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Just looking at some matt or semi-matt whiteboards and wondering if anyone has more recent advice to give since the above - searching suggests Sahara or Magiboards are best for the space we have. Magiboards have pricing on their website, Sahara do not (which puts me off). Thanks

An important distinction may be between secondary and primary schools and their respective use of interactive board/screen/projector facilities (and also between departments or groups of departments within secondary) [i appreciate this was a quick poll to get some idea of the data out there, but it is quite feasible that primary schools have proportionately more interactivity than secondaries based on my personal experience visiting former and teaching in latter within a single county]

We used Virgin Business broadband (direct) for 6 years. When we asked for quotes to renew they were uncompetitive and hardly moved on price. Their back-end admin is not good. Took weeks to get the right bill when we renewed part way through. Finally extracting ourselves was a right PITA. Not sure we would risk them again (though ironically our new underlying connection is actually a different pair of fibres in the same cable provided by Virgin!) HOWEVER - technical support was excellent - both firewall and DNS teams. First class. Helpful, patient and very competent. Connection was very reliable, though this may depend on location I guess.

Thanks - unsure of camera(s); direct editing of camera footage would be bonus, but with the limited time available [hopefully] reducing length and shooting ratio, then some transcoding before editing is not the end of the world. Had not thought of WeVideo in this context - will have another look. Might need to be careful about storage, retention and data protection, in case the students get a little introspective and/or angst-ridden. Might give us another option however.

See what you mean.

Thanks for all the prompt replies. An interesting mix so far. A follow up question please - how relevant/important are 'AfterEffects' features for A level Media Studies? If yes, then can/does Final Cut or DaVinci Resolve do the same kind of thing? (or is there separate package, at extra cost) thanks

We are kitting out a room which will be partly used for A level Media Studies. Likely hardware will be iMacs. Question is: what software for video editing? Choice seems to be between: Adobe Premiere Pro Final Cut Pro X or maybe DaVinci Resolve or Lightworks or ? or maybe iMovie is sufficient? In the past I might have argued a case for Serif MoviePlus, but this is discontinued and the choice of iMacs is partly to add extra flexibility for rooming the teaching of photography/music tech. Looked around web - many comparisons found but primarily aimed at enthusiastic amateurs or [semi-]professional film-makers. Example - interesting and educational but not really aimed at school level implementation given our parameters appear to be: a) complexity/depth for learning about Media at A level b) smaller projects than most/many productions c) students have other stuff to learn, and other subjects (and hopefully a life as well) and thus limited time to learn software and implement a project (alongside other media projects) Complication is that with the move to Computing at KS4, there is no formal IT teaching after age 14 (at least here) where some video manipulation skills could be taught. Situation not helped by the exam board - although the spec has not been finally approved (at time of writing) it is possible/likely they may 'expect' software capable of delivering complexity beyond needs of most students (or the time they have available) - even if not explicitly. We already have site licence for Adobe CS4 (excl Premiere). Upgrading to AdobeCC would benefit Photography and the school publications team (not least as sooner/later CS4 will not be supported). However, the feeling from my research and comments from Media teachers is that Final Cut is more accessible. From financial/whole school point of view Adobe would be the better way forward but is Premiere Pro going to be a bridge too far* for students/staff to assimilate in the time available? (thus making the extra investment in Final Cut worthwhile) We would welcome views/experience from other schools delivering A level Media Studies. - thanks in advance. (have seen similar questions here from a few years ago, but things have moved on and/or were not aimed at A level specifically) *apologies for over-used cliche

We have more than 200 staff users and have not hit this - guessing because we share to a group which is likely what google expect rather than 200 individuals.

Thanks @rama1712 - so not very different to the existing local system - we have to do an upload/update from the nominated workstation for that. Not sure why they have not used Groupcall or other sync to do this overnight - wondering if we can call the upload job using a schedule so it is not dependent on that person logging in (they work part time, varying hours).

Excuse me if i have misunderstood but how does the MIS information get up to their online database if there is no sync? ... and is there still a local SCO client or does it all work through a browser? TIA

Thanks for your prompt and detailed reply, and also to others for their suggestions. Our QNAP experience sounds very familiar - random reboots - very frustrating. Further digging suggests that the HP P2000 is in fact a DotHill underneath. We were unsure about QSAN initially but increasingly interested in that, and your positive comments reinforce that. QSAN have been recommended as the replacement (500-P20) with options for dual controller and additional SAS disks.

