localzuk

We live in a cloud world now. There is no reason I can think of that staff cannot check email on a personal device. We have suitable controls in place if they use a phone, in that we can delete their data remotely if we need to but that's about it. The governor shouldn't be telling you how to do things anyway. They can provide advice, but you are not required to do what a governor says - they are not an employee, or a manager. They are governance. Operational decisions belong to the headteacher.

All well and good, but that is them trying to force their way of thinking on schools. Not all schools have staff that want to spend time faffing configuring Classrooms. The reality of schools is that we sometimes need to get involved to help/fix things that the teacher doesn't know about. Which brings me on to another thing - why can Classroom settings not be configured when they're created by the API? Eg. turning off posting on the feed? Why is this something every teacher has to do on every classroom they're the teacher of?

Why after all these years of it existing does G Suite/Google Workspace have such a poor set of admin tools? A couple of examples. Why is a huge amount of the admin limited to being done via GAM - a third party tool that hooks into their API? Why isn't there a web interface for every feature? Google is a web company after all... Why do I have to resort to GAM to edit a Google Classroom as an admin? Why can't I access all Classrooms via the admin panel, like I can do with Groups? Why do I have to use GAM to delegate rights to an email account? Why can't I do this from the user page in the admin panel? Sure, it is free for the G Suite Education package. But they still get a lot of money from us via all our use of Chromebooks. We are also considering paying for the paid Education offering for some staff so they can record Meets long term. All of these things should be easy to use and in the admin panel. I shouldn't have to train someone how to use GAM to do basic admin tasks! Come on Google, up your game. Especially as you've just announced a 58% increase in pricing for the Chromebook management licenses!

Odd, as for ours, the IPs the RDP service run on are not AWS at all. They're dedicated machines hosted by Blackbox Hosting in a LINX datacenter. That applies to both the gateway address and the website side of things. I'm not sure what your connection is doing but it should literally be a connection to port 443 on the domains gateway.psfcloud.com and the domain for your PSPurchasing address. That's the lot. That's all that gets a connection when I look at our users. I wonder if they've started hosting the non-gateway hosts on AWS since ours was set up.

Yes, you don't actually use it like that. You have a single Windows server that hosts everything, then an RDP file which connects via their gateway to your server. The purchasing side of things is hosted in IIS on your server, and you connect to it via a dedicated URL for your server.

We have a number of PTP leased lines and an Internet leased line as well (with FTTC fail over), all from Exa. We also have a couple of standard BT Business FTTC lines for 2 nurseries. We then have Sophos XG that we bought extremal to Exa, with a RED device in each nursery to give a vpn back to the central site.

I'm not sure I understand any claims that a laptop for a teacher is a bad investment. An average laptop will last a good 5 years these days. Say you spend £500 on it. Are those schools seriously saying the investment of £100 a year is not worth it, when they're paying those members of staff £30k a year etc? Seems like quibbling over pennies in the scheme of things to be honest. We expect staff to teach using modern technologies, so we should be providing the equipment for them to do so.

Not sure it'd make any difference to education users, as we get unlimited storage. They'd have to limit us first.

I think the terminology is being a little confusing. Apple are saying they get more performance vs power usage. That doesn't mean more performance overall. But yes, I do think x86 is slowly going to die unless Intel and AMD innovate significantly in the power/performance game soon.

When we were a single school still, I redid our website twice, it got redone by the head's PA, then they paid someone to redo it externally. The result was the same every time. The design was fine. It looked good and did the job. But the content was always out of date, so we'd get comments about how the website was bad. Hence the constant redesigns. Since being a MAT, we've paid a company to do all our sites. We also have someone in the Trust who keeps them up to date. I don't touch them at all. My advice, if you can get rid of looking after it, do it. It isn't IT. It is marketing, and someone doing marketing should be dealing with it.

That's astonishing.

We have been gradually replacing all our VGA only IWBs with touchscreens that have HDMI over the last 5 years or so. We've got about 20 rooms out of 90+ to go. A lot of our newer projectors accepted HDMI anyway, so we've retrofitted HDMI leads onto those too. So, in reality, we only have a handful of devices which are VGA only, so we just give those teachers adapters. DVD drives? We don't really care about them any more. Only 2 departments still use DVDs - French and English. So, we just made sure they get USB DVD drives. Everyone else doesn't even notice.

The embedded scanning in Papercut is excellent. We gcds it set up so you can scan direct to your Google Drive, so that PDF files are made searchable via the built in OCR capabilities etc... What can Equitrac do that Papercut can't in this respect?

There are various cloud based filtering solutions out there and they aren't that expensive if you're buying just a few licenses etc...

So, to answer my own question - updating to a later version of GCDS added an option that prevents the sync deleting roles or groups that aren't in AD.

I want to set up a group in G Suite, sync'ed from AD that has all our staff as members. However, I only want a small list of people to be able to email the list, so I need to set them up as managers and give only the managers rights to post. BUT if I do this, when GCDS runs it strips their group role, and resets them to members again. How can I set up this group to sync automatically, but also have custom role assignments to people in the group?

For basic doodling on screen, we link to Google Canvas - https://canvas.apps.chrome/ Also, Sketchpad - https://sketchpad.app/

I think it is a wake up call for schools that 1:1 schemes are the way forward to be honest! It is entirely doable within existing budgets - we've managed it without increasing our IT costs (and we own the devices, we're not getting parents to buy them).

The tokens are no longer yours when you hand them over. Computers are still yours, as you retain ownership, and therefore responsibility. So, as the owner you're covered by the KCSIE statutory guidelines, and legally have to provide appropriate filtering. If the devices belong to the LEA, then the responsibility is there's instead.

We have ours in QNAP rackmount NASs. Specifically TVS-EC1580MU-SAS-RP, with 10GbE network cards. We have 2 of them, with 10 of the SSDs in each. All in RAID6. The performance difference between SSD and legacy disks is considerable, that RAID10 is not necessary. We have 40+ VMs running our 6 schools from this setup without the slightest performance issue.

600GB disks are very small these days to be honest, and overpriced. We switched from SAS drives to SATA SSDs 5 years ago and have had zero issues. A Samsung PM883 1.92TB is about £290, compared to Dell's list price of more than £400 for a 600GB SAS drive!

I have never went looking for them in ASM/DEP - it all just works and they end up in the MDM. If there's no devices in Mosyle yet, I would contact the supplier as they should be there.

Server address: mc.edugeek.net FTB University can be downloaded via the FTB Launcher We are using version 1.2.0 Note: This is a large pack, make sure you give it at least 8GB RAM to use! Oh, and it takes ages to load, so make a cuppa while you wait! To whitelist yourself to access this server, you need to be a member of this website, you need to add your Minecraft username to your profile, and then you need to wait until the sync next runs - it runs every 3 hours from 00:00BST. Up to date information is always available via the Discord channel. You do not need to join the Discord server to access the Minecraft server. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/gaming/186223-edugeek-discord-live-chat-server.html Announcing the next EduGeek Minecraft server - FTB University

It's that time again... This server is now offline. Details of a new server to follow.

Yes, once they are in your DEP account, and your MDM is linked up to that same account, your MDM should automatically sync them across to it. In Jamf school, they appear in a dedicated DEP devices section only at first. Via that, you assign the profile etc... So, when they then get turned on and get that profile, they then also appear in the MDM's normal devices section - where you can apply changes/apps/etc...