dhicks

This sounds like a good size project to try out using Raspberry Pis as CCTV cameras, if you fancy figuring out the setup: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/physical-security/231637-alternative-hikvision-2.html#post1986068 I'd suggested a Raspberry Pi Zero, a Pi Hut custom CCTV case, camera module and some kind of lens - around £60 total per camera for parts. You might need to add some kind of PoE adaptor, and of course you'd then need a PoE capable switch of some sort, plus some kind of local server (or possibly a cloud server).

I can see what BETT were aiming for - a conference / market where people purchasing stand space get good return-on-investement. If I'm a business spending (very rough guess) £10,000 minimum on a stand, plus transport, accomodation and the cost of staff for a week, I'd want to have some way of making sure I could get to speak to the people making actual purchasing decisions for schools / districts / groups. The connect@bett idea is a good first try, but probably needs some tweaks for next year - larger group tables maybe, and a better search / matching facility on their booking system. I tried to use their system to book some meetings with door entry / visitor management vendors, a pretty specific requirement, but just got a list of every exhibitor at BETT to choose from, which wasn't practical.

In a couple of cases, we still have "projectors" - staff got used to calling a PC-with-projector-and-board "a projector", that's still what they sometimes call our nice new touch screens.

All of our pupil devices and a few of the staff ones are indeed Chromebooks, all of which have full 360-degree flip hinges so they can be folded back into tablet mode. At some point, someone is bound to try and bend one of the old Windows laptops the same way...

Not VR-related, but maybe consider hiring an artist - we have hand-painted murals at several points around the school, they seem to suite the setting better than a printed equivalent. I suspect hiring an artist is possibly the slightly cheaper option these days, and you could always aim for an airbrush / graffiti artist if you wanted something a little more modern-looking.

From a very quick trial at the BETT show, I understand you can interact with the environment using a cursor that points where you look at, so you can make simple "click here for option X" choices via simply looking around, which works quite well if in a limited way. I suspect a whole-class-at-a-time approach might be difficult to manage, but I could see a 1:1 situation as described above working, or possibly as a lesson starter / plenery - one pupil explors the VR environment while others watch / comment (again, would need close management). Admitedly, for both those cases I'd maybe try a more powerful, thethered headset, possibly with the pupil sat down. Edit: despite the name, ClassVR actually does AR content as well, which might be more appropriate for a classroom situation where you need pupils to be able to see each other still.

We have one test machine using GCPW, most office / classroom workstations are still Windows domain machines. We currently deploy new machines by installing Windows from USB storage, adding to the domain, installing software, etc. My plan (that I'll hopefully get to work on over Easter) is to automate this process for our newly-deployed machines, probably via the unattend.xml mechanism on USB storage. I've used this previously, with Windows images delivered over the network and automatically being renamed and joining the domain, I just need to move that setup to local USB storage. Myplan is to possibly have a setup configuration picked up from Google Drive, but I'll see how I get on with that. We've just moved to Action1 - free for up to 100 endpoints. Handles Windows updates and software installs, with a nice web-based dashboard. Seems to work very well so far, I'm not sure of costs past 100 endpoints but I think it would be worth paying for if we needed to.

We do at the moment, the process has been slow. Hopefully, we should have staff moved over to Google Drive by summer half-term, then we can turn the local file server off, then we have to roll out the GCPW for Windows workstations - we might do that alongside a roll out of new hardware as some of our classroom machine are a bit old now. I think we have Google Workspace for Education Plus. We haven't got many Windows devices managed via Google yet. We're using Action1, a separate package, to handle management of Windows updates and software installations - we're finding that to work very well, and for under 100 endpoints it's free.

