dhicks

We've just bought 50 more of the Lenovo 500e - flip device, so can be used as a classic laptop or as a tablet, complete with front and rear cameras and a stylus which is stored inside the case. Around £320 (that price includes VAT), don't forget to budget for Google management license (£30, one-off fee per device) and any kind of extended warrenty if you want (maybe £20). We ordered from Getech in Ipswich, we've found them to be reliable suppliers - if they say devices are in stock then they mean they're actually in stock. Our existing Lenovo Chromebooks have lasted well so far, they seem pretty rugged - we've had a bunch of this model in use since September with no particular issues so far. They take a 45W USB-C charger and can be charged from a USB-C port on either side, although there's a charging LED only on the one side. This model is just a little less wide than the previous one, so fits better in charging cabinets designed for iPads - the previous model just about fit, but we had to use extra right-angle USB-C connectors to be able to close the charging cabinet door. About the only damage we've had to this and previous models is some of the ports failing to charge - our guess is that this is due to rough handling by pupils, and for the most part we can simply turn the device over and use the other port, and it's not a huge number we've had this problem on.

Not SIMS, but we host other Windows applications on our remote access server which presents a web-based interface using Ericom's Access Now gateway product. We plan to move this to a Guacamole gateway instead, complete with GSuite login integration.

We use SalamanderSoft to export our iSAMS calendar to Google Calendar, from which we can export as an iCal (.ICS) file - there'll be a Wordpress plugin somewhere that displays iCal for you. The iCal format isn't complicated, being just a set of records in text format, so you could possibly write a script to convert the XML exported from iSAMS straight to iCal. I thought I remembered writing some code that did this at some point, but I can't find it. I do have a script that takes an iCal file and produces a printed calendar from a .DOCX template - we use it to produce a print-able (PDF) "school diary" document we can put on the school website for parents to download (and print) if they want.

It's not a problem we have in my current school, but we have found Chromebooks to be nice and easy to manage. For a cheap option for home use (assuming home internet access, which isn't necessarily a correct assumption) an older (possibly donated) laptop reformatted with CloudReady (ChromeOS, but installable on standard laptops and desktops) works well, with the advantage that if a child logs on to any ChromeOS device with their school account then any settings should follow them around, so you can apply filtering and so on if needed.

If I remember correctly, there was a paper out a few years ago (from either Google or Backblaze, I can't remember which) looking at the relationship between temperature and disk / general hardware failure. I seem to remember that the conclusion was that higher-than-you-might-think temperatures were okay, but the consistancy of those temnperatures was more important. So 21 degrees (or a bit higher, if you like) is fine, but a consistant 21 degrees is the important bit. If you're in the same room as the equipment you might want to try a baffle of some sort between your workspace and the equipment - it's surprising how much temperature difference a simple pane of wood or just a curtain can make, especially if you have fans that are circulating air around the baffled-off area.

Turns out the "etc" part might not be neccesary - you can set up WDS on a non-domain joined Windows server, then set up Windows install images complete with unattend.xml files to automate the install. I've got as far as setting up the new server, installing the WDS service and importing the latest Windows 10 image, I'd be interested to hear if there's a different option.

We had a similar issue: we have a bunch (170-odd) of managed ChromeOS devices used accross our Year 1 to 3 classrooms. Those are set to log in with a guest session, so as soon as you open the device up it's ready to use - pupils can then log in via the browser if they want. A lot of filtering is done at the network gateway side (using Untangle), but there's a few sites we wanted to be able to allow for some users in the school (mostly social media sites for the marketing department) but stop pupils getting to. We have client-side filtering in place with Securly (I think Smoothwall produce something similar now, too), but that doesn't get loaded up in a ChromeOS guest session. The solution turned out to be to add the list of sites to block to the OU with the managed devices in, in the guest session settings section. This seems to work quite well, although it might get a bit fiddly to maintain if the list of sites gets longer.

