ICT_GUY

It is a case of keep it simple. We already have in excess of 400 windows laptops with their own user accounts. Plus a computer suite, and 50 staf computers. 24 IWB The ipads are literally going to be used as cameras and with a few managed apps. On the hours I have I have to keep admin to a minimum. 27hrs does not go far on a network of this size. The ipads will be locked down with meraki, and it is for primary school kids. also the wifi network they are on is heavily restricted. It is the way it has been done before, so here's hoping it will be good enough for the next 6 years.

That is exactly what I wanted to know. I had worked out that they are supervised just by being dep enrolled to asm. Apple just makes me stressed about messing up and doing something stupid. BTW I posted this in the wrong forum, just saw the sticky. Sorry. :-(

I have done this before but it was 10 years ago. School Manager is set up. I have a new mac mini. The ipads are listed under school manager. I am waiting for the meraki licensing to come through. I don't mind researching the steps, I would love someone to give me an idea what those steps are. As far as i am aware, I set up a new meraki network, add the licences for the mdm to it. Add the apple certificate that i create in school manager. Then do the MDM profiles student , teacher ect. I want to set them up without apple ids as they will be shared devices. So is this still correct? Now the real questions. I am unsure about supervision, where to enable, would you use apple configurator, or enable via school manager. Is there a way of automating the initial setup. So I don't have to manually go through 75 setups adding wifi answering the questions ect to get to the point where meraki mdm app is installed. Any help, I just don't want to royaly mess things up. So any resources, guides or even a list of things to read up on. even a list of steps that you recommend.

Good point well put, we used to use the old mac mini for this but it stopped working awhile back. Then again the mac mini was from 2014 :-/

Generally it would only be used when things go wrong with them. Doesn't happen often but it is a pain in the bum using windows and itunes. Though using itunes on a windows PC is not that bad, it still add another layer to things that apple can do to make your life harder. because it's windows not a mac. More so that I will manage the MDM school manager ect all on the min via a kvm, not needed at all and not even a good reason. However having an old 2014 mac mini that has been used to fix various snafus quickly in the past was a godsend. Plus and why shouldn't I get a nice shiny m4 mac mini to complement my shiny new i7 PC? /s

So much for the cheap option. Looks like the head wants 50 ipads, miraki mdm and mac mini. Oh well. Thanks for the info though, my other school may go down that route. :-/

So the current version of google apps that we have had for a very long time only has basic functionality?

Has anyone tried this already? I am interested in trying android phones as cameras for the following reasons. You don't have to have a sim card. Google apps for education should be able to managed them (not played with this yet). Their free MDM version should be adequate. Camera quality of a £100 smart phone is way above cheap chineseium digital cameras. Staff can have their work gmail accounts on the phones and auto upload to google photos on that account making accessing the photos super easy. Class dojo should work nicely. Can locate lost phones via the MDM. A motorola smart phone for £100 is both robust, easy to use, decent ish camera, can be made obviously a school device with a clear phone case and a logo underneath it. Easy to take on school trips. The MDM allows phones to be wiped, locked ect. also enforce security in case they are lost. Anyhow, any feedback welcome. Any ideas on why it would or wouldn't work?

This was a brand new cursed install last year. It was supposed to be a hands off install. It was very much a guy on the end of the phone trying to fix the BS the first install team and second team did. Even the second on site installer failed to do the basics like make sure the sfps where the same speed either end of the fiber runs. Even when it was running at 1/10th the speed it should have been. I spotted it after he gave up after 2 hours trouble shooting in about 5 minutes Anyhow, it was all done remotely and I only got to look at the system after it was up and running. Then I made the cardinal sin of believing that because it was working it must have been done right

Had an outage this week, our very expensive meraki network started playing up. Then various switches became uncontactable. During the whole trouble shooting I noticed a number of settings that had not been changed since the initial install and a number of typos. Remember it is always a DNS problem. Seems like one of the DNS servers at RM was misbehaving and the second DNS server specified in the switch config was missing a crucial number. This caused them to not be contactable, and my blood pressure to rise. You are never ever going to be as popular as you are when teachers can't access the internet. Everyone wanted to talk to me that morning, it was nice to feel wanted for once :-) Anyhow after resetting everything to the way it should have been setup, and then rebooting everything came online. Moral of this story, always check your DNS settings especially if someone else set them up. :-)

We had a full extreme network. CLI was good, and easy to pick up. Chat GPT now makes it even easier to manage. The main issue we had was with the support contract. Also firmware updates were linked to the licensing. Even though we were licensed and had a support contract getting updates never actually happened. In another school I had cheap layer 3 switches. no licensing issues, no firmware issues, easy to set up and manage cost £500 each. Now in my current school we have meraki cloud managed switches that cost the tax payer an absolute bomb. But they are easy to manage when setup correctly.