We got it working on a test (Windows 10) machine, yes - somewhere in my to-do list is an item to add the installation to our standard Windows 11 setup and see how it works with the current version of the Google Drive Client. On our test machine, we found we could redirect user folders to Google Drive folders, but only after the drive client had loaded, which loaded after Windows Explorer (the main user interface for Windows). Ideally, we want the Drive client to load first, then handle folder redirects before presenting folders to the user, so as far as the user is concerned their dekstop folder just appears and automatically appears on Google Drive as well. Costs: for an off-site hosted Windows server capable of running Salamander or other software: somewhere under £20 a month, probably a bit cheaper. If you want a local machine, we've found these to be good value for money (around £250): https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09PRH1R4J/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title Synology box to handle on-site backups of Google Drive: I think around £1,000, possibly with a cost for disks on top of that. Offsite backup: we use Backblaze, £5 per TB per month.

Also the Google Credential Provider for Windows (GCPW): https://support.google.com/a/answer/9250996?hl=en Lets users log in to a Windows machine using their Google logins. You can do similar with the Mac, too, although that uses Google's LDAP service. For a server to run Salamander or similar tasks, that can be off site if you want to avoid having hardware on site. You'd still need something local to run Papercut, though, and I'd want a local NAS of some kind to hold a just-in-case backup of Google Drive files - I understand Synology do a nice all-in-one solution that can back up a Google Workspace's worth of files.

Playing Elite on the Commodore 64, and then later the DOS version on early x86 machines. A few years later, I was talking to Ian Bell, one of the authors, down the pub one night, and tried to convince him that an online version where everyone could just play the game through their new-at-the-time "web browser" might be a good idea - possibly my suggestion that the (also, new-at-the-time) Flash engine would be the perfect development environment might have disuaded him from thinking it a good idea.

If anyone else is around, I'm aiming for the 8:06am Thames Clipper from Embankment to Royal Wharf, with breakfast before BETT opens at 10am somewhere nearby. If you're looking for me, I'm the one who looks pretty much exactly like my avatar.

Depending on where your hotel is, you could always use the baggage storage at one of the larger stations (most of the London terminus stations have a branch of the Excess Baggage Company and others) and pick it up on your way back to your hotel.

We bought some OPS-capable screens when they first came out, then populated them with OPS PCs. They do make for a nice, tidy solution - the user turns the screen on, the slot PC just boots up, all nice and obvious for the user. Our initial batch of OPS slot PCs were purchased separatly from the screens, and were brand-new technology at the time, so we've had a few connectivity issues. All sorted in the end, mostly by plugging more cables in to the ports on the OPS PC, which kind of defeats the point of having them as integrated devices in the first place. Our second batch of OPS PCs we bought along with the screens they were embedded in, so they were warrentied to work with the screen, so any problems become the seller's problem, which is a much better way of dealing with things. I think at the time the only people selling OPS-capable screens and properly warrentied slot PCs were VeryPC, who's support has been excellent, and I would recommend buying your choice of screen and OPS PC from them. A bit of a design issue inherent with the OPS format is that if you plug a small USB wireless keyboard receiver in it tends to have its signals blocked by the body of the actual screen itself. The same can go for wireless networking - the WiFi arial attached to the PC tends to be behind the main body of the screen, so if the WiFi point is somewhere the other side of that screen WiFi signals can be blocked. We found we needed to put the small USB receivers on a USB extension cable so they dangled just below the screen. I think the newer SMART boards have USB ports on the front linked to the OPS slot, although I'm always wary of leaving USB dongles plugged in anywhere too obvious as they can get removed.

Yes, good point. Another good point. SalamanderSoft might be the people to talk to about this, their MIS connection software runs locally on a school's own servers, so no data needs to go off anywhere else. A service built on top of theirs might better meet privacy requirements.

