dhicks

If "devices" means things you can't upgrade the OS on (the iPads in your example, we have older Chromebooks that have a similar problem) then it's probably time for those devices to be retired. You could, maybe, put them on their own isolated network segment and use for whitelisted-only sites / apps for junior pupils, maybe, but having them capable of general web browsing is probably not a good idea. If these are devices that you can change the OS on, then ChromeOS / CloudReady might be a good option, turning older (Intel) devices into Chromebooks, complete with manageability. We've found you sometimes need to add a USB wireless dongle with older devices if the on-board wireless isn't supported - the one sold by Raspberry Pi seems to work well. If you don't want ChromeOS (maybe you don't use Google Workspace so you don't have Google logins), I find Raspberry Pi OS (for Intel devices) works quite well as a light-weight OS to make a device into a just-turn-on-and-start web browsing device. I have a script to configure a base install of Raspberry Pi OS as a kiosk device: https://www.sansay.co.uk/device-config

I've not yet used it myself, but a couple of people have recently recommended Obsidian as a note-taking tool: https://obsidian.md/ Notes / documentation are stored locally as Markdown files, so you can use a static site generator or other tool to process them into a documentation website.

If it's any help, there's this thread from 9 (!) years ago: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/av-multimedia-related/113765-rackmount-wireless-microphone-set.html The £250 set of 4 Chord microphones I bought back then is still working just fine - none of the original links in that thread still work, but a quick search on Amazon for "4 channel microphone" turns up some very similar-looking 1U rackmount sets for around £200 or less. We wound up buying two sets - one with handheld mics, one with headset mics, the one receiver works with either type, so you can have a total of 4 mics, a mix of handheld or headset, in use at one time. We've found using standard AA batteries to be less trouble than trying to use rechaergables. I don't know enough about amplifiers to be able to recommend anything, we wound up using VeryPC to recommend and sell us new speakers for our hall - their audio / visual department knows their stuff, we wound up buying stage curtains from them as well. For the "mixer" part of things, I rather liked the look of the HH Electronics Tensor-Go: https://www.studiospares.com/live-and-pa/pa-systems/column-pa/hh-electronics-tensor-go-252610.htm An all-in-one portable system, but with suitible audio out connections so you could use it in your hall or as a portable solution.

Jamf will handle that for you: https://www.jamf.com You can set the Macs up to join a Windows domain, have them mount Windows file shares and distribute software to devices. Possibly separatly from Jamf, you can also have Macs log in with Google credentials, if that's more appropriate for you than Active Directory.

If this is a situation that occurs regularly (i.e. every year during exams) it might be worth investing in some heavy-duty cables with commando sockets for power distribution. You'd need to add at least one commando plug point as well, of course, but it might help reduce the number of cables you have to run. Maybe also a roll of rubber cable cover.

As mentioned above, I'd be suprised if they were still being made / sold. You could probably get interactive board(s) for free from a school upgrading to touch panels if you wanted. If it's any help, we've found the more budget-end Smart GX boards to be good value for money: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/av-multimedia-related/222323-smart-gx-series.html

I think a Chrome OS management license is currently around £30, which as a one-off fee is still pretty good value for money. I can understand why they've done that, especially in the education market where schools tend to get lump sums of money for purchases ("Here's £10,000 for some laptops") and running costs tend to get forgotten about. Just for added confusion, we went for CloudReady's yearly combined CloudReady / ChromeOS management fee license - the one way (I think) you could pay a (smaller) yearly fee for ChromeOS management, with the advantage that you could transfer the management license to a different computer as needed, handy for older hardware likely to conk out. At some point I'm guessing we're going to have to re-install our 20 or so existing CloudReady devices when they got all the licensing and whatnot figured out.

"a third party called Adobe" sounds a little odd, as if the support person hasn't heard of them before. Could you have another tool somewhere creating users - a left-over locally-hosted script of some sort, or maybe SalamanderSoft's system, or some other third party system?

If I understand correctly, Adobe requires a sync process (of some kind) from Active Directory / Google Workspace to create Adobe IDs that users (pupils and/or staff) can then log in to with the usual log-in-with-Google process. This holds for free accounts as well as paid, so you can have your pupils access Adobe Spark and various other stuff for free via their Google Workspace login, you just have to figure out the sync process. You'd think Adobe would just let you go "My domain is myschool.sch.uk, please let any users with that domain log in", but the process seems to be more complex than that - it's been on my to-do list to take a look at for a while but, like you, I've not managed to get my head around it yet. Sorry, that doesn't really answer any question you've asked, but at least you know there's someone stuck on the same thing - if anyone answers it'll help both of us :-)

Ah ha - the email from CloudReady / Chrome Os Flex arrived in my inbox just after I'd seen this thread. I hadn't spotted that part, we'll no longer have to pay for a separate license for CloudReady, which is handy. I notice the email I got has links to the Enterprise and Education vesions, does anyone know if there's still going to be a "home" version? That was rather handy for older hardware to hand to people for home use without any need for a managed device.

We had something similar-sounding which (I think) we've tracked down to a faulty 10G port / transceiver in a server.

I think it was this model one of our teachers was looking at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/OKIOLABS-Visualiser-Classroom-Projection-Compatible/dp/B0827V7X6T/ref=sr_1_2_sspa?crid=2UYML28DOMEQW Looks like a wide, adjustable field-of-view, should just work as a webcam with pretty much any computer, under £100 each.

