dhicks

As pointed out already, Alexa might not be the best thing in a corporate / education environment. Google and/or Microsoft's AI offerings might be more suitible - we're looking at how we might use Google's Gemini, which might include a voice assistant type feature. My guess is that microphone placement is going to be a bit tricky, although might be more do-able in a controlled office environment rather than a classroom.

We use iSAMS, which uses SendGrid as its email backend - we pay iSAMS, we don't pay SendGrid directly, although we do get separate access to the SendGrid console to help with any occasional mail sending issues. Mailchimp / Mandrill I think we can pay for via credit card, although I think our mailing list size is still under the free limit at the moment.

We found much the same limitation using GMail - trying to email more than about a dozen people starts to have issues. We make sure all our teacher-parent communication goes through our MIS (iSAMS), which uses SendGrid as its email provider. We do also use Mailchimp for a mailing list, and I've found their transactional email service, Mandrill, to be good as well. I've not used Edulink, but I'm guessing it should be able to give you the option (possibly at an extra cost) of using SendGrid, Mandrill or a similar provider.

Can youy provide any details? This is something I keep meaning to look at (getting a simple list-of-people-in-the-building so I can do a dashboard display of some sort), is Paxton API access a bit fiddly?

That does rather imply the room is on an external wall, in which case an active air filter / cooler / heater venting outside might be an option.

Semicolons: I've always preferred the full-fat version, myself.

We've not had any comments or complaints about latency on touch screens - all our classrooms are on Smart touch screens. If USB connections might make a difference you could possibly offer the DT department an OPS slot PC to go in the board, making the whole thing an integrated "tablet" type device.

Phones are handled by the front desk - senior school pupils are allowed to bring phones to school, they hand them in at the front desk on arrival and pick them up on the way out. When we had a separate senior school building we had a room holding all the Chromebook chargers, pupils could swap their phone for a school Chromebook and leave it on charge (thank goodness for USB-C chargers!). Does need managing (you wind up with a lot of pupils milling around fiddling with cables), and you're best off having solid metal charging units in case of charging issues (overheating / fire) with devices.

That seems like a reasonable specification for a Chromebook, too. You don't actually have to replace your physical Windows machines, you can (probably) simply reformat them with ChromeOS Flex instead. ChromeOS does work on devices other than laptops, so if this is a fixed classroom with desk space you could get PCs with screens and keyboards (cheaper, although more stuff to tinker with - a Mini PC with screen and keyboard will be around £300) or all-in-one PCs. ChromeOS should take care of removing older profiles if it starts to run out of space - I think there's a setting in Google Workspace where you can set the percentage of disk space you want to use for profiles. Best to allow enough disk space so that the machine isn't having to constantly swap profiles in and out, though - 256GB should be a good amount these days.

That's not a huge server by today's standards, I reckon you'd be fine with a second-hand HP server. Forum sponsers ICT Direct (@ICTDirect_Dave) would be the place to start - they can probably do you a two-year-old server complete with warrenty.

Multiple users should be able to log on to a ChromeOS Flex device, just like standard ChromeOS, they just need to click the "Add User" button. Might need a bit of explaning to the users, it's not the most obvious way of logging in.

I've found the X86 version of Raspberry Pi OS to be pretty usable and lightweight, it should install on most things. I have a script from a few years ago that turns it in to a kiosk device, basically replacing the default shell with Chromeium: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/device-config It might need some tweaks to get working with the latest version.

Well, at least it's consistant 🙂 Does a USB wireless dongle work, I never did check on mine?

A while back, we used GBC roll laminators, like this: https://the-laminator-warehouse.com/collections/gbc/products/gbc-ezload-4410020 £700, plus the cost of the laminator rolls. Can handle lots-of-little-bits quite well as you can just keep feeding them in.

We don't allow any of our students (up to GCSE age) print directly, which (somewhat surprisingly) doesn't seem to be a problem. Anything that needs to be printed to be put up as a display or similar gets printed by the teacher (print quotas managed by PaperCut), but materials are mostly accessed online.

+1 for that. We've found ChromeOS Flex generally works very well, although it doesn't support the wireless hardware on our older iMacs (although wired network works just fine). We also had a specific model of NUC (9 devices in the staffroom) which just stopped working one day when ChromeOS did an auto-update to a newer version. We switched those devices for new Mini PCs (one actually on the ChromeOS supported hardware list) with no problems, but for a larger deployment it might have been more trouble / more expensive.

