dhicks

Just in case you're thinking you'll need to re-terminate cabling and so on: you can generally remove network cabinets from the wall without having to remove cables terminated in a patch panel, you can generally wiggle the patch panel, with all the cables still connected, out of the back of the cabinet. I don't know the exact setup you're in or what tools you have to hand, and this is something you'd want to leave half a day for and have decent drill for (and, really, leaving it a contractor would probably be quicker and less fuss), but it might be a bit simpler than you might think. Sorry if you've already considered that, I thought I'd better mention just in case you were thinking you'd have to re-terminate everything afterwards.

You might want to try WeVideo: https://www.wevideo.com/ Web-based, so you are going to need a reasonably good internet connection, but it is designed to be web-based from the start and should handle bandwidth sensibly. You can upload video footage from local devices / media, or (if I remember correctly) you can record directly onto an editing timeline from a webcam or USB-connected camera.

Might swapping the comms cabinet for a sound-proofed one be an option? We have one in our ICT teaching room, and I've been surprised at how much of the switch's sound it cuts out. The switch in there has been in place for at least 5 years now, too, and doesn't seem to have had any overheating issues.

That's 30 devices per trolley. Depends on the exact dimensions of the device you're aiming to charge, but we have a couple of 15-shelf trolleys designed to take larger laptops that fit two smaller Chromebooks per shelf. Just make sure you can get charging cables down each side of each shelf, and that there's some way to cable-tie the cables neatly to the inside of the shelf. For a couple of classrooms with lock-n-charge units, we've removed the tubs / racks that fit 10 devices and crammed in around 15 per unit. It can get a bit crowded in the top if you're trying to fit in a bunch of individual chaeging blocks, so better to get a proper multi-way USB charging device, but of course that would add a bit on to the cost.

Just had an email from them today pointing out they have a snazzy new "WeVideo Classroom" version coming out this week. Not quite sure what the extra features are, but sounds like it could be useful.

Indeed. We're starting to find the next problem, after we've got everyone in the habbit of raising a ticket for a request, is that the IT department winds up getting involved in general maintainance / admin as we're the ones with a nice, well-organised ticketing system that can track tasks. We wind up being the ones coordinating between other sections of the school, which can be time-consuming as they're not also using the ticketing system. I'm starting to think the solution is going to be to get all admin staff on the same system so they can organise their work and coordinate with us better. Also, a good handy feature for any helpdesk is the ability, as a helpdesk operator, to be able to easily open a ticket for an end-user. Spiceworks does this quite nicely, you can simply assign any of your users as the owner of a ticket and they'll get emailed updates and so on. We found it helped getting people in to the idea of seeing updates come from the helpdesk - even if they hadn't opened a ticket themselves to begin with, they wound up with one assigned anyway.

The cheapest option (around £30) might be a pair of bluetooth noise-cancelling headphones. Most sets will act as a bluetooth mic as they have mics in the headpiece to do the noise-cancelling bit. Snazzier models have motion / orientation detection that turns them off when you remove them from your ears, so you might need to turn that option off if the teacher is just going to stick them round their neck to use.

Most of the issues you list aren't really things you can control - devices out in the world are going to get damaged sometimes, and you can understand parents / siblings in some households making use of devices if they're available. From experience, some things you can do: - Make it clear to children / parents that devices include power supplies, which you also expect back. We took to photographing each device, complete with power supply and cables (and mice, as some parents requested), just before we handed it to the parent / child in a bag so we had a record of what was supplied. Make sure you have a supply of carrier / tote bags handy, it makes it easier to hand a device over as a complete unit. Most Chromebooks seem to have standardised on 45W USB-C for charging, so maybe find a price for replacements (probably around £20) so you have the figure to hand should you need to tell someone how much a new one will be. - Get senior management to either enforce payment for breakages or assign a budget (maybe 20% of total purchase price?) for repairs. Accidents do happen, it's maybe a bit much to expect every device back in perfect condition, best to have a plan to cover accidents and repairs. - Senso.cloud or similar (we use Securly, I think Smoothwall now have a similar product available too) will allow you to block / filter access to sites at the client-side. As a default, pupils shouldn't be able to get to any adult content, and you can block all social media /games sites easily enough. You could add to your block list any remote-access sites that parents might be using to access their work. It is easy enough to limit managed ChromeOS devices to only allow logins from your own Google domain (it's just a per-OU setting in the Google Admin Console), so people wouldn't be able to log in with other Google accounts. Check with your senior management if they want to do that - it's maybe a little heavy-handed, but you are providing the hardware for a specific child to use.

