Bev

We are a not a rural local authority at all. They are putting it out to tender, and it will be for the council as well as all the schools. A number of schools, including us, currently have a Wifi link, which is around years old. Ours has been fine, but I know a lot of schools find it's very unstable, so they are trying to replace them all and have a more robust infrastructure.

We are currently on a Wireless connection through our council which works pretty well. They are removing this option shortly and will be investing in a dark fibre solution across the council. If we want to obtain our connection from the council, we have to commit to a 25 year payment on a new fibre (just the fibre, we can change providers for the rest after 5 years) I am a bit dubious about committing to anything for 25 years. If I look back to 1998, I couldn't have predicted what technology we would be happy with now, so I am loathe to commit to 25 years going forward. Going it alone, means sourcing ir ourselves (Virgin and BT are on our street but I don't know if there offerings are suitable for a school), but also taking on the support / filtering and firewall. Has anyone else committed to 25 years? it was presented as a logical option but it seems like madness to me!

This is an old post, but I just wanted to say that using Apple Configurator to put it into Single App mode and back out again has worked for me today. Also, I had to download a Supervision Identity from JAMF and add it to Apple Configurator to allow it to update the iPad. I had somehow missed that option previously and I think that will make apple configurator much more useful going forward.

We have had 1-1 iPads for6 years, it has been a success here. We started with Year 5 (we run years 5-8), and then added the new year 5s in each year, so it took 4 years to get it fully 1-1. We had 3 teachers in Year 5 who were keen to use the iPads in the classroom which really helped to launch the scheme, and over the first 4 years the other staff saw what they were doing and we also offered training. We did have an old class-set that other classes could use before we were fully 1-1. We offer a choice of lease, provide your own (not BYOD exactly, as it has to be registered on our systems to be used in school), or school will provide one. We have about 10% using a school device. School iPads have a lot of limits on their use, no personal apps etc, they are only used for schoolwork. Personal iPads have more freedom on the use outside of school hours. All iPads have the same school layout applied during the school day. I agree, you need a set of spares as they do get forgotten or broken. You will need a good lease scheme including insurance as they do get broken. I send away approx 2 iPads a week for repair. Your lease provider should recommend an MDM - we started with Lightspeed but have now moved to JAMF - I prefer JAMF but they all work pretty much the same. We don't have charging trolleys, each classroom has a USB multi-charger and a number of cables in it. I really wasn't keen when it was presented to me as an idea, but I can see that it has transformed the way our school works. The iPads are now integral to everything we do. And it made that first lockdown very easy - everyone already had an iPad, and google classroom, so we were able to get started straight away. Hopefully it won't be an issue going forward, but it was a huge bonus for us. If you have any questions, I am happy to help. I was very sceptical but I am a convert!

Exactly this, I find it quite hard to work with 2 windows on the same screen, even though it feels like it would be more comfortable rather than having to look to the side for my second monitor. I didn't know about snap to left / right, so I might give that a try in the future.

as so often seems to be the case, after I post on here I find the answer myself. But I will share it in case it affects anyone else. It is possible to disable javascript on the iPad within safari. It needed to be reenabled. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-enable-javascript-on-ipad?r=US&IR=T

We are having issues logging into Seesaw on some of our iPads. The google login gives an error saying Javascript is required and to use a different browser, however, we aren't in a browser, it's just the popup Google login box that you use when you use the google login to access an app.

That is really helpful. I just need to work out how many I-02 marks they each have, which I can do seperatly and then combine the two reports.

We have added the covid subcode onto our pupils who are absent with covid, and would like to work out their attendance, without penalising them for being off with COVID. I can print out all the covid marks but I can't work out how to just get a count of them. I need a list of students and the number of sessions they attended, were absent due to non-covid reasons, and sessions absent due to covid reasons? is there a way to get a count of items in a subreport rather than a list of all the items?

We have the Develop Ineo copiers, We have a pull printing system on them which I like. We haven't had many major issues with them, certainly no better or worse than what we had previously.

