dhicks

If you're looking at new screens, then possibly something that can take an OPS slot PC / Android device might be an option.

Darn! They do seem to do their dedicated signage device in the UK, and not a bad price (£200) for that sort of thing.

If you can squeeze that down to 10 VMs, Veeam Community Edition would handle that. I use that on my own personal / test server setup. It doesn't have things like the snazzy scale-out backup features to cloud storage, but you can sync local backups with cloud storage separatly easily enough with something like rclone.

Ah! You mean the Tappo P110?: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tapo-Monitoring-Control-Required-P110/dp/B0CMGDJX2W/ref=sr_1_2 £10 each sort of price, not bad. Do please let us all know how you get on - I'd prefer something with more of an "enterprise" setup, with a central (web based) control panel I could delegate access to for the site staff and so on, not sure if that's an option with these devices or if they're mobile-app only. If it's any help, if you have any sort of budget for new devices, we're using cheap (for PCs, £160-ish) NUC-alikes from Amazon for our displays: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Windows-3750H-TRIGKEY-S3-Graphics/dp/B0CQKXMJS1/ref=sr_1_17 Cheap as far as PCs go, but not as cheap as a £30 Firestick or similar.

I found the Pi 3 could be powered from the USB port of a typical smart TV, so if your TV / screen has a built-in on/off timer (and most do) you can have the TV turn on and boot up the Pi in the morning, then turn off at night. Newer Pi 4s need more power, so couldn't be set up the same - I haven't tried with a Pi 5 yet. Our current solution, as we needed something managable and that could output 4K, was a cheap NUC-alike PC with ChromeOS installed, which can be managed along with other ChromeOS devices. We're currently using the ChromeOS-installed NUC-alikes on digital timer switches, tuning on at 7am(ish) and turning off at 7pm (ish, varying with daylight savings time). ChromeOS seems to handle sudden, daily power-offs with no problem - the Pis would occasionally bring up an error message on reboot, and I didn't try a Windows machine. We tried mechnical timer switches, the cheap ones with a dial in the middle that you set the on/off times on. They all stopped working, I'm not sure if they're sensitive to power surges or something. A snazzy, site-wide smart/timer plug management system would be nice, if anyone has any suggestions - we have some lit display cabinets and similar that we could hook up, too.

Curses - only just seen this thread, we ordered 21 new iMacs for a summer ICT Room refresh on Wednesday, complete with wired keyboard and mice and the XtremeMac USB-C Hub for iMAC M1. We'll have those up-to-date with MacOS, hopefully we won't see this same issue.

After moving to A3/A5 licesning, we only seem to have MAK keys available, we no longer seem to have KMS keys given in the Microsoft Volume Licensing control panel.

Similar to the previous posts, we used to use it a few years ago but switched to a different web-based remote access mechanism - in our case, Guacamole behind a Cloudflare Zero-Trust tunnel with Google authentication. It's been working nicely for both our admin access and for general user remote access for at least a year now.

If it's any help, I found Ventoy to be very useful: https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html Lets you create a bootable USB stick with multiple ISOs on - just copy the ISO over, when you boot from the USB stick you get a handy menu allowing you to pick which ISO you want to boot from. Means you can have Windows 10 and 11 ISO on the same stick, along with other OSes if you want. Also makes the process of adding things like custom unattaned.xml files for Windows installation nice and simple.

We had a demo Newline screen in a couple of weeks aog. We found we had to swap out the HDMI cable that had been plugged in to the old screen (an 8-year-old Promethean screen). For screen connection issues with some of our other boards (all SMART boards), we've tried fiddling with the refresh rate (there's a subtle difference between 60hz and 59.94hz which some screens have trouble with), and we've also recently tried one screen with an EDID emulator to solve connection issues: https://www.lindy.co.uk/audio-video-c2/hdmi-2-0-edid-emulator-p11244

Do they have replaceable motherboards? You might, possibly, be able to replace the motherboards and re-use the existing screens, if that's any help. We are likely to have nine HP edge switches and two core switches available at/by the end of the summer, after we have replaced them with new switches. We are replacing them with new switches as they are going to be too old to have their firmware updated - not ideal, but might be okay for your situation.

Check that "toners" covers toners from larger printers. We've found recyling companies in the past that will take cartridges for "home" devices, but not for larger office / commercial devices as they aren't as valuable to recycle. Again, we just get toner recylcing sacks (£10 each, I think) from our regular waste disposal provider (First Mile), which are nice and simple to have them collect.

At the cheaper end (£230-ish), we still have several QTX Busker PAs: https://www.amazon.co.uk/BUSKER-15-Rechargeable-Microphones-Bluetooth-Connectivity/dp/B073YKDWDL/ref=sr_1_6 12" or larger 15" options, two wireless mics, and those mics are cheap enough that you can replace them if they lost / broken / eaten by children. You can also buy compatible headsets - still limited to the two channels, though, and the mics do sound cheap. They have audio out connectors, although it's a twin-phono out, which we find tend to get broken with a bit of rough treatment (children pull the cables out and break off the ends inside the ports). The arials can also tend to get broken. Useful for locations where the equipment is going to be left unattended and bashed around anyway.

We've just bought a Behringer B115W, with the optional Ultralink ULM202USB wireless microphones. Those wireless mics (another £100) also work with the MPA40BT, which might be handy. The only problem I can see with the MPA40BT is that it doesn't seem to have a wired output to link to another speaker, and it doesn't seem to support wireless linking to a second speaker, either.

