Robbocop

OK, a quick follow up to this just for completeness. Apple will let you buy software direct from them if your school is set up to do that. The "shop" page lets you pull the products into a list which you can save and pass on to your purchaser, but unless YOU are the authorized purchaser with Apple, you can't place the order. Talk to Apple to work that out. An authorized Apple reseller should always be able to beat Apple's pricing for hardware because we get a margin to play with, but for software there is no dealer margin available. However, for convenience you might want to order licenses from a dealer anyway, even if it's a quid or two more. Your call as always, but I thought I'd clarify that so you know we're not all trying to rip you off

Thanks Captain! I've fired of a question to Apple to ask what their official line is, but I'm sure you'll agree that if they can quote prices they should be able to sell to you, and if they can't sell to you they shouldn't be quoting unless they quote the prices a reseller can sell them for I'm glad you got your licenses sorted in the end.

Guys sorry to butt in. I work for Jigsaw24 and I'd like to get to the bottom of this for you. We work to the pricing Apple give us as a reseller, as does every other reseller, so if Apple are undercutting the prices they ask us to sell for I'd like to ask them why. Captain, your 45 OS X licences should have been quoted to you at £7.50 per licence - that's £337.50 plus VAT (£405.00 inc VAT). I'm looking through a long list of quotations and I can't see any other prices we've quoted so I'd be keen to find out what happened. i'll check with Apple and see what I can find out for you both. I apologise that you've had a bad experience over this.

Does it have to be Flickr?

I'm not sure if this has already been covered so forgive me if it has. You can obtain 5.1 audio directly out of the optical audio out on modern Macs. Obviously you will only get 5.1 if the media you are playing contains it, and obviously you need a receiver or speaker set with an optical digital input to be able to hear it. There's an article here describing how to get 5.1 from iTunes and from DVD Player. Setting up iTunes and DVD Player for digital surround sound The article which was mentioned in an earlier post About Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapters is really interesting because it shows that not all Macs output audio through their mini display port, and that not all MDP to HDMI adapters can pass multichannel audio. It's worth a look to be sure, but sounds like there's a lot to go wrong ;(

hi guys, iPad Mini is now out, and visible on the Apple site. when we get a chance to play with one we'll know more. I've been playing around with the Puffin browser for iPad, which does seem to work with Flash content like MyMaths and might be worth a look. Sadly I think some of the posts on this thread are correct. Flash has a future for Adobe, but delivering web based content is not necessarily in it! Yes Apple are forcing the move to HTML5, but they were not the only company with concerns about Flash.

stevenwba, someone might have already said this, but just in case: iWork for Mac is a different licence to the Pages/Numbers/Keynote apps for iPad. An iWork site licence is not valid for the iPad versions. Apple have allowed some resellers to sell 20+ volume licences of Mac apps now. We at Jigsaw are one of them, but it's fairly widespread I think. So if you need 20 or more Apertures, Final Cuts, Lions etc you can approach your favourite reseller. Sadly there still isn't a reseller scheme for one-off purchases like a single Lion Server licence or Apple Remote desktop. Hope that's useful.

I advise a little caution here. Bernardita seems to have answered the question about whether it's physically possible to get an iTunes library to play on multiple computers, but has completely avoided the question about whether it is legal to do so in a public space. I think that part of the problem here is the ownership of the material in the first place. I've assumed that the material is owned by the teacher. If that's the case the teacher has the "personal, non-commercial rights" to play the material. If the school purchased the material that might change things. Synack is absolutely right though. even though a school is non-commercial, you still need a performance licence to play any copyrighted music or video in school. The Performing Right Society (PRS) published this brief guide to licensing http://www.prsformusic.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/Schools%20leaflet.pdf and is really helpful if you contact them.

Kris, it is confusing it's true, because the product code does have "Ent" in it. That refers to the Office component, which Microsoft see as an enterprise product. 2UJ-00011 combines Office, the Windows 7 upgrade and the CORE CAL package. If you want the Enterprise CAL package the code you need is 2UJ-00007 DsktpEdu ALNG LicSAPk OLV E 1Y Ent EntCAL - with the EntCAL bit at the end as the only clue It costs about 6 Quid more than the one with Core CAL.

