dhicks

Yes, similar age board, pretty much exactly the same symptons... ...nope - the backlight failed after a couple of weeks of on/off flickering.

I'm not familier with EasyBadge, but a quick look at their website suggests they have a database of some sort that you could possibly read from / write to, you could possibly get data into their system that way. Alternativly, if the EasyBadge printer (which can do double-sided badge printing, seemingly) appears as a standard printer on whatever device you have it plugged in to you should be able to use pretty much anything that can produce a document the correct dimensions to print to it - have something generate a two-page PDF document that you jut send to the printer?

As mentioned above, a lot of LED lights these days have both IEC power cable inputs and outputs, meaning you can daisy-chain them together. Check the power consumption of each fixture, but our (probably somewhat under-powered) whole setup doesn't total 13A. For the newer setup in the church hall we use, we have three lighting bars above the stage with a 16A Commando socket at the end of each bar, each socket being on a seperate circuit running from the consumer unit, so we can daisy-chain the fixtures on each bar together for power.

We use Ventoy to create a bootable USB-stick deployment: https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html You make the USB stick bootable with Ventoy, that then lets you simply copy over the Windows ISO image and copy over / tinker with any files. We have a customised unattend.xml file and a setup script that installs some local software and sets a couple of registry values, you can also do things like join a domain and join a wireless network.

We have touch (and stylus) capable devices for pupils in all our classrooms, stored in charging cabinets overnight rather than being carried to/from school daily. We've not had any problems with large numbers of device screens failing, just the odd one or two. It maybe depends on the school, our pupils tend to be quite well behaved but they are still children and do sometimes bash the devices around a bit. We tend to get a lot of broken USB ports where they pull the charging cables out, fortunatly most devices have two charging ports so we haven't had too many devices completly dead. The devices with syluses stored in the case itself got them instantly lost, so I don't think anyone uses the stylus.

The current issue of PC Pro magazine has a group test of Chromebook Plus devices, capable of running things like the web-based version of Photoshop. About the cheapest device they look at is the Asus CR11 Flip, arouynd £317 retail, but you might get a cheaper price than that via a reseller in bulk. The reviewer wasn't that impressed, but most of the things they disliked (somewhat chunky if robust design) might actually be features for an education device.

Are you setting up the URL you want to load as the "kisok app"? We're using a couple of ChromeOS devices as signage display kiosks, I seem to remember having to add the URL of the web page I wanted to display as a Kisok App - I think at: Admin console -> Devices -> Chrome -> Apps & extensions > Kiosks

As pointed out in a previous reply, do you actually mean "feedback" (generaly a whistling / screeching sound caused by getting the microphone too near the speakers) or something else? If you have a constant low-level buzz / hum (at around 50Hz) then that could be a power supply ("ground loop") / cable shielding issue. For wireless mic frequencies, I find this guide quite handy: https://www.canford.co.uk/TechZone/Article/UKLegalRadioMicFrequencies We have a set of 4 Chord handheld / headset mics, bought about 10 years ago off Amazon, still going strong, now around £240: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chord-Wireless-Handheld-Microphone-System-Blue/dp/B00A692Q66/ref=sr_1_15 Those are on channel 70 frequencies (UHF 863.42MHz, 864.99MHz, 864.30MHz and 863.01MHz), 4 is about as many as you'll fit in that frequency band. Great for assemblies / every day use for when you don't want to use your best (more expensive / delicate) mics. We also have a couple of (even cheaper, £30 each) mics on VHF 174.1MHz and 175MHz (also "channel 70", but completly different frequencies) - again, handy for pupils to use if you don't want them wandering off with the decent equipment. We have a set of 8 Studio Spares own-brand receivers / mics on the 2.4GHz band, same as networking WiFi. They don't seem to have a problem with inteference, despite having WiFi access points throught the building. All the above are license-free frequencies, for which equipment tends to be cheaper. It depends on your location as to whether you'll get interference from other users on particular frequencies, although we don't have too much of a problem and we're in central London. Cheaper wireless mic units don't tend to have a hige pick-up range anyway, which can be quite helpful in not picking up interference. We have recently found our two very cheap mics on the VHF frequencies have started getting more interference, so maybe avoid those. Licensing mic frequencies isn't actually that expensive, I think a few hundred pounds per location per year depending on the frequencies you're wanting. We find having the license-free equipment above for day-to-day use works quite nicely, then you can save any more expensive equipment for productions, or hire it in as needed. The licensed-frequencies "pro" equipment will work alongside the cheaper stuff just fine, too, so if you are, say, doing a production where you have a dozen children with lead parts and the rest with smaller parts you can hire "pro" headsets for the main parts and give the other kit to the rest, which might keep your costs down a bit. I tend to find external people hired in to do sound / lights don't like working with cheaper equipment, though.