We have recently had a bad experience with a QNAP SAN box and do not trust it any more (following bad firmware update that could not be fixed by the QNAP engineers). It has taken some time to get things back using a 'lifeboat' SAN box (older Intel running Openfiler), and fortunately we had 2 other (Openfilers) that have carried us through. So now we are looking for a replacement and it seems to come to these three (not in any order) from our various contacts: HP P2000 DotHill AssuredSAN 3530 QSAN S300Q (each would have 6x600Gb fast SAS disks, and 6x3TB 'ordinary' SAS disks, configured in RAID6) The QNAP was running iSCSI but our preference is towards a direct SAS solution as we only have 3 VMware hosts and do not anticipate that changing for the foreseeable. It would appear that SAS would provide better performance etc We would welcome the benefit of others' experience in using any of the above (or something very similar) and in particular support should there have been need to use it. Many thanks in advance

Just a note to say that Google Apps Password sync (GAPS) allows AD-Google password synchronisation. (as opposed to GADS for directory sync - which you have already)

No we did not find a solution in the end, sorry. We wrote some python to process the xml as it stands ignoring the extra info. Not as elegant but did the job. Then of course the goalposts changed and so we have not pursued it. Paramdef did not appear to have a bearing as far as we could understand it in the timeframe we had.

... or dare I suggest Google Drive/Docs? May depend on your attitude to MS and/or Google.

Thanks. We are using CamTimer to give built in delay for taking pictures rather than try and press button from 'wrong' side. Just need to hold it really still! (or lean on something)

A couple of ideas so far - Skitch - to annotate photos, maps etc (and Evernote to upload/share it - along with voice text and photo notes) Google Tracks - to record journeys, field trip transects etc and of course Google Docs/Drive to prepare docs, spreadsheets/graphs and presentations - collaboratively if need be (and to access them from PCs, home etc later)

Our Geography department has invested in some Nexus 7 tablets and have started using them in class - initially as an on-line reference tool, which looks promising so far. Wondering if Geography colleagues elsewhere are also using similar devices (preferably android) - and if we can compare notes on potential ideas (or apps) for their use in and out of the classroom - eg fieldtrips being an obvious example. The benefit of others' experience (both good and bad) would be helpful - or simply a point of contact I can pass on to our HoD Geography. TIA

Thanks for that XML reference - we recognised the x0020 as 32 = space from the old ASCII days - and UTF equivalent. The escape sequence makes sense. What is still a puzzle is why SIMS generates the report one way manually (without escape sequence, but with a caption in the schema), and fully with escape sequence via commandreporter. Will have another go at paramdef in case there is a setting in there to force one or the other, unless someone else already knows and can help out here.

We are running SIMS commandreporter successfully to generate csv data out of SIMS. However, we are aware that it would be better to export the data in XML (not least as a spurious comma in some student data recently caused a minor hiccup). XML is a [relatively] new venture for us for this kind of thing (CSV has worked till now so we have not fixed it), but it seems that Python is adept at handling it and so progress drags us forward (another spinning plate). A [test] report has been created to list the classes of students. (see attached pdf, slide 1) Commandreporter generates the xml shown in slide 2 - note the attribute 'multiple IDs' and the 'x0020' in the middle of the attribute labels (hex for the space in the field name in SIMS?) When run manually from SIMS it generates the XML shown in slide 3. No multiple IDs and no 'x0020' in the middle of attribute names. However in the schema the attributes have a 'caption' of the field name. The question is a)why the difference? and b) is the x0020 consistent or might it change (if it is derived from something other than my guess) [would be better/simpler for coding if we can get commandreporter to generate the simpler 'manual' xml] OK that was 2 questions. [No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.] Any constructive help/advice gratefully received, even if only to confirm this is expected behaviour and we have to live with it (should others have come across this also). We did try to generate a paramdef file in case that is relevant, but it did not make much sense to us (other than date fields referred to in other posts). If it helps our cmd file for comandreporter is as follows: "\\server\c$\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS .net\commandreporter.exe" /USER:username /PASSWORD:**** /SERVER:server /DATABASE:dbase /REPORT:"_xxxx_StudentClassesx(xx)" /OUTPUT:"\\server2\m$\xxxx\xxxxx\StudentClassesx.xml" (comparable syntax works fine for CSV files and when run from CLI) Have not found specific reference to this question in other posts here. TIA xmlvariation.pdf

We are looking at rolling out python to some areas for same reasons. I acknowledge SimpleSi's principle and this will apply in 95+% cases at our school. However every so often we get someone who wants to 'experiment' (not a bad thing), but they may also be someone who knows less than they think they do and/or someone who is relatively immature in applying such principles (the nature of [some] school students). So - just wondering if people have now tried this, before we have a go and reinvent the wheel. Also if any particular distribution of python is better to deploy on a curriculum network than others ('vanilla', ActiveState, Portable etc) and any pitfalls to avoid .... [personally prefer PyScripter to IDLE] TIA