Just as a further comment on the use of Apple wireless Keyboards with iPads: Some things are better - physical keys are great and having symbols like © and £ available without changing pages speeds things up. Some things you get used to on the iPad and they don't work on the keyboard - like hitting space twice to add a full stop. Not a problem though the keyboard functions exactly as you would expect. The bluetooth connection is very immediate and easy. I guess in a classroom or office you might need to number the keyboards which are paired with specific iPads. Although you can't use a mouse with the iPad when you're typing, the arrow keys allow navigation through the document. CMD + Arrow goes to the start or end of the document or the line. ALT + Arrow goes to the start or end of the paragraph or one word at a time on the line. SHIFT + Arrow allows selection of text and you can copy and paste those selections using the standard CMD + C/X/V commands. CMD + A selects the entire document, again as you might expect. This helps minimise the number of times you need to touch the screen, which can be more irritating than you would think

Sorry, I'm confused. If you had Leopard installed on these Macs before they were trashed, and they were running Photoshop, doesn't that mean you have a Leopard compatible version of Photoshop?

Traditionally we've always used a disk share internally, and we can VPN onto that from home. Recently we have been trialling Sharepoint and really like it for lots of reasons. Microsoft tell us that UK customers who prefer to use the online Sharepoint service are guaranteed that their data is only held within the EU, so we think that's a safe bet for anyone who wants to give it a try. With the new EES licensing plan, it's become cheaper to run Sharepoint than it used to be.

I'm liking that Nice one David!

Originally Posted by Robbocop The iPad does not have a keyboard You know what I mean David. If you had to carry a physical keyboard around with your iPad you might as well just have a laptop I do have an Apple wireless keyboard on my desk which I use when I'm in the office, but I don't carry it around. There's a hilarious case I spotted though with a keyboard in it iPad Keyboard Case Hey! Why not buy a gesture based low power device and turn it into an underpowered laptop! http://www.edugeek.net/images/smilies/tongue.png

Great thread guys, with lots of valid reasoning and so far relatively little Mac Bashing, which is nice. Just a couple of things I'd like to add, personal opinions rather than any professional view. The iPad does not have a keyboard, of course, and the on screen keyboard is OK for typing in URLs and emails, but is not a substitute for a mechanical keyboard for involved typing. This becomes worse when using VNC type solutions as some important keys are either missing or hidden away. That misses the point though really. The reason iPad is so interesting is that it's a very different device with different strengths and weaknesses. It's like criticising a microwave oven because it doesn't make good toast If you can't see the benefit of a wholly tactile interface - the whole device is basically a controller - then it's not the right device. Early years pupils absolutely love the iPad because they prefer to use their fingers rather than a pen, mouse or keyboard. They're learning positional and causative skills just by playing with one. "If I do this, something happens" type activities. For SEN we're seeing empowerment on a new scale with these devices, where a traditional PC just can't be used. In Primary it's less clear cut, but as a true instant on device with a massive battery life, great display and very cheap apps it's gaining ground fast. It won't replace the laptop any time soon for typing an essay or running existing software, but in the home the tablet will be a device that people buy INSTEAD OF a computer if what they need is a fast, simply way to browse, view and communicate and very little else. People don't generally need to actually "compute" any more. When Mr Jobs called the iPad 2 a "Post PC device" I don't think he was kidding. Feel free to disagree, because that opens up new ideas but that's how I feel about it.

It's probably best to install fonts in the machine Library folder rather than the User Library folder, unless there's a particular reason you need to restrict them by user? Some font-dependent applications (Sibelius for example) really hate not having their fonts in the machine's Library. Allowing students to install their own fonts might come back to haunt you later

Macbook Airs: You can certainly look at OpenOffice as a good compatible Mac application for your Office 2003 files. Apple Pages is really good at reading all Office files too but you have to remember to EXPORT as Word if you want your file to open on a PC. Macs will bind to AD fine but setting up permissions and policies is something you need a solution for. I would buy a Mac Mini server to handle that, given the relatively small Mac count, but not for file storage. See threads elsewhere on "AD/OD integration" and the "Golden Triangle" for more info. You can use it for image deployment and storage as well. I'm not sure about the encrypted datastick question but I can try to find out if you're stuck. I would buy just one Macbook Air Superdrive that you can just plug in via USB if you need to. Keep it yourself rather than giving it to a teacher. I can sympathise with the extra workload this will mean for you, but it won't be so bad! People keep trying to use iPads as laptops, and that's kind of not the point. It can be done though, and yes they make pretty good terminals. But really they work best as a stand alone consumption or interaction device, as a reader, player or browser, and interacting with cloud based services. If you try to use them to create documents for storage on the network you'll quickly think of them as a poor substitute for a netbook Here's a nice blog about mobile learning using iPads and iPods: Digital Roadtrip

The choice is pretty good these days, but gets smaller the more extras you want. for example, we get asked a lot for cameras with a mic socket. There are hardly any at this sort of price range. The best value one with a mic socket we've found is the Panasonic HDC-SD90, but it's outside your price limit. If you want to use just the built in mic, have a look at the JVC HM330 JVC Latest | Jan & Feb 2010 | Product details | JVC Everio GZ-HM330 or for something pretty good but cheaper, anything in the Canon Legria range.

