mikes

OK I can see where they announced what they call "temporary recordings" which are the 30 day recordings- to ALL education customers, even us on the cheapest "fundamentals" license. Have Google released a statement saying that this will be going away this week too as I am unable to find one? For things that are so important I hate how this corporate language is so damned vague

As others have said, you need to join them to your domain using your management licenses. This will allow you to turn off guest use and people will need an account from your organisation to log in with. They will not be able to sign in with their personal g-mail account. You can also use this functionality to block certain websites and apps although it is basic. If you already have it set up where the @DomAin part is filled in you are almost there, just have to disable guest mode access. Originally we loaned out 100's of devices with guest mode enabled (as a secondary school). It was found that guest account mode would get around our crude filtering and allow access to the main porno sites that I blocked, so I had to disable it. I had almost 10 complaints from parents/siblings of the pupils because they had been using the device for their own uses too! Again as far as accidents, we actually haven't had that many but we are a comp, a primary school I would imagine would have many more accidents. We had one smashed screen, two or three displaying garbled graphics on the screen (either spilt drink or just bad motherboard, 3 bad units in 500 can be expected), a few missing letters, a few missing chargers but it hasn't really been that bad considering we loaned out 100's of the things. Infact the chromebooks in trolleys to be used solely in classrooms, managed by teachers, have come off a lot worse!!! One other thing, you need special paid software to monitor and block inappropriate content well. We couldn't afford it and so our chromebook users can go on whatever adult site their home broadband allows, apart from the ones I specifically blocked in the Chrome settings in google admin. But the 20 or so porn sites I blocked... I am sure there are many many more. We made this clear in our loan agreement the parents bear responsibility for any content the users visit. We didn't even have a good way to check Internet history other than logging in as that user and checking it that way..] But times have changed and every comp pupil knows that school devices are monitored, so I've seen very few problems with them. They all use their own smartphones for stuff they know they shouldn't be doing...

Hi do you know where this is listed? I can't find anywhere on Google that says this, all it says is "Compare your editions" with a Tick under "Record" but with ** that say "until Jan 9th", but it doesn't say anything about what will happen after then. We are on just the Education Fundamentals package. We do get recording now with Hwb via a deal with the Welsh Government, they have extended it until July 31st for all Hwb users - but we use our own domain and getting everyone to use Hwb will be a nightmare. If it reverts to keeping a 30 day recording under the users own Drive, that is fine for us as we only want recording to deal with any allegations about bad behavior during the online lesson.

We never downloaded the exams here, we've never bothered downloading the exams with this software beforehand, as it seemed like it would lock each PC to that particular student when you download the exam firsthand? even if not, it seems if you don't download the exam, the student gets an error message before the exam starts. If you do download the exam, the student does the entire thing then gets an error message when it gets uploaded. I know the exam data can be recovered but I'd almost rather the student get the error message before the exam starts, rather than potentially waste 2 hours doing an exam only to have to do it again. I guess it all depends on how robust the software is - e.g. if the backend comes back up 5 hours later, can that exam completed earlier still be uploaded? We only had 1 student so it wasn't too stressful for us.

I didn't download our tests beforehand, our problem was when the student finished his exam, it would not upload. But then by the time I'd gotten into the room with an Ethernet cable (assuming it was a wireless issue) the test had uploaded ok. But our problem then was the Invigilation Page did not show any data, that seems to be the problem now - people can't see any data on the Invigilation page so they can't get PIN codes etc. For us, we could not see if our student's test had uploaded OK - it said on the laptop that it had uploaded, but we could not see anything in Invigilation - so we were worried that our students exam had not gone through. We are on phone to support now but they seem clueless tbh. EDIT - ok the invigilation page has loaded now, it is showing our exam as Finished so it looked like it did upload. So I'd say their servers were overloaded, that's why our students exam failed to upload the first time; luckily it got through the second time and now we can verify it via the invigilation page. They did the same thing our Video Parents Evening company did IMO - they do not spec anywhere near enough hardware, they cheap out, and it crashes and burns on the night. You would think that all these problems would cost them a lot more than the few thousand for some better infrastructure but they never learn...

