September 19, 2018

We have heard from many teachers and schools who are confused by the process of buying apps. To help make things easy and clear, our Sales and Marketing Manager, Dan, has wrote this simple guide on how you can purchase apps through Apple School Manager.

What is Apple School Manager?

Apple recently introduced Apple School Manager which brings managing your devices and purchasing apps together in one place for your schools. It is the new home for iTunes U which allows you to share content, the Device Enrolment Program for registering your devices with an mobile device management (MDM) system and the Volume Purchase Program (VPP) for purchasing and downloading apps from the Education Store.

Through VPP, when schools purchase 20 or more copies of an app from a participating developer, they are given a 50% discount of the total cost. This means if you're total spend on 20 apps is $300, you will get those 20 apps for $150.

Apple School Manager should help to keep things simple for stressed and over-stretched teachers and admin staff. It gives your school one central place in which to control everything instead of navigating across multiple different logins and Apple ID’s.

What if my School already has a Volume Purchase Program (VPP) account?

If your school is already signed up to VPP, that’s great! You can continue to use the existing Volume Store. However, migrating your existing VPP account to Apple School Manager is very quick and straight forward.

Migrating your VPP Account to Apple School Manager

Apple have called this Invite your current VPP Account to Apple School Manager.

• Sign in to Apple School Manager
• Click Settings
• Below Institution Settings, choose Enrollment Information
• Click Invite VPP Program Facilitator at the bottom of the page
• Enter the Apple ID of the VPP Account you want to invite

You will receive an email with a link to join your School and you’ll be asked to upgrade account. Click that link, and you're good to go!

Selecting and purchasing apps

If you've managed to get all set up then this next part is truly easy. Well, once you've decided what to buy out of the two millions apps on offer.

• Search for an app through Apple School Manager
• Enter the quantity you'd like to purchase. Remember, if you're buying over 20 you are usually given a 50% discount on your purchase.
• Choose a way to distribute your apps. Select Managed Distribution to assign, revoke, and reassign apps to devices and users through your MDM solution
• Enter your payment and billing information and the apps are all yours!

If you're looking for an app from Special iApps, a shortcut is to visit our website at www.specialiapps.org from your PC, Mac or iPad (not iPhone), tap the Download for your School badge near the top, and select the app from the drop-down list. That will take you directly to the Education Store page for the app.

Hopefully this guide has helped to demystify the app purchasing process. We hope to see many more schools around the world downloading our apps and using them to make a difference for your pupil's education. If you have any more technical queries, send us your messages to us by email or on our Facebook or Twitter pages.