dhicks

We gave it a quick try via a free trial account when the web version was announced. It seemed to work okay, at least for basic stuff like opening an image and using the paint brush tool. This was on some older machines, too - I think we even had it working on one of our 12-year-old ChromeOS Flex laptops. Google were promoting the "Chromebook Plus" a few months ago specifically for use with Photoshop - I don't know if you can get hold of a Chromebook Plus-specification device to try it on?

We are, I think, currently paying £22.82 for a box (i.e. 5 reams, 5 * 500 pages = 2,500 pages) of A4. That includes delivery and VAT, and is for recycled, uncoated / unbleached paper, which I seem to remember being around a half-as-much-again premium over standard A4 paper.

We use Google Drive, accesible from ChromeOS and from the Google Drive client installed on all our Windows and MacOS machines. The Google Drive client lets you save files locally (with local performance) and have them automatically sync to the cloud when they can. You can tweak the settings in the Google Drive client installer to allow for larger local caching usage, which might be a good idea. You might have to get users into the habit of checking their files have synced before they log off. I think this all applies to Microsoft OneDrive as well, although that's not something I use every day so I'm not sure. We back our Google Drive (both individual user drives and shared drives) to a local Synology NAS, which then itself gets backed up to a cloud backup provider (Backblaze).

We support ChromeOS, Windows, MacOS and iOS clients within our school. Teachers and office staff generally have Windows machines (which log in via Google credentials), with the Google Drive client installed so they can open / edit Microsoft Office files directly from Google Drive. However, a fair few users seem to be using the web-based Google Workspace utilities. Pupil devices are Chromebooks, which seems to be working very well - devices are owned by the school, they aren't taken home by the children, they are charged overnight in storage cabinets in classrooms. The ICT suite is iMacs, again logging in via Google credentials. We have a remote desktop server which can support both Windows (RDP) and Linux (VNC / SSH) targets, and a user-accesible password-reset utility that can change passwords on both Google and Microsoft platforms.

For staff use in classrooms, if they want one, we provide a wireless Logitech K400 keyboard-with-touchpad: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Logitech-Wireless-Keyboard-Windows-Android/dp/B00XJ3LVPI It's a compact keyboard, with a touchpad where the right-hand side keypad would be. Haven't actually thought about it before but I guess a left-hand version would be nice for left-handed people.

One issue I've seen before: GMail (and, probably, other email providers) let you associate your own email address (with custom domain) with a GMail address. This means the user can log in with their own email address, but Google's system sees it as a GMail address, and their OAuth system returns the GMail address, not the associated custom address. Trying to explain this to end users is generally difficult - they've often forgotten / not understood that they have a GMail address. In the past, I've found implementing individual OAuth login mechanisms easy enough, but maintaining a set of working OAuth logins is a maintainanace task that does need some attention. Handling just Google / Microsoft logins (possibly Apple?) should cover most school-provided accounts and should be quite maintainable, but trying to cover every OAuth provider around could turn into a bit of a job. There are thinrd-party providers that will handle logins for you, but of course those tend to have a cost associated.

You check the email address entered with your database of parent email addresses before sending an email - I think the project being discussed in this thread is now not neccesarily the main source-of-truth for parent email addresses, so those are probably being synced from the main MIS or a service such as Wonde.

You might want to look at a 3rd-party service to handle Google/Microsoft/Apple/etc SSO. From my own experience, implementing one SSO integration is easy enough, but the more you add the more fiddly / time consuming it gets to both implement and maintain. For teacher / pupil logins, SSO is definatly the way to go. For parents, etc, it can be more tricky. I quite like login-code-via-email - the parent just has to put their email address in, then they get a one-time login code via email. It saves them having to remember / store / reset passwords, and seems to be common enough these days that it should be reasonably familier to people.

