Disadvantaged children across England are set to receive laptops and tablets

[StevieM]

Fair points, all duly noted.

[ITJS2015]

We understand the safeguarding of our students but after looking at the secure mode setup and unsecured setup we have gone with unsecured so that we can manage them to install software if require but having said that now im kind of regretting now going down the secure root as its locked down. I have laptops which are lockdown but its like being in prison and now being able to anything with it.

 

Some of our kids don't even have a Microsoft account as they are connected to our LEA Azure , i am not sure how we would be able to get them logged in.

 

This has opened up a large can of worms.

[Primus]

In the past we took the view if we supplied a device only it was up to the parent to filter it as required. If we provided a connection too then we would always provide filtering.

 

However the DfE have issued devices in their first offer that had filtering applied regardless of whether they were using their own Internet or a connection provided by DfE or us. Therefore we have now moved to filtering all school devices on premise and off premise so that we are not out of step with what the DfE seems to deem to be best practice.

[localzuk]

This has opened up a large can of worms.

I think it is a wake up call for schools that 1:1 schemes are the way forward to be honest! It is entirely doable within existing budgets - we've managed it without increasing our IT costs (and we own the devices, we're not getting parents to buy them).

[ITJS2015]

In the past we took the view if we supplied a device only it was up to the parent to filter it as required. If we provided a connection too then we would always provide filtering.

 

However the DfE have issued devices in their first offer that had filtering applied regardless of whether they were using their own Internet or a connection provided by DfE or us. Therefore we have now moved to filtering all school devices on premise and off premise so that we are not out of step with what the DfE seems to deem to be best practice.

 

 

How have you set up your laptop in regards to locking down within the laptop such as windows store ? C drive ? Creating MMCs etc

 

Are your laptops on the domain ? or Azure ?

[Primus]

How have you set up your laptop in regards to locking down within the laptop such as windows store ? C drive ? Creating MMCs etc

 

Are your laptops on the domain ? or Azure ?

 

Ours are all Chromebooks so we didn't need to worry about that.

[Cazale]

One of our schools just got a delivery of restricted devices.. am I correct in thinking we can't add our HTTPS inspection certificate to them without making them unrestricted?

 

If so, that's nuts!

[ITJS2015]

One of our schools just got a delivery of restricted devices.. am I correct in thinking we can't add our HTTPS inspection certificate to them without making them unrestricted?

 

If so, that's nuts!

 

From what i have been told with the restricted laptop is that there is a portal which you can sign into which i think is an MDM but im not 100% sure if you can deploy a certificate to it. I am hoping you can , a free meraki account you can insert a certificate from fortinet and applied to our apple devices.

 

We are all in the same boat together and its which way we turn , i have actually locked down a laptop locally that they cannot get access to the following

 

computer management -create accounts , add group and reset passwords

block windows store

block cmd

block run

block gpedit.msc

Hide C drive

 

What is everyone else doing ?

[enjay]

According to the website, I still can't order laptops despite having over 200 students currently self-isolating. Any ideas, and any way of resolving this sooner than waiting 3 days for them to respond to my email?

 

We were contacted today and told we could now place an order. I went for the restricted ones, let's hope that was the right choice...

[enjay]

One of our schools just got a delivery of restricted devices.. am I correct in thinking we can't add our HTTPS inspection certificate to them without making them unrestricted?

 

If so, that's nuts!

 

The restricted ones include filtering, can you not use that rather than install your own?

[Cazale]

The restricted ones include filtering, can you not use that rather than install your own?

Not if we want to use them on the school WiFi we can't, every https page (pretty most of the internet these days) just generates an error if we try.

 

Appreciate we can put them in a reservation space on DHCP and exclude them from the filter, it's just a lot of faffing, and I also suspect the school would prefer to be alerted if someone tries doing something they shouldn't.

 

It's not the end for the world. They'll be going out to parents soon. We just wanted to test what we could/couldn't do with them in the meantime.