A few things which might help, I hope: Editing across the LAN is really risky. It can work on just a single machine but it's not recommended. Work using the local drive as a scratch disk and then manually copy the session to network storage if you want to mimic what a design agency or edit studio would do. Shouldn't be too traumatic on a single machine. The format you are editing in will determine the size of the files. Cameras shooting in compressed formats like HDV (tape) or AVCHD (card) have small file sizes but need to render video in order to edit it, so the more edits you make the bigger the file sizes get. If you have small allocations for Home folders you might want to expand those for some pupils, or have a shared storage area on the network for these larger files. You might want to consider partitioning the iMac drive before you install anything so that you have a designated scratch disk partition. Makes it easier to wipe clean once you know everything is safely backed up.

Heh! I know what you mean. The answer as to why the figure looks so low is no doubt that it bumps up the FTE figure so you need to buy more Seriously though EES is working out far cheaper for most of the people we've quoted so far. There might be a slight problem for very small or low IT provisioned schools who haven't been on a School contract before. Regardless of your FTE count you have to hit a minimum points level of 300 unless you've already qualified in the past. Any school already on a School or Campus agreement should be looking at EES.

There are a couple of issues we've come across which you need to be aware of. The most likely scenario for your problem is a permissions error detailed here http://www.sibelius.com/helpcenter/article.php?id=560&languageid=1&searchid=3767859 Also, Sibelius' player can only be used by Sibelius, yet it's an Audio unit. This means that Logic and Garageband can attempt to load it, and generally you'll see an error message to say that the player isn't available. If Garageband has attempted to use it and failed, it can sometimes disappear from Sibelius until you reboot. We normally only see that in a new set up where users are logging in to different Macs that they haven't used before. After that the user prefs should remember that Sibelius Sounds is switched off in Garageband. On networked, managed machines you'll get other odd things like missing Sibelius fonts, as by default Sibelius will try to put the fonts in the user's Fonts folder, not the machine one. Move them and they're fine. Sibelius can be a bit strange both combined with other applications and when on a network. Given that all Macs come with Garageband you'd hope the Audio Unit thing would have been solved by now...

Most people will be on level E pricing and should pay about £35 per staff member for the enterprise desktop suite with Core CAL, and about £43 per staff member for the version with Enterprise CAL. Bear in mind that the total price is worked out on staff head count, but the EES licence does cover all devices on the site. Check the doc link I posted to work out your FTE head count. You can add other things like additional licences (servers and other services), staff copies and student copies, but if you want a proper quotation from a reseller you need to list everything and give us your FTE number. The pricelist is huge and very complex and I wouldn't be comfortable trying to quote anything on the forum. But I hope that gives you an indication anyway.

As localzuk says, pricing is with all us resellers now. Although the program doesn't start till March one of the MS guys at BETT told me that any existing scheme ending in February would not need to be renewed if schools preferred to switch to EES. They'll allow a "grace period" to cover the gap.

EES is indeed based on a fixed sub price per FTE staff count. You can buy individual licences for Win7, Office (Win and Mac versions now) and CALs, or you can buy a desktop suite of all three together. There is a minimum order size of 300 "points" ie it's 1 point per licence so a desktop suite licence is 3 points. However, schools who were on the old Schools scheme with more points than that are not being asked to resubmit to reach the minimum. Kevin, have a read of this document from MS, which is the clearest one I've found so far. http://download.microsoft.com/download/D/7/7/D7702BE5-3FC2-4E3E-9465-35E66EF1AE8C/EES_program_guide.docx

I remember someone asking if there was stop motion animation software available which allowed sound and text to be added to the finished video within the application. Can't find the thread now, but there wasn't much out there. Kudlian have announced version 2 of Icananimate and those functions are now included: Home Version 2 should start to ship in about 4 weeks, and if anyone bought version 1 from December onwards will get it as a free upgrade. If you bought before December you can get a discount off the new version. Enjoy!