Sorry, I haven't used that hosting service, no. We use a local Cloud Key for management and offsite access - £195, which is pretty good value.

As already suggested, it might be easier to have a reverse proxy in front of both internal sites. I've found Caddy to be very easy to use for this kind of thing: https://caddyserver.com/ It does automatic HTTPS, sorting out getting a certificate from Let's Encrypt for you, so it can be easier to set up. Otherwise, you could look at an ingress solution like Cloudflare's Zero Trust or Ngrok. These services give you an encrypted tunnel directly from the web server to their world-facing endpoint. Both these services also offer authentication via Google / Microsoft / etc accounts, so you can easily limit access to certain users if wanted. We've found Cloudflare to work nicely - their Zero Trust service is free for under 50 users, we're using it control access to an internal web-based application used by some of the admin staff.

We found a decent remote desktop setup helped - having users able to log in to a Windows remote desktop with their Google account to use their specalist software is nice and easy. We've found the remote desktop use gradually falls off, we're now down to maybe a dozen people using it on a regular basis, most of those for something very specific (timetabling, testing software, etc).

We've just had a round of quotes in, around £1,000 for the screen, £200 for the actual installation, around £100 for a basic wall-mount stand - probably around £1,300 total without VAT included. That doesn't include a cable kit, and your de-install might get costed a little higher as we're replacing existing touch screens, not de-installing projectors. We'll actually be spending a bit more on the stands as our 1870s-era walls need stands with the weight of the screen taken by floor-standing legs.

You don't have to try and do an all-in-one go change over. There's a couple of options to have Windows authenticate against Google credentials, you can have users using Windows with Drive mounted using the Google Drive Client. We now tend to have Windows 11 desktop machines in classrooms authenticating against Google, running Office and Smart Noteboook locally but pretty much everything else being web-based. Staff who want a mobile device are given decent specification Chromebooks, and there's some Chromebases in the staffroom for general use.

GCPW is a Windows Credentials Provider that uses Google logins to authenticate. It shouldn't need an on-premises Active Directory server to operate - kind of the point of it is that it uses Google's server for authentication, not a local server. If you have a large number of PCs to install GCPW on you might use a Group Policy to distribute GCPW, but other solutuions to that problem exist. The limitation we found with GCPW was that it couldn't support 2FA via USB dongle. Otherwise, it worked very well on a variety of devices, both domain-joined and not.

It authenticates against the Google LDAP server, skipping any 2FA step. We're using this on on-site, school-managed devices only, so similar to how many schools would have Entra ID Conditional Access set up to skip 2FA on managed devices. Unlike GCPW, pGina can't pass on any login cookies to Chrome, so the user then has to authenticate again (complete with any required 2FA step) when they are logged in to Windows and load up their web browser. In practice we've found that this works okay, users just have to authenticate twice when they first log in to a new PC. I'm guessing (I think I read it somewhere) that Web Sign In uses the same login provider mechanism as GCPW, so it would have the same limitations.

A quick Google search for "Windows 11 web sign in" suggests this page: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/identity-protection/web-sign-in/?tabs=intune That's seems to be a pretty good explanation - I see examples there pointing at Clever badges for login, I'm guessing Wonde and others would work in the same way. Has anyone tried Web Sign In with USB 2FA keys? That was the issue we found with GCPW, it's walled off from USB access so it can't work with USB-based authentication, although mobile or other device authentication worked okay. A couple of previous threads discussing the issue: /forums/cloud-services/232324-migrate-100-google-3.html#post2024282 We've wound up using pGina, pointing at Google's LDAP login server: pGina - Open source Windows authentication We also point the Macs in our ICT Room at the Google LDAP server, so this solution works for us accross Windows, Mac and ChromeOS. For our remote desktop server we're using Cloudflare's Zero Trust platform for authentication (using user's Google accounts), that can also handle logins (via SSH or VNC) for Raspberry Pis.

If you log in to Windows via GCPW the Google login token will be passed into Chrome web browser (if installed), but not directly into the Google Drive client. You can set the Google Drive client to use Chrome to login, so when users start up the Google Drive client for the first time, all they really have to do is hit the "log in" button and "next" a few times, they don't have to re-do their 2FA step. The problem we found was that the Windows Login Provider system doesn't support USB 2FA devices - if you're okay with users using mobiles to log in then it should work okay.

If you re-did that example template as a Word / Docs file you could do a mailmerge with a spreadsheet, if you could get the data into that format. If your ID cards are a standard size of some kind (credit card size?) you can probably find a matching sticker you can print with a sticker printer and stick on the back of each pupil's ID card.