We're using SendBoard, now (I think) bought by Trello and renamed "Email for Trello". Checking Trello just now it seems to have conked out, possibly some maintainance going on over the Christmas period.

You mean to handle helpdesk ticketing and similar? We've recently (well, over six months now, I guess) moved to Trello, with a plugin to handle people being able to email tickets in. I'm guessing there would be assorted plugins available for producing whatever kind of reports you wanted, or you could use their API to write your own. That might get a bit expensive in either licensing costs or your time to create / maintain those reports, but it's worked well enough for our small team (3 people) so far.

I think Wonde's login cards work as a login provider for Google accounts, not Windows / Microsoft ones. However, you can set up Windows workstations with the Google Credential Provider for Windows, which might let you do what you're aiming for: https://support.google.com/a/answer/9250996?hl=en

If it's any help, do bear in mind that, once you have a managed Chromebook device, you don't have to physically visit that device to install software / settings, so you could prioratise getting the device to the children first, then roll out / refine the blocking capabilities afterwards.

Short notice! We use Securly, I think Smoothwall also have a similar service available now, too. Might be worth pointing out that (for Securly, anyway) the filtering is done by a client-side app, pushed out to the user account rather than a specific device, so in theory a child using their school account would have their fltering settings follow them wherever they happened to log in to a ChromeOS device. That might not work for CloudReady machines, but does seem to work for all our dedicated ChromeOS devices. For managed ChromeOS devices, you maybe need to check what the school's / parents expectations are for outside-hours use - are children going to be allowed to log on to school-managed devices with a private account so they can play games and so forth once the school day is over, or is the device going to be limited to only allow school accounts to log in, so the filtering settings will always be in effect?

Ask the school, see what they say. If it's any help, for comparison, for our Nursery to Y3 pupils, each pupil gets assigned a Google login account as soon as they join the school ("[email protected]"). We don't enable email until Year 4, though, and even then it's limited to whitelisted-only domains. The only ChromeOS app we currently push out when pupils log in is Securly, which handles filtering at the client side, so any children using their school account at home should get the same filtering as if they were at school. Mostly, you shouldn't need to install any ChromeOS apps locally on your device, everything should, ideally, be web-based and accept your daughter's school account as a login.

I think Xporter provides something very similar, although I'm not familiar with it myself. Other unified-interface-for-multiple-MIS systems exist (meta-MIS?), in particular Clever in the US. I'm guessing this project would, ideally, support getting data via several mechanisms and putting them all into one standard data store (a meta-meta-MIS?).

This is somewhere on my to-do list as well but, as you point out, not something we use every day so I hjaven't looked at it recently. Does GAM let you produce a report that includes user login times and device?: https://github.com/taers232c/GAMADV-XTD3/wiki/Reports You'd probably need to put the above in some kind of script that ran every so often (every hour?) and updated a spreadsheet or similar.

Okay, so your project is producing a bit of software that sits between Xporter and PostgreSQL. What language / framework / technology stack is this component written in? Are you also aiming to provide pre-made templates or similar for Superset? Sorry, I'm not familier with Superset, but I would guess it lets you import templates of some kind for the reports / dashboards you want to produce, is that right? My plan would be to have an, as much as possible, self-contained application that is easily deployable on a school's own infrastucture, with users authenticating and viewing dashboards via a web browser. I currently have an application that can be deployed on a server to provide a very basic web-based interface to trigger batch jobs (see https://github.com/dhicks6345789/web-console - currently on version 0.1, not for a production environment, although I am using it myself for a couple of things and it mostly works) and am developing a software-as-service application to handle OAuth / email logins to work with that application. If you are working on something that could be triggered as a batch job (once a day or whatever) that that might work very nicely with what I'm doing. I can be available to talk via email or video conference at some point if you want to have a more detailed conversation, although if this is an open project then replies to this public forum might be equally appropriate.