As others have already pointed out, yes, this is probably some kind of network hardware / configuration issue. We have up to around 300 ChromeOS devices in quite a dense setup (5 floors of classrooms crammed into the footprint of two central London townhouses), our current 5-ish-year-old Ubiquiti hardware (about 30 access points accross the building) copes just fine. As this is a system you've inherited, you might want to check up to see when hardware support for any of your devices runs out. Google / Chromebook vendors are pretty good at giving a well-defined support period, generally 7 to 10 years after manufacture, but it's worth keeping track of when hardware is going to need refreshing so it doesn't come as a shock to finance / management. If you're using dedicated ChromeOS devices (as opposed to ChromeOS Flex on older x86 devices) you can (I think? Or has that changed?) deploy Android apps. Personally, I'd prefer to keep everything web-based - if you use sites that have a "log in with Google" option, then users log in once to the ChromeOS device and logging in to the website itself should just be seemless. For a "coding" environment, I would set up a remote desktop for those users that required access (although, again, having a dedicated web-based coding environment is probably the best option). If you did want to use Raspberry Pis for that (or Raspberry Pi OS on a x86 server that multiple remote users could log in to), then there's a previous thread about that: /forums/raspberry-pi-arduino-other-sbcs/240898-rpi-noob-needs-help-connecting-pi-4-windows.html#post2060418 As already pointed out above, settings / apps / etc are assigned to the user rather than the device. This is something teachers and parents, in particular, sometimes seem to struggle to understand - the settings (and files and so on) follow the user, not the device. ChromeOS devices are pretty much interchangable - if someone looses / breaks their device (or, in the case of one PE teacher, leaves their device on the ground and has it run over by a ride-on lawnmower), they can just log in to another one and everything just carries on. Our main problem with ChromeOS devices is that our pupils have figured this out nicely, meaning that if they've forgotten (i.e. were too lazy) to put their device on charge overnight they just wander in to another classroom and make off with someone else's device. This does work well for filtering - if you have a filtering extension (Smoothwall, Securley, etc) deployed to your pupil's user accounts, that filtering extension will still work if they log in to a non-school managed device at home. Parents would need to check they are logged in with their school account, of course, but it's a nice way of giving parents some way of doing filtering at home. I don't much like using a touchpad, if I was a child I'd want to bring my own mouse. We let children bring their own headphones in (which needs a bit of policing, otherwise you end up with some huge gaming headphones cluttering the place up), we might do the same with mice. This forum is generally pretty good if you have a specific question. I work for a private school, we go up to GCSE level, I'm available for a talk if you want. If you haven't looked at it already, ChromeOS Flex can turn an old PC into a ChromeOS device. You can even have them be standard domain-managed devices, but that will cost you a (£30, one-off) license fee. Also, if you haven't already found it, GAM is a very useful tool for Google Workspace (inlcuding ChromeOS) managers: https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM The command-line utility is very handy, and there are a number of scripts around that make use of GAM to do various useful things.

If you're buying a Model M new, you're better off getting a newer USB version, the originals are fiddly to get working with a USB adaptor.

We can put pupil devices on our network in "guest" mode, which isolates individual devices on the network, just giving them access to the internet rather then letting them see other network devices. You could add further restrictions if you have gateway filtering, possibly only allowing access to a whitelist of approved sites. PythonAnywhere might be worth a look, users get a managed Python environment with a whole bunch of common libraries already installed - I think they do discounts for educational customers. Raspberry Pi have just released their for-organisations version of their Remote Desktop system, which might be helpful - previous post: /forums/raspberry-pi-arduino-other-sbcs/240898-rpi-noob-needs-help-connecting-pi-4-windows.html#post2060418 Hmm - sounds like it should work, it might be worth re-visiting the idea. If you were having trouble running the VMs on local desktops, you could try having them all hosted on a server. We have a remote desktop server accessible via web browser, so you could have a remote desktop server that could connect to a "programming" virtual machine for each user, then you'd be able to reset / restore the VM if needed per pupil.

Someone could, of course, offer Raspberry Pi device management and remote desktop connection as a managed service. The market rate for Pi remote desktop services seems to be 50p per device per month, so for a class set of, say, 16 devices (one between two) that's around £100 per year - maybe double that if user management / filtering is included on top?

Assuming you have a gateway filtering device that allows you to set up access groups by IP address or network card MAC address, you could assign the Pis to a group where you block everything except a whitelist of sites. I've noticed PythonAnywhere does that - users can access a whitelist of sites / APIs / services rather than being able to access just anything. As @mavhc points out above, user accounts on the Raspberry Pi don't have to be root users, you can set up accounts with whatever restrictions you like (although there will probably be a bit of a learning curve while you figure out how to apply security restrictions to a platform you're not used to managing). With our remote gateway, the user authenticates with their Google account and then is passed in to their local, standard, restricted user account on our remote desktop server. We're using a Cloudflare Zero-Trust tunnel for authentication and network ingress, which is free for 50 monthly users.