That might be a good idea, yes. It's a MakerBot Replicator 5th Generation, bought 2014, so 10 years old. I think it's mostly in a pretty good state, if probably somewhat dusty, the extruder will probably need cleaning out or whatever before being used again. I think we still have some rolls of filament for it. I'll check with the Bursar as part of the ICT Room refurbishment what we want to do with the old equipment. I think the current soon-to-be-out-of-support iMacs are going to be be reformatted with ChromeOS and distributed around the building, so those are spoken for. If you wanted to have the 3D printer, how would we get it to you - would you come and pick it up, or would we be best shipping it to you in some way?

If you want to do Mailmerge from a script / command line tool, then I have some (somewhat rough) Python code here: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/docx-merge The DOCX format is actually a ZIP file, with the text content available in XML format inside the archive, so Mailmerge becomes a case of a pretty simple text search-and-replace operation. Just had a look at the code I wrote a few weeks ago implementing the mailmerge-via-API method, and it seems that "testing" OAuth refresh tokens now expire after a week, so I need to go and have a look at how to sort that.

As suggested above, a basic mailmerge should be all you need. I vaguely thought Google had now added mailmerge functionality into Google Docs, but a quick search suggests you still have to install an add-on or implement your own solution. This add-on seems to be the top search result: https://mailmergedocs.com The other top search result suggests writing some simple mailmerge functionality yourself using Google's API. I've recently done that for another project, so do say if you want a hand implementing that. Is it maybe an add-on module or similar? It's a fairly common feature for a MIS.

Rob_D has it pretty much right - we have some very small GCSE class sizes for some Year 10 / Year 11 subjects (2 or 3 pupils), not enough to have dedicated classrooms per subject, and space is at a premium. We don't have a DT department, although we do have a nice Art department. Our ICT Room is one place where we have a fixed layout, and as we're looking at refurbishing the room I got to thinking if we could maybe put aside some (small) spaces for dedicated subject-specific equipment. The current layout is with benching around 3 sides of a square room, so we have the classic two empty corners at the back. One is currently filled by a never-used 3D printer, the other just with assorted junk, although we do have a printer / scanner that could be moved there. I'm thinking maybe a laser cutter might get more use, although I was wondering what other options might work there, hence this thread. We have a portable set of music keyboards, I think those will work best kept as a portable set. As I've already said in this thread, I was thinking of maybe an "audio workstation" kind of setup, but on reflection there's little point in having a mic just stood in a room, we might as well keep stuff like that as portable kit and plug in as needed. The same with video editing - you don't need dedicated equipment these days to transfer footage from camera to computer, any of the computers in the room should be equally capable of doing video editing type tasks, so any camera equipment would best be kept securely in a cupboard and handed out as needed. For the lighting desk, I think you're right - it might be nice to have a setup in the ICT Room, but the equipment is probably better off down in the hall for use by the drama department. Some small audio mixing desks might be handy, though, maybe kept with the keyboards.

We have a set of 10 Korg smaller 2-octave keyboards - connected and powered by USB, I think they were something like £30 each from Amazon. They've not been used much by ICT, but I think music have just started using them some more with Flat.io for our GCSE music pupils. I was thinking of a an audio interface more as something to plug a condenser mic into, but thinkiong about it it probably wouldn't be hugely useful to have a mic plugged in at a workstation in a crowded ICT lab, we'd probably do better with something portable that could be used somewhere quieter, for which we'd probably get a dedicated USB mic. I think that's what our performing arts department staff have found - they entusiastically bought QLab (and a Macbook to run it on!), then just use the manual lighting control board anyway.

Ah, I thought I'd read that somewhere - yes, maybe one to stick in the maybe-one-day pile. We had a demo from Google a few years back where they came in and had all the pupils try out their phone-in-a-cardboard-box VR headsets, which worked well for what they did with it, but there seemed to be little you could use in a general classroom setting.

Just another recommendation for Ubiquiti. We're at pretty much the same stage as you - 10-year-old-ish HP switches, planning to replace this summer with Ubiquiti switches. Pretty much each of our classrooms has a class set of Chromebooks in, so decent internal wireless network performance is going to be important. We currently have Ubiquiti wireless access points (a mixture of models now) which work well and CCTV, with a few smaller Ubiquiti switches in a couple of spots where we ran out of network ports, so having Ubiquiti accross the network should give us a nice, single, easy-to-manage control panel. We have a fibre core network, and Ubiquiti's fibre aggrgation switches are quite affordable, it should hopefully all go together nicely. We'll also be able to upgrade to Ubiquiti's snazzy new WiFi 7 access points if we want, which is a good option to have. I did also talk to TP-Link at the BETT show this year, I was quite impressed by their offering - similar to Ubiquiti, they do switches, wireless and CCTV. It's just that we already have a bunch of Ubiquiti kit, so that probably tipped us in their favour, but the TP-Link system did look good.