[enjay]

Not if we want to use them on the school WiFi we can't, every https page (pretty most of the internet these days) just generates an error if we try.

 

Ah yes, I hadn't thought about the laptops coming in to school. We're not planning on allowing that at this stage, but I can see that might change in the future.

 

How's your visitor wifi? We found it too fiddly to get visitors to install SSL certificates, so we just do domain-level blocking on the visitor wifi. If yours is the same, you could connect the student devices to the visitor wifi and go with no filtering/staff-level filtering, then let the onboard DfE filtering do the rest. Otherwise, reserve them some IPs and set up source exemptions on your firewall.

[Jobos]

I started reading this thread at the start and bits here and there but just read the last two pages and if I understand correctly it appears that schools need to supply filtering if the school loans a computer to a student which is very hard if the school is a primary with limited resources. We had 8 laptops from the DfE from the first round and I think there is another 5 coming but we have a stack of old staff laptops that are sitting around and the HT wants to loan them out to students if year groups isolate.

[localzuk]

There are various cloud based filtering solutions out there and they aren't that expensive if you're buying just a few licenses etc...

[mattysmith80]

Hi, we have received some DFE iPads, submitted our Apple Customer number to get them DEP enrolled but cant for the life of me find the Reseller ID from Techsource so they then appear in Apple School, does anyone have it by any chance ? ive emailed DFE Covid advice email to ask also

[DGardiner]

Not if we want to use them on the school WiFi we can't, every https page (pretty most of the internet these days) just generates an error if we try.

 

Appreciate we can put them in a reservation space on DHCP and exclude them from the filter, it's just a lot of faffing, and I also suspect the school would prefer to be alerted if someone tries doing something they shouldn't.

 

It's not the end for the world. They'll be going out to parents soon. We just wanted to test what we could/couldn't do with them in the meantime.

if you you have an onsite applicance inspecting, try adding the cert of the DFE filtering to your appliance.

 

you would still need to put your filters cert on the laptops like but id assume it would fix it

[keyboards]

I've had this passed on to me, I've asked the school's for details, one come back with 100-120, surely that seems far too high, it's only four year groups.

[keyboards]

I've managed to work this out now, is there anyway to order ones for schools that say ready, as they're only primary so very unlikely to have year groups off as much secondarys, can I still just order this?

 

I'm a bit confused with it, any help would be great

[enjay]

Has anyone heard about extending the contract on the 4G dongles? One of our students reports their has stopped working, which sits about right with the original 6 months service they had.

[2097]

Has anyone heard about extending the contract on the 4G dongles? One of our students reports their has stopped working, which sits about right with the original 6 months service they had.

 

What sort of error are they getting ?

 

I have just tried one of the spares we have, its getting a proxy error.

 

I wanted to use one as a quick test on something.. But am unsure if its the dongle or the laptop we are using isnt setup for them

 

Im assuming its got the proxy info applied to the DHCP server on the 4g dongle.

 

I cant even get access to the admin menu on the 4g dongle even after a reset which is weird

[enjay]

What sort of error are they getting ?

 

Unsure. We've just had the usual "it isn't working" message from the parent/form tutor, but the timing it about right for it to have expired.

[StevieM]

The head has ordered 20 iPads through the scheme. Does anyone know whether they have mobile data capability? It would be great if we could use these free data SIM cards with them.

[DGardiner]

The head has ordered 20 iPads through the scheme. Does anyone know whether they have mobile data capability? It would be great if we could use these free data SIM cards with them.

 

If you check your order on techsource it should show the spec/model numbers - Id have a guess at no, cheapest model available

[StevieM]

Id have a guess at no, cheapest model available

 

That's what I'm thinking, too, but hope springs eternal...

[Andycat]

The head has ordered 20 iPads through the scheme. Does anyone know whether they have mobile data capability? It would be great if we could use these free data SIM cards with them.

 

Ours are Wifi only