We use Jigsaw24, we run a 3 year parent lease scheme, Parents order through an online portal. We have an separate portal where we can track parent payments on all iPads and check progress on any insurance claims made. It all works very well, and I'm happy to recommend them. If you want any more details about how the scheme works, feel free to get in touch.

We will be looking to renew our ICT Suite next summer. We have previously used Stone and VeryPC, but I am looking for a couple of other suppliers to get a quote from. We will be after 48 all in one style PCs (Either genuine All in one, or a mini pc mounted on the back of a monitor) on a 4 year lease. Any suggestions welcome. thanks

AssetTiger is free upto 250 Assets. We have 667 assets (although I am not sure how!) and pay $200 per year. You could certainly give it a try and see if you like it.

We also use Asset Tiger, it used to be free, but now there is a small charge. Works well for me though

We user a Konica pull printing system which requires the printer to use a specific port. I have this setup on the server, and it was happily pushed out using a GPO as a deployed printer. However, we needed to update the driver on the server today, and now the printer will only deploy through GPO when I login (with admin rights), it won't deploy for anyone one. Even if I have logged in first, it still doesn't appear for the other users. If the other user is logged in, and I manually install the printer, entering my admin details during the install, then the printer does stick around. But I can't do that for every user/computer combination. I can't use the control panel GPO option, as it pulls in the IP Address as the port, rather than the specific port the pull printing system uses. I have read through this thread, but I am none the wiser. Is there a step by step foolproof guide on how to install a printer in this brave new world after the latest MS update?

it looks like it is a setting you can set on a group. I created these groups using GAM so maybe I have inadvertently set the setting? I didn't know it existed so I wouldn't have checked for it.

just to add, I discovered a user in the group called 'All Users', I've never seen that before but I have promptly deleted it!

I have a google group setup for a class. Messages sent to it on Tuesday just went to that class. Two messages sent today have been sent to the entire domain. I can't see any reason for it. Any one had this happen before?

344 in Jamf - with another 90 due to be added next month. I have recently added about 100 which I moved over from Lightspeed, so I don't know if the increase in number is an issue

No, I don't think we have a caching server.

Is anyone else having issues with Jamf School? At least once a day I can't get logged in, I get a 503 Service Unavailable No server is available to handle this request. It normally resolves within 5 minutes, but when you are in the middle of something it's not helpful. I'm also finding that where is used to be extremely fast to update any changes to an iPad, it is now taking 5-10 minutes. As in if I add an iPad to a new group, the related profiles don't appear on the list even as pending for quite a while. It used to be they would appear as pending immediately and then install quite quickly after that, but now the profile list can remain empty for sometime. I have literally just moved all of our iPads from Lightspeed to JAMF over the last year, and I am quite concerned that it's not working half as well as it was last year...

I have a spreadsheet with all the kids information in it, and the spreadsheet from the Gov.uk website, but it won't let me paste from one to the other. Why it thinks it is more accurate for me to retype what the parents have entered, I have no idea! Is there anyway to paste into a protected spreadsheet?

All of our managed appleids are in the format, appleid.schooldomain.org.uk I am in the process of verifying schooldomain.org.uk, but I can't verify appleid.schooldomain.org.uk as I don't own it, it was a format created automatically by Apple when I first set up the system. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212275 Seems to suggest that we will lose access to all the appleids using this format appleid.schoolschooldomain if we don't verify it. Is there anyway we can do that? Considering it doesn't actually exist? I don't particularly fancy having to change the account on every iPad, and I assume we will lose everything saved to the iCloud (photos / backups etc).

We had a Teams meeting last week where a group of students were giving a presentation to an external group of people. We had the meeting reflected onto a TV, which meant that the other people on the meeting had a terrible echo as the webcam picks up the sound from the TV. Is there anyway around this??

We have for all intents and purposes. We do have a server, but the staff barely use it, everything they use day to day is stored in the google drive. It works very well, but we have been doing this for quite a few years now and it has taken a while to get everyone used to it. We use google docs for all documents as well, so they are doing everything within the google system, rather than just using it for storage.