I agree with the general idea of a project of some sort to work on data analytics for schools, but your website is rather short on detail. You mention Groupcall Xporter and Apache Superset in your post, is your project basically some kind of application that gets data from Groupcall and puts it into Superset? How is this application implemented - as something a school installs on a web server and points users at? My current plan for data analytics for our school / group is to have a set of (probably Python) scripts that take in data from CSV / XML files (we export data from the iSAMS API) and produce a set of static HTML files that can then be served to appropriate users, with suitible authorisation settings. I'd split users into groups (teachers, senior management, finance, etc) and generate a separate dashboard for each, making sure each dashboard could only be viewed by the appropriate users. If a bunch of data-processing scripts already existed in some form which I could use that would be very handy and save a lot of time.

Does having Storage Spaces certified hardware make any difference, would you know? We went for a server with NVMe storage for the fast tiered storage layer, all certified to work with Windows Server / Storage Spaces. I'm not sure if that makes any difference - you'd think hardware would simply work at the full speed it was capable of, but Windows Server might be looking out for specific features it knows it can use for better performance?

Any idea why not? I thought the whole point of ChromeOS was that everything (including, I assumed, extensions) was "web based" - Javascript or maybe Web Assembly for added performance. I could be guessing wrongly there, of course - I've not looked in to writing any ChromeOS extensions, I just assumed you got some kind of hardware-abstracted API.

Does it make any difference what kind of file system you have on top of your Storage Spaces volume? I think our main shared folders are served from a ReFS file system on top of the Storage Spaces volume, and performance is okay as far as I know.

Just to add my agreement to this strategy, also look at Windows Storage Spaces - rather than use a RAID array, let Windows handle how it deals with using multiple disks for redundancy / performance. This might actually be the cheaper option as you don't need a RAID controller (although maybe a small one just for the Windows boot volume), just an HBA card. If you want to have SSD performance but the capacity of larger disks then you can let Storage Spaces handle that for you, too, via tiered storage.

I'm guessing the extension-deploy option is actually per-user - subtle difference, but it means that anywhere a child logs in to any ChromeOS device with their school account they'll have filtered access. Can be quite nice for home-use - you can explain to parents that as long as their child is logged on to a Chromebook with their school account they should have filtering the same as they would at school, even if it's a home-owned device. And, of course, it means they can switch to an unfiltered home account at home if they (or, hopefully, their parent) wants.

If you mean in terms of CPU / RAM / disk space, we've not found any performance or storage size issues on our ChromeOS devices. ChromeOS seems to handle sorting out profiles for multiple users with little fuss (user logs on, profile settings are synced, if disk space is lacking then oldest other profile is flushed), although we've made an effort to keep any per-user apps to a minimum so there's very little to sync for a user's profile. The processor and RAM provided seem sufficient - I'm guessing the devices might struggle if you had a lot of different tabs open, but in general use, and for video (WeVideo) or audio (Soundtrap / Flat) editing they seem fine. Worth checking your internet and wireless infrastructure is reasonably up-to-date and you have good coverage so you can handle multiple devices in a classroom all in one go. Depending on what, exactly, the teacher is planning to use the front-facing camera for, ChromeOS devices will accept pretty much any camera that identifies itself as a generic USB webcam, so you could use something like the Hue camera to plug straight into a USB port.

It maybe depends on what, exactly, the rear-facing camera is used for - tablets (and phones) are set up to be able to take pictures / video more quickly, you can whip a phone out of your pocket and be taking a photo or video a few seconds later, with a ChromeOS device you might have to log in first, switch to tablet mode, then point at whatever you're taking photos / videos of. For most pupils I'm guessing that should be fine, though. The cameras on Chromebooks aren't as snazzy as those on phones, either - generally just the one fixed-focus lense rather than the standard smartphone 3 or 4 lense setup these days, but again for most things your average pupil is going to be doing I'd guess that's okay. Our experience with the 500e has been good (so far...), although I'm guessing our pupils are (hopefully) quite careful with the devices. They do also stay in school, they aren't carried home in bags each day, so they aren't getting the full workout they might get in other schools.