Just to add: if curriculum are aiming to teach robotics and you're setting up remote desktop, that should (I think) be a really useful way of being able to interact with robots. Pi-based robots on WiFi, remote desktop enabled so pupils can connect nice and easily from any desktop (or laptop) device, minimal power / HDMI / keyboard / mouse cables in the way. I was at the Raspberry Pi store the other week and had a look at the Trilobot: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/trilobot-full-kit?variant=39861727526995 It's was actually quite robust-feeling - maybe not great for primary or as an introductory device (the Micro:Bit seems to have a good ecosystem of entry-level robotics devices, cheap enough to be able to purchase a classes worth at a time), but looks great as a self-contained, remotely-accesible robot.

I'm guessing what you're aiming to do is plug the Pis in to a USB-C power source so that they start up and run. Raspberry Pis are (typically) used as stand-alone computers, you don't program them via a USB connection like you would with something like the BBC Micro:Bit or (confusingly) Raspberry Pi's own Pi Pico microcontroller. The Pi 4 and 5 take a bit too much power to be able to be powered from a laptop USB port, you'll need a dedicated USB power supply. In our ICT suite, we've put in power sockets with integrated 3.1A USB ports, which work quite nicely. Get each device set up and joined to your network. You have a few options for connecting to the Pis from a Windows (or other OS) desktop PC / laptop: - Use Raspberry Pi's snazzy new remote desktop facility ("Raspberry Pi Connect"). They've literally just (6th December) released the "for organisations" version: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-connect-for-organisations-plus-full-screen-support/ Pricing is around 50p per monthly active device by the looks of things, so should hopefully be quite affordable. I'm not sure if they do SSO with Google / Microsoft / Apple accounts yet, although I'm guessing that would be a really handy feature for most schools. If I understand correctly, Raspberry Pi Connect should work without any ports needing to be forwarded at your gateway device. Security-wise, you could put the Pis on a wireless guest network, so they would be able to see the outside world but not other devices on your network. As something of an added bonus, pupils will of course be able to connect to the devices from home if they are left powered-on in school. As access is via remote desktop, any text typed will go through the local device, where you probably have some sort of filtering already. On our ChromeOS devices, the Securley filter should pick up any concerning words and so forth that pupils are typing. The Pis themselves can be filtered by basic gateway filtering that blocks unwanted URLs. - Similar to the above, we use a Guacamole gateway server to provide remote desktop services for our users. I have a setup that supports SSO via Google accounts: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/remote-gateway The above is likely to need some tweaks to get working for a particular installation, but once set up should (hopefully) just work and be free to use. - If you don't want to use (or, as is quite likley, teachers can't understand...) remote desktop then you can connect the Pis up to a local monitor. Again, Raspberry Pi themselves have just released a monitor that can be powered from the Pi itself: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-500-and-raspberry-pi-monitor-on-sale-now/ You will still need a keyboard and mouse per Pi, which can start to get a little cluttered - I think the remote desktop option is better. If, like us, you have all-in-one desktops or laptops in classrooms rather than "PCs" with monitors, then you can use an HDMI-to-USB (yes, that specific way around!) adaptor to use your monitor with the Pi: https://sansay.co.uk/pi-view/

If it's any help, I've recently been doing some work to process (OCR) a directory tree of PDFs, and found this Python library quite decent: https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF That was for a Python script, obviously, running on Linux (Debian), which proved to be an easy enough install - I've not tried it on Windows, and it might be more useful for you to stick with something that calls the same DLL function that's causing the issue. My guess is that the Python library would also be tripped up by the same un-parsable PDFs, although that is just a guess.

I found CFM Systems' "Introduction to PowerBI" webinar to be very useful - understandable, not too long, I would imagine any other content they offer is good too: https://cfmsystems.com/

Can you pre-process the folder(s) with a PowerShell script that calls the same function in the Windows.Data.Pdf.dll DLL but properly handles the exception, marking / recording the PDFs in some way for you to remove / deal with?

ChromeOS (Flex or otherwise), although to set a device as a managed kiosk device you'll need to have a Google Wroskapce domain set up and a device management license (£30-ish) per device. Otherwise, I've found the X86 version of Raspberry Pi OS to be pretty usable and lightweight, it should install on most things. A while back I had a script that turned 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.

