dhicks

I bought the slightly snazzier version for my own use: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BJP64YTT Has both USB A and USB C interfaces and NFC. I find the press-able button easier to use than the capacitive touch ones used on the Feitian keys, which can take a few seconds / bit of finger-wiggling to get to register a touch.

How are you licensing Power BI? If I have this right, Power BI Pro comes as part of the A5 license for education - we have A3 licenses for most of our staff and A5 for SMT and admin. That makes sense, we could have SMT and admin able to run Power BI Desktop to create reports and publish to their online service for other staff to consume. If I understand this correctly, that could also include pupil accounts - pupils would be licensed to be able to view Power BI reports, but not their parents as a proper, separate account. Is there a way to publish Power BI reports to parents?

Wonde are pointing people at this guide: https://powerbiforschools.com/wonde-integration-with-power-bi-using-the-api/

I spoke to Wonde yesterday - I initially contacted them via their web-based form: https://www.wonde.com/app/try-for-free/ We then organised a quick video conference session. The person I spoke to (an Associate Business Development Manager from their Data Sync Team) knew enough to be able to give me the technical basics and answer some questions, it was a useful session. That got me set up with (free) test data access, which I'm aiming to have a tinker with today. One of the useful things I learnt from the call yesterday was that Wonde have a list of capabilities for each MIS they support, so you can check and see what features each MIS supports. You'll be able to see if the data you want to be able to get from ClassCharts can be written back to Bromcom.

Anaconda now own PythonAnywhere, which can provide education establishments with a web-accesible environment to develope and run Python applications in: https://www.pythonanywhere.com/

For the Feitian NFC K9 key themselves, I think they were a little cheaper than the Ubikeys - we bought in bulk, a quick Google suggest around £21 each, which sounds about right, maybe a bit cheaper if you're buying 50-odd at a time. They were easy enough to set up for use with our printers - the printers have USB-connected NFC sensors and are managed by PaperCut, we have one of the same NFC sensors on an admin PC we use to set the keys up. You'll probably need to buy the sensors via whoever manages your printers, which is going to depend on your provider. Same with door entry - our new door entry system project has been a bit delayed, so we're not using them for door entry yet, but it should simply be a case of making sure we get compatible readers that work with our system (Paxton, so common enough).

The Feitian K9: https://www.ftsafe.com/products/FIDO/NFC For using them as 2FA USB keys, a couple of small gotcha's: our nice, compact all-in-ones have side-mounted USB ports hidden away behind the screen, and mounted the wrong way around for someone to be able to press the touch pad with their finger when using the key. A short (30cm) USB extension cable solves that. Also, the USB interface is of the thin style, so it can be put in a port upside down, which can confuse some users.

Hmm. No, not this specifically, although we did have some circuits in the building that were tripping out on a regular basis. Our laptop charging cabinets did each have 10 individual power supplies, one per laptop, crammed in the top - after replacing those with proper multi-way USB charging units we don't seem to have a problem any more. Not sure if it was total power draw or too many individual power supplies on the one circuit - seemingly having too many AC-to-DC converters on one circuit can cause modern circuit breakers to trip, although I'm a bit hazy on the exact details of why.

A Raspberry Pi with power supply and case plus a Temper USB temperature sensor will cost around £100 for the hardware, which isn't actually bad compared with other solutions. If anyone wants a hand setting up something to run on the Pi to read temperature and / or take action if it hits a certain level then I'm available - I've already set a couple of similar devices up. The Temper sensor works on Windows or Mac devices, too, so you could actually have a monitoring script running directly on your Windows servers, if you prefer.

We've issued USB keys to our staff, with relativly little fuss / bother. We have a "no mobile phones visible" policy in the school, so staff shouldn't have their phone out in classrooms anyway. The keys we have can also be used as fobs for printing and door entry, so trhey become staff's handy one-item device for security.

As other have pointed out, your usual remote-learning solution generally works quite well - post-Covid, I'd be surpirsed if most schools weren't signed up to use at least one of Google's (Meet) or Microsoft's (Teams) solutions. We use Google Classroom / Meet, with the child being assigned a Chromebook - we found there was a bit more choice of devices available, with a range of screen sizes, 11" up to 27", for the visualy-impared user. Apache Guacamole will do you a web-accesible remote desktop solution. For this particular use-case, you could install VNC on the teacher's desktop machine and allow the pupil read-only access (although, as a teacher, I think I'd prefer to use screen sharing from Meet / Teams, less chance of the pupil just logging in to see my desktop at any time). I have a small project available on Github that will help install a Guacamole server on a fresh Debian install and configure it to work with Cloudflare's Zero-Trust product, putting your remote desktop behind an OAuth2-protected login: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/remote-gateway Also handy for giving pupils desktop / remote access to network-connected Raspberry Pis.

