The school box

A small computer inside your school that holds the school's own copy of BenoEdu. Every device on the school Wi-Fi — teachers' phones, the office desktop, the lab computers, a laptop — syncs with it directly, no internet needed, and the box carries the whole school to the internet on one connection, when there is one.

In a school paying by the megabyte, that is the difference between the register being taken and not.

#What it does for you

• Everybody works without a line. Registers, marks, quizzes, fee payments and notices save to the box over the school Wi-Fi — from a phone in a classroom, a laptop in the staff room or the computer in the office. Nobody is waiting for signal and nobody is paying for data.
• One connection instead of sixty. When the school's line is up, the box sends what the devices handed it and fetches what changed. The first big download happens once, on a connection the school chose to spend — and then never again.
• A week offline is queued, not lost. Everything entered while the line is down goes to the school's records the moment the line comes back, in the name of the teacher who entered it.

#What it never does

A box relays. It never grants. It cannot sign anybody in, reset a password, or show a device more than the person using it could already see. A student's phone gets a student's rows; the office computer gets the office's; nobody gets the whole school.

Signing in still needs the internet — once. After that a device can work through the box for two weeks without seeing the internet again, and every time it does see the internet, that clock resets.

#It tells you how old its picture is

The one thing a box must never do is answer confidently with last Tuesday's attendance. So its health is measured in hours, and every device can see it:

The box last reached the internet	What devices do
less than 6 hours ago	use the box
6 hours to 2 days ago	a device with its own connection goes to the internet instead; one with none keeps using the box and is told how old the picture is
more than 2 days ago	devices go to the internet

Nothing on a screen ever pretends.

#What you need

• A machine that stays plugged in, on the same network as the phones and computers that will use it. A Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB) is enough for a school of a thousand. An old office desktop is better — it has a fan.
• The school Wi-Fi. The box does not need to be reachable from the internet, and it is not.
• Somebody with the school's admin login, for two minutes on the day.

You do not need your own server. If the school has one, we can use it; if not, Benovate supplies the box, sets it up before it leaves us, and places it in the school.

#On the day

1. Plug the box in and connect it to the school Wi-Fi.
2. On the school's BenoEdu page, the admin adds the box under Sync → School hub and gets a key.
3. The key is pasted into the box, once. From that moment the machine is the school's box.
4. On each device — a teacher's phone, the office computer, each lab machine — open BenoEdu and choose Use this box under This device. The choice is remembered per device: a teacher's phone at home has no box, the same phone in the staff room does; the office desktop always does.

The whole thing takes longer to read than to do.

#Turning one off

From the school's hub page, Turn it off. It is reversible. The usual reason is "we are not sure where that box is this week", and turning it off means every device stops trusting it — even a device that has not been in the building since Friday. Turning it back on is one press.

#When something looks wrong

• Devices are not using it. Check the hub page shows the box as current, and that the address they were given is one they can reach on the school Wi-Fi (guest networks are often walled off).
• The box says it is behind. That is the school's internet line, not the box. Nothing is lost; it retries by itself, gently, so a two-day outage does not burn the school's bundle on pointless attempts.
• Anything else — ring us. A box is administered from our side too, so most things can be looked at without anybody driving to the school.