GreyWhirly

Are you all just using password managers with your IT team - or has anyone used them for teachers too?

Sure, yes of course - however it is slightly more controlled than just posting on the school website which is open to everyone. Is there an alternative?

Hi there, Is there a way to create a school channel on YouTube (we have GfE) so we can upload and share videos of special events (just thinking of any Christmas performance type things the children might be able to do in a socially distanced manner!)? As parents won't be able to come into school as they have done in the past, it would be nice to be able to share some of these things with them. We would like to be able to upload videos to YouTube as unlisted and then share the link with parents. (Parental consent for posting photos/videos of children to social media websites has already been gathered.)

Has anyone come across https://video.link/ It's billed as a "teacher and family friendly YouTube" where you copy and paste existing YouTube links and are given a new link in return which plays the YouTube video in a clean window of its own. I think it can also be used for Vimeo and other hosted videos. It looks really good .. but can't find much about it anywhere apart from their own website!

Thanks @TechMonkey - I think your second description probably fits what I am looking for. We don't really need different departments - not big enough to warrant that! But just a good old fashioned library of docs. I have seen SharePoint in some of it's guises when I have created a Team or a Group in O365 .. but I guess there is a way to get to real Sharepoint and create sites that way? I feel another session of Googling and YouTube watching to up my skills on this one!! ;-) Thanks

Hi there, We have our GSuite setup and pupil accounts created (except for this year's new intake) but as yet we don't have anything linked with AD. Going forward I would like to be able to do this and for our pupils to have individual logins to AD which are then synced with their GSuite login so that all they need to do is login to the AD and they can access Google Classroom with no further authentication required. Is that possible? What is the best way to do this? Is there any way to retrospectively create AD accounts to reflect the GSuite users I already have - or is that a backwards thing that cannot be done? If that's not possible, is there a way to prepopulate the school domain name when accessing the Google Classroom page, so that the pupils only need to type in the first part of their GSuite username and not have to type the @DomAin.co.uk bit? I have seen something somewhere about adding something to the Google URL .. but now can't find that post! Is there something I can add onto the classroom.google.com URL to prepopulate the domain name? Thanks

We are also looking to do something similar for storage of staff documents (staff meeting agendas, minutes, etc and policy documents). I would be really interested to hear what your MS contact advises. Not all our staff have school laptops (TAs, site staff), so some people will be accessing it from personal devices (which as I write just makes me wince a little). However all staff do have a school email address (we did this at the start of lockdown as we used Teams to live stream staff meetings) - so using Teams/Sharepoint to store/share staff information documents makes sense .. unless there is a better way?

OK, thanks that's great. Could the recordings be downloaded and saved if required (without the need for a license) - or is that not permitted?

We use Meet Recordings a lot at the moment - are you saying that there will be an alternative without paying for the Enterprise version? Thanks

I bought one as a trial from ebay and so far it has been fine: https://tinyurl.com/ebay-webcam It't not branded but I was struggling to find a supplier with anything available in stock for around the £20 mark.

What is DC10?

OK thanks for the info .. I haven't had any experience with anything Azure so far and tbh I wouldn't even know where to start! I think I need to do some serious binge-learning!

Hi, so would I need to set my AD users up first and then pull them into GSuite? How would that work if using say Wonde or something to pull users in GSuite from the MIS system?

Hello, I have been searching through old threads about username conventions and see that lots of people use Entry Year + Surname + First Initial (or a version of this format) which sounds great. Our pupils currently have class logins (yes, I know!). We are a Primary school, just getting started with GSuite and I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to now move across to individual logins for AD (as they will need to have them for GSuite). I will be creating accounts for Reception year upwards and want to make the usernames as child-friendly for the younger ones as possible (I realise that they will carry these usernames all way through until they leave). Do you stick to the same naming convention for AD and GSuite for login names? What works best for younger children? Can I use Entry Year + First name + Surname Intial? Or should I stay away from names altogether? Do you have any computers based in shared areas that are always logged in for pupils to use? I am thinking of computers in library/bay areas which are logged on each morning and used thoughout the day. Do you have shared/classroom logins for these machines? Thanks

I've called a couple already! It's just a bit of a long list ... and I have someone who is keen to make the application sooner rather than later! :-)

I do see what you mean. It's just normally when choosing suppliers, we tend to go by recommendations or locally-based (depending on type of service). This feels a bit like picking a name out of a hat ... or there is also the option of not choosing one and having one allocated ... not sure what criteria would be applied for that though!

That's a good point ... although working through the list trying to suss them out from purely looking at their websites is madness. I feel as though I'd like to ring them all up ... but that's not possible either! It would be helpful if they had been split into regions for the smaller companies - at least they could be narrowed down that way!

Thanks @EdTech-Tom ... where did you find that list?! I have been looking all over the place! Is anyone here happy to give any recommendations for a Google partner?

Does anyone have the full list of partners to choose from? Would anyone here be able to recommend a partner for GfE? I am assuming that there is a list to choose from ..or do you get one allocated?

Thanks. Our O365 comes via our Learning Platform, so I don't have much in the way of administrator access to the O365 setup specifically (short of creating new user accounts that then have and email address etc generated for them). I will contact the support chap to see what he says in relation to your advice. Thanks

Hi there, up until now our teachers have only ever accessed their email from the school laptops and other office based staff have used their school desktop machines. Now that a lot of staff are working remotely, we have recently started using MS Teams and are looking at how to keep our staff teams communicating with each other. For those that have a laptop, it's fine, they can do video calls etc using Teams on their laptop and have been doing so for a couple of weeks. But we have some other staff who do not have a school laptop and as time goes on, we need to find a way of keeping them in the loop! We are thinking of asking them to install the Teams app onto their mobile phones ... but I guess this will throw up all sorts of issues about having it installed on a personal device so we will probably have to make some policy/AUP changes to go with it. I have installed it on my phone, but put the app inside a Secure Folder, so it needs me to enter my PIN when I want to access it which gives an additional layer of security. I don't know how to go about controlling if documents can be downloaded and stored on my phone though ... I guess that is something we need to watch out for. Has anyone else got teachers using this app on their personal devices? What do I need to look out for? Any advice gratefully received! Thanks

Am following this thread as in a similar position to the OP .... thanks @TechMonkey for your description of options ... really useful stuff!

This looks so easy to use! Brilliant! I would ask the person hosting the meeting to put a password on it ... but apart from that, could there be any security issues with it? How does it work? I just know I'm going to get asked what the difference is between this an Zoom ....

Thanks @mavhc, I will look at the video chat option you mentioned! I am not sure I know what Slack cloning is though!

Thanks Roberto, I knew they must be related! Up until now, we have only used OneDrive for sharing certain documents between individual teachers and the Head (i.e each teacher needs to have access to a set of documents in a folder, but the head needs access to all the teacher folders) - which has worked for us in the past. Going forward I just need to design a structure in SharePoint which replicates the current way our network shares are configured ... but I also really like the things I can do with Google Edu ... so I think I might experiment with the doc/resource sharing possibilities that it offers. My only reservation is that a lot of the documents we use are based on Word templates and have odd layouts ... so am not sure how Google docs editors will handle them ...