I was looking up UPS systems the other week, which lead me on to companies that install PowerWall and similar battery power storage systems in commercial premises. Mentioned was made there of time-of-use surcharges such as TRIAD (TNUoS) and DUoS. I can find this explanatory page: https://powercompare.co.uk/blog/duos-tnuos-charges/ If I understand correctly, it would seem that we (as a school with a business account with our electricity provider) might be paying surcharges for usage at various times during the day. It's something I'd need to take some more time to understand properly, though. Regarding how-much-power-do-we-use, I have a bunch of small children and a power monitor handy, I'll see if I can get our school's Eco team to do some power usage measurements and report back.

Ah - you mean they have generic fake-but-usable test data you can get your code working with? That sounds very useful.

It might be worth a bit of collaboration here - I'm currently writing some very similar-sounding functionality, getting data from an MIS (iSAMS in our case) and writing out a bunch of CSV / Excel files ready to be further processed (in this case by PowerBI). I'm writing that in Python, which is generally quite cross-platform, and I have a server that provides a basic user interface and handles security.

I've not had to get a DSLR repaired myself, but I know people who have have used Fixation: https://www.fixationuk.com/ Their office / shop is in Vauxhall if you plan to be in the area at any point, otherwise I'm sure they do collection / delivery.

I'd also recommend looking at Wonde - I haven't used it from a developer point ofview myself yet, but there was a similar thread a couple of weeks ago where people were looking at pricing. Turns out it's quite affordable, you pay per-school, it's the kind of thing you can scale as you add schools using your system. What is it you are writing - something that processes data from an MIS in some way to produce graphs / charts of some kind?

They make fine re-purposed ChromeOS devices - I'm now using a re-formatted ChromeOS iMac (early 2015 model, I think) as my daily workstation.

For places we have separate monitors with power bricks, I've tended to stick the power brick to the back of the monitor with Sugru silicone putty, keeping them together: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B089WH4K6M/ Most of our classrooms and offices tend to have all-in-ones, where we find the supplied power brick is too heavy for this. I generally stick the power brick under the desk in a wire under-desk cable tray - for some reason, Ikea still seem to be the only place that sell reasonably-priced, easy-to-fit, adjustable-by-sawing-bits-off ones: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/signum-cable-trunking-horizontal-silver-colour-30200253/

Is digging a trench yourself a possible option? Pre-terminated fibre might be your best option.

You could try running a PoE-carrying ethernet cable from the main school building to as near to the cabin as you can get. In theory, the limit for an ethernet run is 100m, but you might get a bit closer. You could stick an outside-rated access point on a tree / pole near the cabin. The price you've quoted (£2,600-ish - maybe £3,300-ish today?) to properly run power doesn't sound unresonable, my suggestion is more of a DIY solution.

Do you have Windows machines with the basic Python install on, giving you Python runnable from the command line and/or the default Idle IDE? Our ICT teacher is trying out JetBrains' PyCharm as an IDE - it does need licensing, but those licenses are free after signing up as a school, and the license manager is cloud-based, so it's not too difficult to get working. If you're thinking of using a whole different language then whoever is doing the teaching really needs to decide that one.

We're reviewing our setup at the moment. Our current remote access server has about a dozen regular users, most staff have moved accross to using Google Workspace for most things. For our own admin access, we use Guacamole behind Cloudflare's ZeroTrust platform, with user authentication via 2FA-protected Google accounts. That has been very reliable over the past 6 months or so, we're considering if we move our main remote access behind it, too. Interestingly, as Guacamole supports SSH and VNC as well as RDP connections, we should be able to give pupils access to individual Raspberry Pi desktops or SSH sessions via their Google accounts if we wanted.

Ah - I think I got to about the same point trying to get our old Asus C100PA devices reformatted. That's where we've found it works best - I've just handed out some reformatted-with-ChromeOS 10-year-old laptops for staff to take home if they want a spare device, they work surprisingly well. You get a managed device. With Google Workspace, it's great how settings, permissions and even app installations follow the user around - as long as a child is logged in with their school account (even on a non-school-owned / managed device) you can ensure they have their school filtering and permissions. The easy way for them to get around that on a non-managed device is, of course, to log out of their school account and log in with their own. You can stop that on a manged device by simply only allowing your school domain logins on that device.

Pelicase are, possibly, more of the top-range suppliers for this kind of thing. If you search "pelicase" on Google you'll get their website and a selection of probably-just-as-good-but-cheaper alternatives, which might be a good place to start.

You could try the other way around - Wonde now has an "app directory" that you can browse / search by topic, that might be the quickest way. We use Evolve (with Wonde integration) for Accident Book and Trips, I think it does Clubs as well.