I will be in contact over the next week or two.

So really simply, as a large primary we are currently paying nearly £5k per year with a well known school internet provider in the South West. 1Gbs FTTP connection with filtering and monitoring (CLUNKY). The quality of service goes down, the prices go up. If anyone has moved away from the default provider and gone it alone, maybe with smoothwall or other filtering service could you let me know any of the following. Basic cost per year. Broadband, filtering, what router / hardware was used. Setup time. How difficult was it to replace what was in place before. This is only sending out feelers at the moment. The thought of taking on more responsibility is a little daunting. So if there are other fully managed providers you have experience with I would also be interested. All information appreciated.

There was something I read about school devices used at home being monitored? Does anyone do this and how do you do it? The main issue I have at the moment is just to satisfy ofsted that we filter and and monitor enough.

All advice welcomed at this point! We have user based filtering with RM. We have alerts in place for safeguarding and concerning sites visited. The head at one school wants to keep an eye on staff usage of the internet for reasons. This under the guise fo Keeping children safe in education. Personally I can't see there being valid reasons for what he is asking, it may even breach GDPR. Though I am guessing that the Key Logging alertng software has stuff in place to protect passwords and sensitive information. Such as SEN leads using wording that is sensitive in corespondance, then a confidential emails is effectively leaked to SLT or myself. It really is a can of worms I am not interested in opening. Other heads have basically tackled this with a robust usage policy and the fact that if a member of staff is using the network illegally we will be alerted. If for example they are shopping during lessons we would not be alerted. Apart from the absudity of a member of staff having time to surf the internet during lessosns, and the rediculous idea that no body would flag this up. Kids are particulary good at keeping those sort of secrets. /s Plus there are always T.A's in class. So what are your thoughts and do you regulalry search through users browsing history, and or use computer monitoring software of the type that screen shots PCs when dodgey stuff is detected? Have you looked into the professional and ethical usage of such software and the legality of it? The main thrust of this is that it would be used on staff as well as students. Where as I would notmaly exspect it only to be used to monitor students. Also this is in a primary not secondary setting.

We have been a vanilla windows network for the past 18 years. It is purely an internet connection we use them for.

Movie maker was so easy to use even teachers could use it. /s

It is just for broadband. One connection, with filtering options. Firewall as well. I could do this in house but I will never be given the hours to manage the service. The filtering options would need to be userbased, as we use userbased filtering with RM. Any options for better monitoring of students for safeguarding would definitely be nice. At the moment we are using SWGFL and RM purely becuase its managed by them.

Anyone got ideas for what would be the best replacment for RM? To be fair their service levels have been dropping rapidly. Alternative filtering? and or combined provider? This would be for a large primary. We do have two admin networks on the same connection.

Fair point, well made.

It worked. Thats a pretty big win for MS! :-)

Just in case anyone else is fed up with MS making perfectly good products that just work and turning them into trash. Yes I am looking at you clipchamp, I want to edit a video, I don't need or want to create MS accounts. https://shotcut.org/ provides a nice simple video editor. They also provide a portable version. That is important, as you can use their zip file and a start up script to copy it to a local drive. It's not a super fast install but it works. This worked for me with windows 11, just change the paths to suit. Powershell script. $folderPath = "C:\Program Files\videoeditor" $zipFile = "\\server\share\video.zip" $destination = "C:\Program Files\videoeditor" # Check if the folder exists if (-not (Test-Path -Path $folderPath)) { # Create the folder New-Item -Path $folderPath -ItemType Directory # Extract the contents of the zip file Expand-Archive -LiteralPath $zipFile -DestinationPath $destination }

The 65" promethean panels are now £1700. Not a great price but cheaper than they were. £500 per seat, for software thats as buggy as windows vista.

Well its still going strong. It is blocking around 32% of dns queries as being Adverts or survalience traffic. It is blocking this on our main network and BYOD network. No issues so far reported apart from noticeably fewer adverts on websites. It is not 100% simply because some sites host adverts within their domain. Its still at only 20% memory usage and negligible cpu usage. It is currently blocking 700k domains.

Lock screen changing is also dependent on OS version. I fell foul of this a long time ago. Windows education version works easily via gpo. You can also change the Windows version by using a script to change the kms key to an edu key, then activate using your kms key using you KMS key on your DC / kms server.