Not sure about the clipboard error, I'm not getting it here running Sophos and with LEA mandated smoothwall. I installed it to the default location.

Really hope the launch goes well, apparently this telescope will allow us for the first time to detect oxygen in exoplanet atmospheres within a few hundred lightyears of here. That means if we mess up Earth we can simply move planets!

That gigabyte panel looks great on the surface, but shame about the price and the RGBW. I am likely going to end up buying a 55" panel more than likely; apparently they are cheaper than 48.5" because they are cut from different parent panels or some other corporate reason. (But this might just mean they are cut from poorer quality panels!!) 55" would probably be my ideal size really, when I was using my 48.5" I imagined it being a little bigger and would have been happy with a 55" panel. 65" was just too big. Unfortunately that Gigabyte panel has an RGBW pixel structure, like all OLEDs it seems, and this makes text and other UI elements in Windows look nasty. I haven't seen this particular display in person but I've seen other RGBW OLED's displaying Windows up close, and for my use case, it's basically unusable. My Acer 48.5" was specifically sold as a PC monitor, they were making 42" and 48.5" PC monitors, it retailed for £799 but one day on Ebuyer it was on sale for £400 and I just had to buy it. It was a great panel with good colours (fake HDR only though) and no stupid post-processing; although the response time on the unit wasn't great and the overdrive wasn't great either as it could leave grey trails. But other than the not so great response times (grey to grey pixel changing), it was a great panel. 2 years 2 weeks after I'd bought it, I came home from work, woke my PC from sleep, and the monitor would not power on, I smelt that all too familiar smell of burning circuitry. I kinda wish I'd tried to file a warranty claim anyway, I was two weeks out of warranty but I should have claimed it failed 3 weeks ago while in warranty but I was too sick with covid Who knows wether it would have worked or not, anyway as they don't make that particular monitor any more perhaps they'd have just refunded me and I'd be in the same situation now trying to find a potentially decent TV as a monitor. It's a shame as the 65" hisense TV I bought had fantastic response times despite getting mediocre reivews for it, and other than the disgusting interlacing the quality of the visuals were great apart from the darks; it's wierd TV RTNGS rated the TV as poor for motion, and yet I found the motion great. And it rated the PC monitor output quality as great, and I found it to be terrible due to the interlacing. (And yes it was the same IPS panel). I got my refund anyway, if the alternate line interlacing was a fault and not part of the design, I'd have been happy for amazon to issue me a replacement other than a refund, but there we go, I have many more hours now trying to decide what to buy.

I'm the rare person who prefers an absolute massive display it seems, my last monitor was a 48.5" Acer 4K display, and it was awesome. Just the right size to sit about 1.5 meters away from, nice 4K resolution and very immersive for gaming. My eyes aren't great so I prefer a large screen where I can sit a little bit further back from and not have to strain to see where things are. Unfortunately my Acer 48.5" failed 2 weeks after the warranty ended, and I bought a 65" Hisense TV to replace it. Which was a) too big, 48.5" is the ideal size I think for me, and b) as it is a TV and not an actual Monitor, it has no Displayport and had all kinds of silly image processing nonsense on it that made the picture quality in Windows look garbage. You could turn off most of the image processing in "game mode", but it still had this awful fake 10bit interlacing that meant every alternating row of pixels was slightly lighter or darker, giving you a banded appearance. From far away the colours did merge into one, but up close it just looked dreadful and you can't turn it off either. Most solid blocks of colour had this banded appearance, even in chroma 4:4:4, so the quality sucked. Luckily it failed 2 days after I bought it, so after being messed around for 6 weeks I'm about to get a full refund on the thing. The problem is they no longer sell 48.5" computer monitors any more, so if you want a big PC monitor, you have to risk buying a TV. And the majority of TV's on the market are hopeless as PC monitors, even if RTNGS gives them a good review. RTNGS gave the Hisense a 9/10 as a PC monitor despite this trash interlacing, same with other displays - they gave an OLED a 9/10 yet I saw posts on Reddit showing how that OLED's RGBW pixel layout made Windows text in particular, look very ugly. I no longer trust TV RTNGS, it seems to test as a PC monitor, they plug in a PC, launch a game, and judge how good that looks - they don't judge how the unit actually performs as a PC monitor in Windows. (e.g. do they output 1:1 exactly as the PC outputs, which is all that is wanted) The biggest actual monitors I can find are these trash 32" ultrawide displays, basically half of 4K if you are lucky. My friend swears by his 144hz 27" ultrawide, but I used it and could barely see what I was aiming at - what's the point of 144hz if what you are aiming at is 1 - 2 cm high?? I was tempted by the LG CX OLED, a 48.5" (or the 55" version actually) - it has a 120hz 4K panel - but OLED's are known for bad burn in for Windows, plus it has RGBW pixel layout which means text in Windows looks trash, and it has no DisplayPort so getting 120hz 4k at chroma 4:4:4 over HDMI is a nightmare (these TV's often use cheap chroma subsampling tricks to fake full 4k colour). So at the moment if you want a good looking, large (42" or above) PC monitor, there isn't really anything good on the market at the moment for a decent (sub £1500) price. Even the expensive TV's have problems as monitors. So I am stuck on my ancient 32" Hanspree 1080P TV from 2010 until I can find something tolerable as a PC monitor again that doesn't have interlacing, subsampling, VA blacksmear (a lot of these TV's have VA panels with awful blacksmear, I'd much rather IPS, anyone who I've talked to who knows what they are talking about has despised large VA panels for gaming), I might be waiting 5 years by the sounds of it

