carlin_w

Hello, I am hoping someone will have some contacts for the disposal of large interactive whiteboards. We are a special school located in Hemel Hempstead, Herts and have various screens that need disposing: they are a variety of 50" or 55" screens. My usual contacts either don't have vans big enough, or are not collecting in my area anytime soon. Does anyone have any other contacts that could help with this? TIA Carlin Webster Woodfield School

We've just set-up a SumUp card reader in our school - though we run a transparent proxy, so we don't need to enter the details. I would contact SumUp, but I cannot see a way to add these details easily on our reader - or a static IP. What reader do you have?

Thanks all, checked the BIOS and it needed an update - working fine now

I am looking to move our meeting room bookings completely online, as we currently manually write this all-in a diary. My thoughts are we must be able to use Office 365/Outlook to reserve the rooms, and it will manage the availability itself. I have tried adding a room in the MS365 admin centre, looking online everywhere but cannot seem to get the room to appear in the room finder or as a location. All articles I find online mention some form of external software to bolt on to this. Does anyone have any experience of doing this, and am I missing something obvious? Thanks

Hello, I have been upgrading various PCs/Laptops to an SSD, and as such reinstalling Windows 10. I have never had issues before, but I came across an issue when upgrading a HP ProBook 455 G2. When inserting a Win 10 USB install, I get a flashing white line in the top left corner - no matter how I try to install it I get this error. However, if I install Win 7, it works perfectly, and it will then let me upgrade to Win 10. Does anyone have any clue as to what is happening - I have googled and googled but cannot find anything. TIA

We have had them working before with no issues. However recently they have just started failing to connect. It’s bizarre. The terminals aren’t the most intuitive and give hardly any info. The coffee shop is its own entity, running on BT with no access points (it’s quite a small area). According to the data sheets, it supports Wi-Fi 802.11n - but has no note of 2.4Ghz vs 5Ghz

A strange request - we have a coffee shop on site for work related learning. We have a Miura M020 card machine, and it really struggles with connecting to our Wi-Fi. I have tried assigning static IPs but this doesn’t help and I am lost at what to try next. If anyone has any tips for troubleshooting that would be great. This is the machine - https://www.miurasystems.com/retail-payments/m020

We are looking to move to a digital sign-in system for staff and visitors. Does anyone know of any systems that can integrate with our MIS Arbor for staff, and provide easy access to see who is in/out, what visitors have been in? An added bonus if visitors can input car reg to help with the car park. An extra added bonus if it can make use of an access fob (of which we already have - Noralsy fobs to be exact) Any ideas greatly appreciated.

We've used JP-UK, very helpful.

We use RM filtering within our school - currently have to guide staff to turn the proxy on/off manually. I'd be interested in the PAC files if this is a better solution - following to see any thoughts.

Not something I have encountered before. I have used the following set-up before with a USB boot drive, so the install asks what edition you want to install: [Fix] Unable to Select Windows 10 Pro Edition During Clean Installation – AskVG - adding the ei.cfg file means it asks you what edition you would like to install. I assume you use OVS licensing for your devices, otherwise do be aware that if the machines didn't come with Pro as standard, you will need to license these.

Does anyone have a better method of sharing calendars with staff on the same domain within Outlook/Office 365? Currently, it is a right pain. Staff A shares their calendar with Staff B. Staff B accepts but has to manually add the calendar to Outlook - and this doesn't always pull through. We have to then do the same vice-versa, and I find myself going back and forth updating share permissions and adding calendars. Am I missing something obvious? I've investigated creating shared calendars (e.g., an SLT calendar) but the calendars are so full it will cause more chaos to try and move them over.

Good to get some insight from another Special School. We have similar systems in place to differentiate the iPads - and they are all labelled clearly. Obviously, this is never full proof. I currently have a box of around 20 iPads all with broken screens. They are all iPad 2s and there's no reason for us to get these repaired now - they are well past their time. I was hopeful there may be an alternative, but would rather get something that is going to last.

Some staff do make use of their iPads for photo/videos too, I think it'll be a case of we need to spend a bit more for something that will last. Thank you all for your thoughts.

We're a SEN SLD (Severe Learning Disabilities) school. Chances are they will end up damaged/broken - the main reason they don't have desktops in the classes. We don't use projectors/interactive whiteboards, so the only real use of the laptops is for planning, assessment etc.

We currently use various systems within school (all of which are web based), for use in assessment (SOLAR) and safeguarding (CPOMS). Previously, under the old IT Manager, classes had an iPad which they could use to access these. I am in the process of reviewing the iPads within school and find some are now too old to be compatible with the systems - or some classes just don't have an iPad! Does anyone else have a similar set-up or can recommend an alternative? At nearly £300 an iPad, it is hard to justify one for every class - and stretch my budget to that. Teachers have laptops, but SLT would rather these were not out while students are in the class. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

This happened to me a few weeks ago with iPads - like you the only way I could get a connection was to set a static IP address, then turn back to DHCP. Following to see if anyone has a definitive solution to this.

We make use of Zoom for the occasional online meeting, but wherever possible I steer people towards Teams. We have the Microsoft licenses, so see no reason to use Zoom. Like yourself, external agencies often lean towards Zoom - it's the only real reason it still exists on our systems. While no official guidance has been published from my searches, it seems a lot of the security issues have been resolved. See these interesting articles from TechTarget: How secure is Zoom video conferencing? (techtarget.com) and Toms Guide: Zoom security issues: What's gone wrong and what's been fixed | Tom's Guide (tomsguide.com) both published this year. I think the base of it is - it's safe to use generally, but I'd be wary if discussing any confidential details. NB: Also, since 30th June 2022 Zoom has put back the 40-minute time limit for meetings for educational institutions - another reason I advise staff to use Teams.

Glad to find this forum, hoping lots of helpful people will be able to provide me with some knowledge and insight into managing IT. I'm working as an IT Technician in a Special School, as the only IT person in the building I am effectively the IT Lead (managed by the SBM). I'm hoping to get some understanding of best practices, documentation and general tips and tricks for working in the industry. I'm sure many threads like this exist, so please feel free to point me in that direction too. What documentation is a must have? I have created a Network diagram and simple diagrams of our data cabinets - should I be keeping anything else well documented? I have old documents of Computer set-ups, which is essentially a tick-list of applications to install, is there a better way of doing this? We are a Microsoft school, currently still on-prem AD but moving to the cloud is our next steps. We use Office 365 for email and office licensing, how do you manage users that have left? Do we have an obligation to keep emails for a certain period (or is this based on our schools/LAs policies)? Any tips. tricks or thoughts would be appreciated, trying to expand my knowledge and bring the school up to speed in the IT world. Edit: Also, any worthwhile training courses that you can recommend would be helpful.

That is great to see, thank you! I had actually come across ICT Direct a while back, but they completely fell of my radar! In comparison, the Surface SE I had been recommended has 8gb Ram and 128gb eMMC storage for £250 These seem built to last!

We provide various members of staff with laptops to do work from home, and for use in school at times. Currently, some laptops are outdated and wonder what other people use for staff laptops to upgrade these as a cost-effective solution. The plan soon is to move to using laptops as the primary device, so they need to be good enough to be day to day devices. We're currently using an on-prem AD solution, but will be moving to a cloud Azure AD solution within the next 1-2 years. I've looked at the Microsoft Surface SE built for education (and the cloud), but feel the specs of these are a bit lacklustre, and will end up needing replacement more often - does anyone have experience in using these for staff? Any thoughts or ideas are welcome, as I am fairly new to the IT profession in education.