We're now using Keeper, which we've found issues with the 2FA / "admin approval" process. I'm on my home PC at the moment, running Chrome synced with my school Google Workspace domain account. I can't get logged in to Keeper, although I'm fairly sure I had it working here a few weeks ago.

Sorry, I can't remember the exact model, but the last batch (of 50, back in August ready for the start of September) we bought were Lenovo's. They've been used with Year 5. No problems so far, so they've lasted the first term in active use with no issues. One thing to point out, though, is that we didn't realise when we bought them they only had the one USB-C port for charging. That seems to be the most common issue with our Chromebooks, the children being careless when unplugging and breaking the USB port (Year 5 seem to be being a bit more careful than some other year groups). All our previous devices have had two USB-C ports for charging, so if we did have an issue with one port we at least have a spare. If these do have an issue it'll need a repair / replacement.

We have some newer Lenovo all-in-ones, some of which started being finicky about connecting via HDMI (after, like with you, seemingly working just fine for weeks). We mostly seem to have solved the problems with an EDID emulator pass-through dongle on the HDMI port: Lindy 32104: https://www.amazon.co.uk/32104-3840x2160-Pass-Through-Overcomes-Equipment/dp/B07NNL1Z1Z/ref=sr_1_5 Lindy 32115: https://www.amazon.co.uk/LINDY-32115-HDMI-EDID-Emulator-Black/dp/B07FMT5RNS/ref=sr_1_3 Lindy 2.1 EDID Emulator: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Emulator-Advanced-Displays-Supports-Refresh-black/dp/B0DD7R34QD/ref=sr_1_9 I'm honestly not quite sure what the orginal problem is or quite what the EDID emulator is doing that solves it, but the 32115 version above (£55) seems to work for us. I've only just seen the 32104 (£25) version, which we might try if we buy more - I have no idea what the difference is betwen that and the £76 version.

I'm thinking the same thing - a simple-enough thing to write (basic Python / Flask webserver, plus export routines for data, I guess somewhere under £2,000 worth of work), but there's several details to sort first. If the timetable (or other data) export can be automated so it updates nightly that would be handy. Ideally, the ID number read by the local reader would need to match an already-recorded value that can also be exported from somewhere, otherwise there might have to be a registering step where each pupil needs to log in with their existing credentials somewhere once, register their ID card, then be able to use the system. A tablet-with-USB-reader-attached setup might not be robust enough for the environment it is to be used in, this school might need some more solid with no cables on show.

From your description, your pupils have ID cards of some sort - do those work as Mifare cards, i.e. can you waft them over a (cheap - £30 ish?) standard Mifare reader and get a unique code of some sort out of them? If so, a software solution is potentially quite simple - a web server with a login page that waits for a single-string code to be typed in, then shows some content, possibly depending on location of device. Are you installing the hardware yourself? A ChromeOS device should work nicely - quite cheap, easy to manage (with a Google Workspace account), and easy to connect with a USB Mifare reader. A Windows device might work quite nicely too, I don't have recent experience with setting up Windows as a (properly managed) kiosk device. An iPad might be a bit more tricky to get working with a Mifare reader, although I haven't tried that recently either. I'm not sure if anyone sells hardware with a Mifare reader built in, but it might be worth asking some suppliers.

Sorry, possibly drifting off-topic slightly from the original post: Snowflake - is that becoming a common choice as the database to store data for Looker Studio / PowerBI projects? Any idea roughly how much it costs to run for, say, a single school-sized database? I've just been doing some work where I've been extracting some data from a service via its REST API and writing that to a Snowflake database. It seems to work well, and Snowflake has a nice user interface for running / testing SQL statements, which was very handy. I was thinking to maybe sign up for a test account of some sort, but can't quite figure out the pricing - I see it's credit-based, but any idea how much credit is taken up by simply writing data to a database? Also, would you happen to have any experience with getting data via webhooks into Snowflake? A quick Google suggests, I think, simply writing a Python (Flask) based web server to handle webhooks and running that from within Snowflake's environment. Again, I'm guessing that takes up some compute credit, not sure how much. Otherwise, the solution seems to be to use third-party tools / connectors to write data - is that how the Arbor connector works?