Have been told that GameMaker Studio is now required for the Welsh IT qualification, anyone heard about this? I am trying to get it to work under student accounts but it must compile and run EXE's, it makes several SUBST drive maps, I must poke holes in AppLocker to get the thing to run... Anyone heard about having to get this thing installed?

I have a copy of this software from 2005 ScienceScope Datadisc PT 2.4.87 but I am not sure on the legality of distributing it? this stuff seems so old ScienceScope don't even mention it on their website any more

I am from a Welsh LEA school and we use WONDE, they haven't mentioned anything to us about it but I know our Cardiff based computer contractor was dubious about Wonde and warned us to be careful when it came to DPA, so I wonder if Cardiff are kicking up a fuss about it. But we are still using it for some web based Maths software.

Is there a fix? all of our Chrome devices have full HDD's too since Summer - 20gb+ taken by user profiles. This has stopped copy+paste working, the students are meant to copy+paste from the web into a document but because it wants to store the screenshot on the HDD, it fails. So this likely affects all gsuite Chromebooks that are "hot-desked", there's nothing particularly special about my schools chromebook/gsuite setup. I didn't want to force delete all local storage via policy, some students use the same chromebooks and if they had stored stuff locally, (they shouldn't be, but you never know) - I don't want to risk having a load of calls about missing stuff

Just noticed this after summer too, it's a local storage thing for me too. It was stopping users from using the clipboard properly which was hampering lessons as they take screenshots and put them into word documents. Having to powerwash or clear the local storage from every one of our 400+ devices would be a nightmare especially if it fills up just as quickly.

My biggest concern is a data breach, e.g. malware infects one of our staff accounts, which then takes a copy of that staff members mailbox and also a copy of the fileshares she has access to. I know there is sensitive data on file shares that most of our staff members have access to - e.g. results of special needs investigations, childrens behavioral reports etc. It isn't ideal but a lot of our staff are older and are stuck in the way of working with fileshares and e-mails - they will e-mail documents to themselves to work on, then e-mail them back - and our wellbeing department has a folder in a network share, that they all work from e.g. a spreadsheet with behavior logs in it, a staff member will log a concern in the spreadsheet, and a member of wellbeing will call home and note the result in this spreadsheet. This isn't ideal because if one of these staff accounts gets compromised, all of this data could be rinsed by malware, and then we could be threatened to pay BTC or all of this very sensitive data gets leaked. This is my biggest fear, and some of this new malware is so sophisticated it could slip right by Sophos antivirus, and perhaps even AppLocker. Our network got hit a few years ago with Emotet, it sailed right past Sophos; this was before I had set up AppLocker however. Anyway it was impossible to remove, luckily we were replacing our entire network infrastructure that summer anyway or we'd have been in serious trouble. This Emotet just sent out spam, if it had rinsed our data it doesn't bear thinking about. Anyway mitigating against this is very difficult, I am trying to train staff in Google Docs but that has its own issue, it only takes a successful phish and you have exactly the same problem. Does anyone here use 2FA for all staff? So for me my worries are: Sensitive data is kept in e-mail inboxes/sent items inappropriately, and b) Shared staff drives, that pretty much all staff have access to, has sensitive medical data in it, I have password protected a lot of these documents but new ones are saved with no password and it could be a while before I get to it. We have bought into some MyConcern thing with our LEA, hoping to learn about that and see if that might offer us a solution.