We've tended not to throw stuff out until it's completly dead, at which point we use our normal waste management company (First Mile), who provide special sacks for electrical items. Something like £20-ish for a sack that can take (I think) 20kg, so I guess around £1 per kg. For working equipment, we're in London and within these people's collection area: https://www.powertoconnect.co.uk/ Volunteer-run, very well organised - they turned up to pick up a bunch of PCs exactly on time when they said they were going to, which is an important thing for us if we're oragnising equipment going in and out of our very space-limited building.

SMART Notebook v24 is now (as of 27th May, 2024) available: https://support.smarttech.com/docs/software/notebook/current/en/release-notes/default.cshtml I have a couple of new boards to install today, I'll aim to get the new version on there and see how we get on.

Ah, good to know - we're looking at upgrading our switching this summer, currently planning on Ubiquiti core and edge switches, this is something we need to look into in further detail first.

That's the one - runs on 5V, you can get a USB-to-barrel connector if you want to power it from a USB port.

You could use a four-way headphone amplifier / splitter, around £30: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fosi-Audio-4-Channel-Headphone-Ultra-Compact/dp/B08XZL91VT/ref=sr_1_2_sspa Run a 5m 3.5mm stereo cable from the TV to the splitter, plug in your headphones from there, each with their own volume knob. The device is powered, so there should be enough power to properly amplify the incoming signal and drive four headphones. The one linked to above seems to come with its own power supply, I think we have a USB-powered one around somewhere that we can power from a standard USB power supply. Edit: ah - this one looks like it's possibly(?) powered by USB: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ronyme-Headphone-Amplifier-Splitter-Professional-Black/dp/B0CC3X5D5Y/ref=sr_1_17

I find ChromeOS Flex installs and works nicely on most hardware, including some 10-year-old laptops: https://chromeenterprise.google/intl/en_uk/os/chromeosflex/ For use as a dedicated kiosk / signage device you'd need to have a Google Workspace setup and pay for a management account (currently £30-ish, I think?) per device, which might be a bit too much trouble to go to if you don't already have that set up. I find the Raspberry Pi version of Debian for Intel quite easy to to work with to customise and configure as a kiosk - I have a script that might come in handy: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/device-config

Possibly not quite the same thing, but Google does seem to have an upper limit of around half-a-dozen devices it'll let you log in to before it starts requiring you to re-authenticate again. There was nowhere we could find that would let us up that limit, so a few of our teachers that move around different classrooms a lot find themselves having to re-authenticate on a regular basis.

Queries from where - do you have some code written somewhere in PowerBI itself, or are you using an external-to-PowerBI script / application to get the data and pass it to PowerBI in some way?

Just posting to agree with the above. As a school, we have charging cabinets full of school-owned Chromebooks in all classrooms (devices stay in school, they don't get taken home). Chromebooks often tend to be designed specifically for the education market, and there's a number of robust-yet-affordable models available, the hardware mostly holds up pretty well to normal day-to-day use in a classroom. We found that devices with included styluses in the case got them instantly lost / eaten / poked into/up things by the children (better to remove them and have them kept by the teacher, maybe), but other than that we haven't had any huge issues. For software, assuming you're in an education context, all the available web-based options are fine, and being web-based there's no on-site installation needed and pupils can use from home. For video editing, there's WeVideo as well as Canva. I find WeVideo isn't great for handling two-hour blocks of footage shot from multiple cameras (i.e. filming a school production from multiple angles and cutting between them), but it's fine for shorter clips. TinkerCAD seems to look very promising for 3D / CAD design, we've just got one teacher started using it. As suggested, Python / other languages work nicely in online development environments. Devices like Lego robots and BBC micro:bit, with web-based development environments and devices which can be flashed via a USB connection, work fine from ChromeOS, which can really bring usage into classrooms other than a dedicated ICT suite. For filtering / safeguarding, we also use Securly. The nice thing, which I think people tend to forget, is that the filtering settings follow the user account around, not the device. This means that, as long as a pupil is logged in to a ChromeOS device (or Chrome on Windows / Mac) with their school account, they'll have their school filtering settings applied. If a parent wants a reasonable way to apply filtering for a child at home they can buy them an affordable ChromeOS device (or, of course, reformat an existing one with ChromeOS Flex for free) to use. For remote desktop use by teaching staff, we have an instance of Guacamole set up behind a Cloudflare Zero-Trust gateway. This allows users to be authenticated with their Google credentials and use a remote desktop session inside a browser. The authentication is pretty much transparent, if you're already logged in to your school Google account the Cloudflare gateway just passes you straight through with no login screen even appearing to the user, so lovely and simple for staff to use.

Is there something specific you are trying to do? If you need access to Wonde's API you need to contact them, they were very helpful when I spoke to them and test access is free, giving you a bunch of non-private test data to play with before you start using pupil's real data. That should allow you to set up a process for exporting data from Wonde to a format PowerBI can input - just exporting to a set of CSV / Excel files works quite well. From experience exporting from other APIs, some applications are more suited to exporting data by having a webhook called each time some data gets updated in their system, calling your system with the details of the updated data. Doing a batch export via a REST-style API can be slow if you have to do multiple calls - that's where something like iSAMS' batch "API" is quite good, you basically get an export in XML format all in one go which you can then parse locally.

A couple of similar threads: /forums/cloud-services/237812-integrating-google-accounts-intune.html /forums/cloud-services/232324-migrate-100-google.html You can use GCPW to allow user to login to Windows with their Google account: https://support.google.com/a/answer/9250996?hl=en Works even on domain-joined machines, or you can use machines not joined to a domain. The only thing it doesn't support, it turnsout, is USB 2FA keys, which we use for our staff, so instead we're using pGina: pGina - Open source Windows authentication We point pGina at Google's LDAP server where it can authenticate Windows users with their Google username/password. We're then using Action1 to manage devices.