A communications application wouldn't neccesarily need the exact details as held in the MIS, it would want a list of children, their group memberships (yeargroup, classes, after-school clubs, maths sets, etc) and a set of contacts for each child with appropriate priority levels given ("This is a P1 contact, they should receive all comms", "This is a P5 contact, they should just get newsletters", etc). Ideally, something like Wonde would be able to provide that data, taking the data from the MIS and removing anything un-needed before handing it over to the application. You probably shouldn't even need parent names or addresses, just their email address (or WhatsApp address / phone number, if that's what you're using). I'd guess there wouldn't be a need to write back to the MIS, just read - communications logs could be kept in the application itself, it should simplify what access the application needs to the MIS (giving something write access is different from read-only access). I think this is why the original poster is thinking of using WhatsApp, although I think there would need to be fallback to email / SMS. The original post mentioned looking at this as an open source application. As Rob_D has pointed out, emails can be difficult to get delivered, so a paid-for email solution is probably going to be a requirement, and I understand there's a cost to using the WhatsApp API. The software itself might well be open source (and I think that's a good way of running a company), but there would have to be a paid-for service of some kind that could take care of running the software for a school, this isn't the kind of thing most schools are going ot be able to handle themselves. For anyone logging in to your system - teachers to send a communication, admins to see what's been sent or set user permissions - please handle Google / Microsoft / Apple logins. Pretty much most schools will be using one of those already for logins, and quite possibly have 2FA set up for teacher / admin accounts, teachers and other staff don't want another separate set of login details to remember. What would sell this kind of system to school network administrators would be if it could sync teacher account names from the MIS as well (which should be easy enough if you're already getting pupil details), then staff can just log in and automatically be recognised as teachers or admins, no need for the IT department to have to get involved and start re-creating the school's admin structure in yet another application.

Raspberry Pi OS (for x86) might be a good option - nice up-to-date desktop experience, but works on older hardware.

I've just come back from a video-editing-for-marketing talk, video editors mentioned at that talk were: Inshot Shotcut OpenShot DaVinchi Resolve Adobe Rush GoPro Splice Capcut I think nearly all of those have already been mentioned, except maybe Splice, which might be worth a look. Seemingly, the new Windows 11 version of Movie Maker is ClimpChamp. There's also the online WeVideo - web-based, so no software to deploy, although not free (around £10 per user per year, I think).

But if you have a bunch of old desktop PCs, you can install Raspbian on them (based on Debian) and configure them as kiosks. If it's any help, I put the configuation I used into a script: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/device-config I think I put in configuration for Raspbian on both the actual Pi and Intel devices (a couple of config files wind up in different places on different platforms for no good reason), and I think the example given still works, although it's been a little while since I set up the devices and things might be a bit out of date.

We use Pi 3s, which can manage to power themselves from the USB port of a modern smart TV, so the Pi turns on and boots up when the TV is turned on. I just have them load Chrome browser in kiosk mode and point at a Google Slides slideshow - nothing fancy, but it does make it nice and easy for users to edit the content.

...and that to get to North Greenwich you can also use the Thames Clippers, the ferries that run up and down the Thames. They aren't generally busy during the tourist off-season, and they're just that bit more civilised than the tube, with a coffee stand / bar on board. I keep meaning to investigate if any of the RIB boat companies will do drop-offs at Excel, that would save a bit of time on the journey...

Possibly rather more clunky, but could you try "cmd" in the program / script field and "/C powershell -File pathToScriptGoesHere"?

If nothing else, you should be able to automate the File... Open... Export As PowerPoint... step for each file using something like AutoIt: https://www.autoitscript.com/site/

Mine will - I spent 6 weeks working at Microsoft HQ when I was a student providing them with handwriting samples. As long as your handwriting is terrible in the same way as mine you should be okay :-)

From the link above, I think she's used / is looking at a whiteboard (similar to what early years use), with a marker pen. Not quite the same as writing on paper, but wipe-and-reusable. If I remember correctly, all the RocketBook system actually is is a frame for your handwriting / drawing to go into with a QR code that helps orientate the page when you scan it with the app. You used to be able to simply print your own pages on A4, which your head might prefer. I think most OCR systems these days will do a pretty good job of orientating a standard A4 page anyway, so you can probably use pretty much any scanning app on a phone. I think Google Drive (and probably OneDrive, but I haven't tried that recently) automatically OCRs image-based PDFs, inserting a layer of copy-and-paste-able text, so if you can get a scanning app that lets you scan a bunch of images, create a PDF and send those to Google Drive / OneDrive, that might be all you need.