I have used it to collect parent names and contact details in the context of booking out open evening appointments. As long as you don't set the form with the option to show all the results of course. I am the only one with access to the forms results and it'll be printed off to provide a register. I think I'd trust the Forms over something I might make myself in PHP that could be vulnerable to an SQL injection for example, as I'm not a full time developer.

Hi guys, just a quick question - does SIMS audit who is adding and removing behaviour points? I am trying to trace a few missing points (I suspect user error, if not that then a wireless issue), I wanted to see if they had been added in SIMS at all or not. (they obv. don't show up in the points screen where they should). I did a search and found a few old threads that said SIMS doesn't audit this data, but that they'd filed a feature request with Capita for this to be included in the next version. Does anyone know if they ever got round to doing it? I've tried running System Manager's access log, but all it specifies is a date range; if I search for 2 days worth of ALL sims data surely it will be unmanageable? (if it even completes without bombing out) I've read other users set up transactional backups of the SIMS DB but that sounds like a bit of a nightmare to me

Must admit I noticed very heavy traffic too! Basically back to normal! I'm looking for Work from Home jobs now as the lockdown suited me very well. Being around people all the time has always exhausted me and this lockdown has actually shown me how relaxing life could potentially be for me!

We had been running with those apostrophe's just fine until this update, but yes removing them fixed the crash. Unsanitized SQL inputs must have been the cause, a sign of very shoddy programming

I love the 60's films after Dr No and some of the 70's ones too, almost more because of the nostalgic time period rather than the films themselves (Though I can't really consider myself nostalgic for that time period since I was born in 1986!) Bond has to deal with these mysterious things called "computers" and the entire film is about stealing a the equivalent of a USB stick. Yes the new cynical bond is good too (especially after how cheesy the bond films got in the 90's) but there's something rosy and comforting about the old times bond

We are getting an incorrect syntax error when staff try and enter data into their marksheets, (aspects?) clicking the tab to the right of the register to access them crashes SIMS with an unclosed quotation mark error. It's almost like a programming bug made its way into production but there's no way of that happening with the software being fully tested before release, right?

Also I found the more the school goes digital, the more it falls back onto often one or two IT technicians to keep running. There was never a big disaster with pen and paper, the worst that could go wrong is that a pencil nib snaps. But when it's all online, and you need laptops - and you're beholden to your LEA for a shoddy Internet connection - half the lesson becomes about working round faults rather than actual learning. I'd say we are not currently at the right technological level for full on 1:1 total digital learning yet. Even if they pour money into it, one poor network setup, one incompetent tech and the whole thing comes crashing down. I'd say we need another 10 - 20 years of ICT development before I'd confidently say to our head, that we should do it. Otherwise you are asking to look a slap fool the moment something goes wrong.

We use chromebooks a lot here even though we're mainly Microsoft. All the remote working is now set via Google Classroom so the chromebooks are ideal. However a big problem for us is that we use Smoothwall for filtering onsite, and we have no real way of setting webfiltering for these Chromebooks when they are used off-site. They are enrolled into our Google domain however, so I have blocked the main porn sites on there. However I know 1% of the main pornsites out there, and it would be trivial for a pupil to find more. In the end we mentioned it in our Loan Agreement, that the end user will be responsible for filtering and that parents should enable their ISP porn blocks for this.

My office 365 logged in fine, but one of my users just reported an error with https://portal.microsoftonline.com/?wa=wsignin1.0 so no idea at the moment

same here, when it said our accounts weren't being recognized... I had the nightmare thought some kid had gotten into an admin account and wiped the whole domain... and my next few days would be spent trying to figure out a way to restore it all