By "connect to the network", do you mean for users (wirth their own devices) to be able to connect to your wired / wireless network? That's not something we implement, but we do implement our Windows machines logging on via Google's LDAP service using the pGina login handler: http://pgina.org/ I found that we couldn't get pGina to connect to Google's LDAP service directly, so we have an intermidate stunnel server: https://www.stunnel.org/ That might help you be able to use LDAP services. If what you mean is you want your school owned/managed Windows devices to be able to log in with Google credentials, then possibly what you want is GCPW, the Google login handler for Windows. There was an issue with login cookies not being passed through to Chrome once logged in, however that seems to hae now been fixed: I'm a bit unsure as to whether GCPW supports USB-based 2FA keys (which we use), I haven't had a chance to test recently and our LDAP-based logins have proven pretty solid, so it's not something I've looked at recently.

Ah! Great, thankyou. I was doing some testing yesterday and it turned out we had a duff USB camera / visuliser, which was causing some confusion. Replaced with a working one, I'll try and get some feedback from the maths department who will be using them. It seems to have worked well! What AI system / tool did you use?

Sorted! Photopea now follows file shortcuts in Google Drive, which means that you can use it to browse the "Classroom" folder generated by Google Classroom. This really was an excellent response from Photopea - I explained the issue, they checked some details and asked a few questions to make sure I wasn't just being daft, and a few days later the fix is in production! Does anyone use their paid-for option, loosing the adverts? Do they have a UK reseller / integrator for schools?

Honestly, I think I prefer yours 🙂 A couple of comments / niggles: - If you zoom in, you don't seem to be able to move / drag to change the zoom-ed area, which would be handy. - Also, if zoomed in, annotation input isn't scaling, so if you try to annotate while zoomed in the input point is offset from the cursor. - We mostly use all-in-ones (or laptops) with built-in cameras. If I add a second camera and try your app I sometimes seem to get a permissions error message, possibly the app is not able to see the second camera? Sorry, I haven't tested that issue very well, I'll try and have a go with a few different cameras.

Ah! Perfect! I made something similar (but more basic) a while back: https://www.sansay.co.uk/pi-view/ But not as many nice, handy features as yours - I was thinking I might re-visit it at some point, but now I don't need to bother 🙂 Is your project free and available for a school to download / self-host on their own servers, just in case they have any privacy concerns about where any data might be being kept? Similarly, a simple data projection / privacy section explaining how it works and what data is stored would be a good idea for schools / corporates with a data protection policy. I'm guessing it's all client-side any no data gets sent to any server, but something explaining that would be handy. Our science department were asking about visualizers the other day, I can point them at your app, most handy.

Hello All, Our ICT department is looking at using Photopea for image editing. This is web-based software - interestingly, it seems to run (mostly) in the browser, and is available as an embedable, customisable HTML/Javascript object. We are aiming to use it alongside Google Classroom - setting the children an exercise in Classroom with some example images to work with, using the "Create a copy for each pupil" option for those files. When we do that, Classroom creates a shortcut in an appropriate folder in each user's Google Drive. However, Photopea doesn't seem to follow shortcuts - it just sees an empty folder. We can get it to open standard image files from Google Drive okay, just not shortcuts. Has anyone else come accross this problem, did you find a solution? I've emailed Photopea support, has anyone else had much experience with them? Is anyone else using Photopea on a regular basis? It does seem pretty neat, the way it's packaged.

As linked to above, there is a documented API for the iSAMS REST API. This is a Swagger-generated API, a tool that helps developers create and REST APIs along with documentation. It tends to do so in a standard way, so one Swagger-generated API works very similar to others, which can be handy. However, something to be careful of: if you are writing, for example, a particular field to a Student record, the "write student record" API call (if I remember correctly) takes an input of a "Student details" object, and you need a whole "Student details" object to write that data, otherwise missing values will be filled with blanks. Your "write" operation actually needs to be a "read record", "ammend record", "write ammended record" operation. It might be best to test with a couple of known accounts before going ahead with your 5,000+ operations.

We tend to go by OS update availability, which gives us around 7 years usage for most hardware. That probably doesn't help very much as equipment still needs to be replaced at some point.

You can add ChromeOS Flex devices to your Google Workspace domain just like any other ChromeOS device - we use cheap £200 mini PCs for a couple of lobby display screens, they came with Windows installed but we installed ChromeOS Flex, joined them to our Workspace domain and use them as managed kiosk devices. If the £30-a-time Workspace management license is too much, then I've found the Raspbian varient of Debian pretty easy to set up as a kiosk device - you can have it just load a web browser instead of a standard desktop. I put a script together a while ago to help sort that: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/device-config The "configKiosk.py" script probably needs updating a bit, I haven't tested / used it on an installed device recently.