The thing I like about iSAMS compared to systems I've used in the past (SIMS, School Manager) is that iSAMS has a reasonably well thought-out API, so I can extract data from it for further processing in whatever way is most appropriate. This probably works best if you have a larger group (MAT or similar) of schools all using the same product, then you can share reporting functionality and expertise.

A solution for which, then, would be to have a cloud-hosted instance of Timetabler, accessible via a web browser. As I said at the top of this thread, we use Timetabler running in this way currently, but you'd want something a bit more customised if you were offering hosted instances to the public. I'd use a customised version of Guacamole, with a plugin to provide Google / Microsoft logins and route each user to their instance. You'd also want some custom web-based controls somewhere so data could be imported and timetable files exported as downloads via the browser (or, ideally, straight to your MIS of choice). The main problem I encountered with implementing the above was the cost of hosting Windows server instances to run Timetabler. I did try running Timetabler on Linux using Wine, and as far as I could make out it seemed to run okay but with some oddities in the user interface.

Ah, I'd missed that bit before - I got the impression we'd be able to use the Windows version of Photoshop Express for free, but it seems not. Also, somewhat related, I've just seen this: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/photoshop-web-faq.html It seems that Adobe have a web-based version of Photoshop in beta. I'm not sure how full featured it is compared to the desktop version, and you need a Creative Cloud account to be able to use it, but it's an interesting development.

Maybe an iPad, complete with keyboard cover and SIM card? I could see a school deciding they needed to make sure all pupils had a device they could use for home learning and coming up with a solution that included a device with a SIM card for its own connectivity off site.

My guess: the £11.50 a month figure mentioned sounds like a 1-to-1 device scheme, paid in monthly installments - it's the tablet / laptop / Chromebook that you access the internet on, I can see that getting simplified into "the internet" somewhere along the way to a Reddit post. It does highlight a point, though - for some families, that's a significant enough amount of money that they'll notice it (£140 a year), and they don't quite understand what it is they're being asked to pay for or, really, given a choice about paying it. If everyone in a class / yeargroup / school is going to be expected to have a device to hand in lessons (or for home access) the teachers will be setting exercises and homework that needs that device, so it's not like you can really opt out of paying.

An external consultant, with suitable access to SMT to get them to sit and listen when a decision is needed from them.

At that sort of scale you'd be earning several million a year in interest, at which point your job becomes "chair of charitable foundation" and you spend time checking up on what the people receiving your funds are doing. Some of the parents here are probably in a similar situation, either through money they've made directly or through family fourtunes inherited through several generations. Everything is relative, of course - houses locally cost up to £55,000,000, and your cost-of-living might have to factor in things like minders or a security detail for your children.

You could just use a Windows laptop plugged in to a screen, camera and speakers / mics. That's basically what that Google Meet system I linked to above is, but with a Chromebase device acting as a kiosk - you can actually boot it into standard ChromeOS mode and use any web-based client on it, including Teams and Zoom, but I'm guessing if you're using Teams you'd want a Windows device. The PTZ camera included in the kit (and available separatly, probably cheaper, from Amazon) just acts as a USB webcam, and the speaker mics are seen as (separate) USB speakers and mics. Something I haven't tried yet is positioning the display so it's the exact height to match up with the height of a conference table, then fitting the table flush against wall where the display is mounted. If you had a matching table at the other end of the connection (maybe a group of schools with the same setup) it would (kind of) look like your local table was continuing on to the remote location.

I spent yeterday installing a Google Meet setup into a meeting room with a capacity of about 16 people. This hardware, around £3,000 (price includes VAT): https://meetingdevices.withgoogle.com/products/5768/asus-google-meet-hardware-kit-large-room-kit/ You also need a display - we installed a 75" TV and stand, around another £1,000. The above hardware gives you a PTZ camera, centre-table speaker mics and a dedicated control device with touch screen. You could probably put together a very similar set of kit yourself from Amazon or similar - a Chromebook for the controlling device (£400), a PTZ camera (£400), a couple of USB speakermics (£100 each?), plus a display with mount and assorted connecting cables - around £2,000-ish for the lot.

