paulkerton

It's hardly pedantry! Sky is releasing Brave New World next month on Sky One, but I'm still paying for access in the first place. I'm not getting it for free. If it helps you sleep at night that you're paying 2/3rds the price of the original game for half the length of a game that was only 8 hours worth of gameplay in the first place. You go with it.

They're not free. You need Playstation+ That's liked saying a film is free on Netflix or Disney+

(click the picture)... and that's all I have to say on that.

I'm sure they are, but I find aligning your expectations with reality is usually a better way to end up avoiding disappointment. Which is why I'm not crushed with disappointment that Karen Gillan isn't my wife. :D

That's a novel way of doing it. Charge full price for the game DLC. Charge DLC price for the full game.

The great balancing act. Do you pay £449.99 for the disc, so you can get cheaper games in the future. Or do you get the discless for £359.99, knowing you'll be trapped digitally and will surcharged digitally to make up the bigger loss Sony makes on that model?

Disagree. Students need to use a keyboard. Even if they're adept with on screen keyboard, they need to learn how to use a keyboard to type. And the free apps thing - Well, if you're spending hundreds on a high quality device and then not paying for apps, I think the priorities are the wrong way around there.

The new iPad Air does, but not the new iPad 8th Generation, which is the one schools get for $30 less and will be the one everyone will be buying in education. The minimum spec new iPad 8th Generation - 32GB WiFi is £329 retail. The minium spec new iPad Air 64GB WiFi is £579 retail.

That'll be SIMS 8 that they announced 3 years, 5 months and 18 days ago? "We announced it, then failed to show it the next year, failed to show up for the next two after that... and now we we're going to show up and the show is cancelled. How conveni.... I mean unfortunate" - Capita Spokesperson

As I've said many times before, you teacher the skills not the tools. That can be done on any device. iPad, Windows, Mac, Chromebook, Ubuntu Linux. I still don't think iPad is the way to go, personally for myriad of reasons. The price is quite deceptive, for example. I'm going to use the consumer pricing but still, the point remains. iPad = £329. Apple Pencil = £99 Keyboard = £159 So now you're at £587.00. That's a hell of a lot of money for the lowest end device. Move to the iPad Air and you're nearing £1000 for that setup. Then you have to license an MDM. You have to still use Office 365 or G Suite to offer any kind of usable cloud service. Then you have the cost of software. I just think iPad is a fools errand, personally. Then the Apple Pencil is still the 1st Generation one on the 8th gen iPad and well... ♂️♂️♂️

The current active advice is here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-decontamination-in-non-healthcare-settings/covid-19-decontamination-in-non-healthcare-settings

I'd go to directprint.io for this in the interim, but PIN support in CUPS printing is due to arrive by the end of the year.

Dan's the man! He'll get you sorted @supportman

I've been waiting for this one to appear! Schools reopen = increased demand for tests for under 18s PhD Students back in classes = Reduced staffing to process tests General reopening of society = increased demand for tests Increased leadtime for tests = Tests take longer, so some of them end up waiting so long that the test is rendered useless to have taken in the first place Absolute recipe for disaster, really. Anyone competent should've seen it coming.

We have Bromcom synchronising this now. Really, really useful. Every timetabled class gets it's own Classroom and any changes made to rosters in Bromcom syncs overnight with the classes. Really pleased with how it's working. Staff can also still create their own classrooms, should they want more for project work or small group working. If I need to do anything specific in the classes, I use GAM. Keeps my hands clean and I don't need to be a member of a class I'm not directly involved with for some reason. Whilst GAM is technically a third party - well second party I suppose - app and not directly supported by Google, it's creator, Jay Lee, is a Chrome Enterprise Support Manager at Google.

Parental contribution schemes will help with this, as well as (and this is massive, so a sentence doesn't do it justice) cultural change to reduce printing costs and divert some of that. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, if you will. I went to one primary school whose yearly printing costs (single form entry mind you) were over £60,000 a year.

Because I see the logic of: Teacher need Windows because SIMS Students have Windows because teachers do. We also need to be aware of our history, as the BBC Micro, and later the Acorn and Archimedes machines were dominant until their collapse in the late 90s (before it morphed into ARM). The only viable alternative when that happened? Microsoft Windows. Remember, when Acorn finally collapsed at the beginning of 1999, the iMac was only 5 months old and it was Apple's hail Mary attempt to stay afloat. Well, I think that's presuming that we need to replicate what industry uses across education, which is one of the biggest fallacies in EdTech. We teach students (especially up to KS4, FE and above is a different debate) transferrable skills. Word processing - not Word. Presentation - not Powerpoint. Photo editing - not Photoshop. Video editing - Not iMovie, Final Cut or Premier Pro. and in some schools, like alternative provision establishments, vocational skills like How to fix cars - Not how to fix Fords. How to cut hair - Not how to do one particular style. Whatever platform a school chooses, it needs to be because it works best for their school. Windows, Mac, iPad, ChromeOS or Ubuntu Linux. I don't think the platform is, or should matter. Especially in this decade where the chances are people are using Android more than any other OS on a daily basis. We also seem to be assuming that the jobs outside of MaccyD's or Starbucks that these students will be going into will be desk based working on Office software, which is a massive assumption to make. Many of them will be using Managment Information Systems. Financial Software. Bespoke developed platforms. The best future workforce will be adaptable, because the OS and the platform they use at school will be irrelevant to the job they're doing. They'll have the skills to be able to move seemlessly between them. My problem is that a lot of the time, iPad and Apple are chosen because of the "magpie effect" on those in charge, rather than because it's the best platform for your school. Let's face it, the moment you buy iPad you're instantly going to have to augment it with G Suite or Office 365, which then begs the question - Why didn't you go for ChromeOS/Chromebooks or Windows 10 instead?

Yes, SIMS has created a lock-in effect, and a general intransigence to let go of what people know, I find. - - - Updated - - - But... but... they're shiny!

Not in the UK, but the market is certainly Chromebook heavy in America, Spain, Nordic Countries and New Zealand in particular.

One of my favourites for this: Surely they realise correlation does not equal causation, or is that a step too far?

Yeah, nowhere near everyone has it yet. I'm a Superadmin and don't have it, but my test account for staff has it. Only blur too, not replace as of yet. To be fair it hasn't been announced as rolling out yet, so I'm guessing it's purely a test with a few users across G Suite. Maybe 1 in 1000 or less!

We haven't. They've always existed. They've just found out they can meet on the internet after going down a YouTube rabbit hole and being convinced by mad-men with a camera.

Yes. I have share and chat controls on all accounts now. A few accounts have also got background blur starting to appear too.

Wonde from the end user's POV is far simpler and cleaner. I think they're now in more schools than Groupcall too.

Oh you should. There's something so wonderfully Star Trek about asking your voice assistant to change the lights. You can even set Alexa to respond to "Computer...."