a halt when devices aren’t available. While technology is often the culprit, it’s most often the students who are the cause.
So while one-to-one device access is the goal, you should always plan to have spares on hand. It’s best to implement a streamlined loaner program using intelligent lockers. Students can quickly check out loaner devices with minimal staff involvement, minimizing learning disruptions.
Students arriving with uncharged devices—or signing out with undercharged loaner devices—create similar disruptions. They may claim they can’t participate or struggle to find charging outlets, which can be disruptive or create unsafe classrooms with cords dangling everywhere. Instead, use intelligent lockers to create secure charging locations for personal and loaner devices.
IT teams are often overwhelmed with device repairs, especially when students come for unscheduled appointments. Rounding up broken devices from busy teachers and librarians only adds to their workload.
You can partially automate the repair process with intelligent lockers. Students can drop off broken devices or swap them for loaners. While doing so they can flag a device as broken at the locker’s control panel. This can send an alert to IT so they know a device is ready to pull at their convenience. And the locker can remove the laptop from circulation so another student doesn’t accidentally sign it out.
While storing and managing devices during the school year is one challenge, managing the summer is a separate logistical headache. This is typically when overtaxed IT teams catch their breath and prep laptop inventories for the coming semester. This means managing overlapping sets of known-good devices, those in need of upgrade, and those ready to be retired.
Intelligent lockers can help facilitate these processes, especially for equipment moving between teams or offices. Different teams can deposit device sets in lockers for transfer at the other’s convenience.
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