Kindle Fire Deployment

The new Kindle Fires have been on a lot of schools' radars recently. We have several schools who have purchased large numbers of Fires for use with subscribed web applications. MyOn Reader is one such site that schools have purchased in order to use their substantial reading material. And with the need to have more large scale web access, schools decided to try the Kindle Fire. So I've learned a lot about the device over the last week. Here's what I've learned...

1. These devices are VERY personal. Even more than the iPad. There is a link to the Amazon store from nearly every page. Great access for the personal user, but maybe not great for students.
2. You have to use an Amazon account to get into the device. There isn't a way to bypass it. We created a generic account that isn't tied to a credit card to get pass this step.
3. There are a ton of bookmarks and history items preinstalled. So if you want students to have quick access to Facebook, Twitter, and iMDb, then you are all set. If you don't, then you'll need to spend a lot of time deleting these quick links. Yes, it has to be manual.
4. Here's the Catch-22. The Fires use "one-click" to purchase anything. No big deal, right. The problem is that in order to set up "one-click", you have to set up a credit card on your account. Not great for student use.
5. When you deregister the Fire, it goes back to "out of the box". All the favorites and bookmarks you deleted will return. And if you purchased anything, you have to use the account password to access it. Even free apps.

With that in mind, we've decided because it's late in the year, it would be best to set up the Fires to use just as a web browser. Hopefully Amazon will have some sort of deployment system for the large scale.

Check out this document for instructions I created to show our teachers how to set up the Kindle Fires just for web browsing. Hope you find it helpful!

Setting up your Kindle Fire for student web browsing