Yes, £20 per month per technician - I think that's actually split between Trello itself and the email add-on, which was originally a separate tool but (I think) has now been bought by Trello, so I'd think / hope that might get a bit cheaper shortly. That sounds perfect - everyone on the same system and able to swap / move about tickets as needed. For us, IT tends to wind up getting involved in too many different bits around the school, partly as we're simply reasonably well organised and have a working tracking system.

We're using pretty much the same setup - flexible enough to be customisable to what we want to do, but the basics of what we wanted to do were there to start with. We're spending around £20 per month per user (as in helpdesk user, 3 of us, not every user in the school) for Trello and the email add-on.

We're using Trello, with a plugin to deal with turning incoming emails into tickets. It's working very nicely after a (relativly small) bit of setup time getting a few macros / scripts set up. It's costing us around £20 per month per user (for 3 users at the moment), so maybe a little more pricey than some options. We were previously using Spiceworks, which is still an excellent helpdesk tool, but I do really like Trello's "Kanban" view of tickets that lets you order your list of open tickets. What I'd really like is to start extending use of that system to more admin staff so we could all be using the same tool, which is where having a more general-purpose productivity tool rather than a dedicated helpdesk comes in handy.

WeVideo: https://www.wevideo.com/ The user interface is web-based, pupils can use it from pretty much any device, including from home. WeVideo takes care of storage for projects you're editing and you can export finished items easily enough. It supports logins via Google and Office365. We found the pricing (per year) very reasonable - you buy a number of seats and assign them to users, I'm guessing you could buy enough seats to cover a class / yeargroup at a time if you didn't want to have to license the whole school all in one go.

Two per desk - one for the workstation, one for the (PoE powered) phone. Of course, whatever you plan for, and wherever you place the network points, plans / usage will change, but two PoE-capable points per user should, hopefully, be enough. You'll need wireless as well, of course, and don't forget provision for printers and other devices around the building. These days that, at the very least, means CCTV cameras and wireless access points at ceiling level, but pretty much however many points you add, someone will think of something else they need added. Do bear in mind that not every point neccesarily needs to be active, the number of passive network points can be a fair bit larger than the number of actual live connected-to-a-switch points you might have. If you find you need to cut back on the number of network points due to cost or simply size of trunking, you could drop to one per desk and daisy-chain desktop machines via the phone, but in my experience you'll always need more network points than you think at ceiling height.

You're looking for the setting in the OU your Chromebooks are assigned to, not users - your users should be able to log on to any (non-school) device (Chromebook or browser).

I think last time we checked this you can limit an OU to accept your domain accounts only, so you can stop anyone other than your pupils / staff logging in to Chromebooks. I think you could also set individuals to be allowed access, but again only at the OU level, so if you wanted a particular pupil to be limited to one specific Chromebook that Chromebook would need to be in a separate OU. That would be fiddly to maintain for a whole school (should be scriptable easily enough - create a sub-OU per pupil - but it's always a problem keeping such things up-to-date), but for a few specific pupils it should be quite do-able.

The script (in Python) is available on Github: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/data-tools/blob/master/setEmailSignatures.py It's basically a loop that goes through a list of staff (we have that list in CSV format, read in via Pandas) and sets the signature for each one via a GAM command line.

It's not something I've seen myself, although what you describes makes sense. I'm guessing only one of the screens, at most, would need to be interactive, and large screens aren't that expensive these days - £800 or so for a 75" 4k TV. Someone has to mount it and cable it in, of course. The cabling from the PC is going to be a bit more complicated than average - most PCs / laptops will handle one external screen and give you the choice of using it as an extended desktop or mirroring your current desktop. You're going to need something (times two) that can clone a PC display - probably not expensive (£30?), just more stuff to plug in and try and keep tidy.

We use GMail (Google Workspace), we have a script that runs nightly and uses GAM to set every user's signature to a given template, with various keywords (name / job title / etc) substituted in.

The partitioning flanges on top - can they be completly removed and the unit used as a 10-way power brick? Would you happen to know the measurements? I'm thinking one of these might do quite nicely in some of our lock-n-charge cabinets - sized to take 10 laptops / iPads, they have a compartment in the top for charging bricks, but it's sometimes quite tricky to cram in 10 charging bricks and power cables.

Monitor setup seems to come down to individual preferences. Personally, I prefer a single larger (32") high-resolution (4k) monitor over multiple displays - that's effectly 4 x 1920 monitors stuck together. Our admin staff seem to prefer multiple displays, although I suspect that might be because they haven't got the hang of resizing windows but can figure out dragging a window to a different monitor and hitting "maximize".

If you mean "Adobe Creative Cloud Suite is too expensive to roll out over a whole school", then I think the current cost is £5 per pupil / teacher per year, with a minimum order of 300 seats, so £1,500. That, I think, includes home-use rights for pupils / staff, too. That is still a yearly cost, of course, and there's always a cost in setup / admin time, and of course you'd need reasonably up-to-date Windows / Mac hardware to run it. Yes, us too - Lenovo Chromebooks, around £380 each (price includes management license and VAT), complete with stylus support and a built-in stylus in a slot in the device. Those styluses are quite loosable, so maybe collect in and distribute as needed, but they can be replaced with £30-a-time Staedtler styluses (although those don't fit in the slot). The only problem with those styluses is that they look exactly like standard yellow Staedtler "Noris" pencil that your typical classroom has bucketloads of, making them even easier to loose.