Also, several applications that we use that use Wonde as a data source seem to use a manual process to import data from Wonde to their system - whenever we have pupils join we have to email the company to tell them to please re-sync their data with Wonde.

We've just had an issue with Wonde's system trigering a too-many-changes warning, where their system stops changes being made if more than a certain number of changes / additions / deletions happen in one go. I got an automated email informing me of the issue which I then replied to, got a response from support within a couple of hours, all resolved within a working day, which seems pretty reasonable. It might be that you have a similar issue and the notification / warning email hasn't got throught to you for some reason.

Timetabler does run quite nicely via remote desktop. I investigated creating a solution to host instances of Timetaler on a remote server, with integrated GSuite / O365 logins. As a project I think it's quite do-able, and less work than, say, re-writing Timetabler to generate a web interface or implementing a timetabling application from scratch, however there would still be some integration work to do (adding options to import / export data via the browser), and Windows licensing costs. Costs would be about double the yearly cost for Timetabler at the moment - not actually too bad, but you'd have to convince schools to pay double the price for something that, from there point of view, looks exactly the same.

Yes. Their email address is used as their username for Google Workspace and we export data to various systems that need username / email address information. Note that our pupils mostly can't actually send / recive emails - their email inbox isn't turned on until Year 5, and after that there's a whitelist of domains they can send / receive emails to/from.

We use cheaper Panasonic camcorders - we have some model HDC-SD90 (about £200, possibly cheaper on eBay), but I'm pretty sure there's a newer model out now. With a 128GB SD card they will record for (I think) almost a day at a time and, if you don't have mains handy or just don't want any cable clutter, you can run them off an external USB battery pack (£30). They will take a hot-shoe adaptor for an external shotgun mic but the integrated one is okay. I've also used them with a cheap (£20) HDMI-to-USB adaptor as webcams, for which they work surprisingly well. They're cheap enough that you can plonk one on a single-pole mic stand (£20), cable-tie a USB battery pack to the pole and have them as a ready-to-go device you can just grab and plonk down wherever someone needs a bit of video / audio recording.

If "capture" just means "display the input from a camera", then a simple web page will do: https://www.sansay.co.uk/pi-view/ The source code for the above is available (it's just one HTML file), it should be possible to make the web page take a parameter saying which camera device to use if there's a choice of several. If you actually want to record the footage for playback later then Google Meet or similar might suite your needs. For those Hue cameras, I find the baseplate sections that the flexible part of the camera plug into tend to be the weak link - the USB port seems a bit loose. If you can find some way of using the camera without the base that might give you a more reliable connection.

Might that be solved with a powered docking station for a laptop? That's possibly why we found a baluns worked - separate (5V, USB) power supply to the baluns provides enough power to get the signal to the other end of the cable properly?

We've not had any HDMI cable-length problems (that I know of) with the various models of SMART board touch screens we have around the building - about 20 to 30 devices, assorted models from the last five years or so, up to and including the new GX series. We're driving those with desktop machines rather than laptops - VeryPC all-in-one machines, explicitly specified (6 years ago - planned ahead!) to be able to drive an external 4K screen. In the past, with a couple of old projectors, when we've had cable-length issues we've used HDMI-over-Cat5 baluns', which worked quite well - about £30 on Amazon I think, I think you need the Cat6 version to support 4K. The newer SMART models, GX included, come with built-in software, and we've also got some screens with OPS slot PCs in - I think VeryPC are still the only people who will sell you a screen and OPS PC warrentied to work together.

Good point - quite possibly, it'd be worth checking. I think the batteries were changed a couple of years ago (or maybe a year - all my time-estimates are a year out at the moment...), they should have a few more years in them as yet.