dhicks

For all pupils, we have lists by class of default passwords, i.e. an individual, generated, strong-ish, (hopefully) easy-to-remember password per child. For Years 3 and below we give the parents those default passwords if asked. Year 4 and above set their own passwords as part of the curriculum ICT session, probably one of their first lessons. There's nothing to stop any pupil changing their own password, so we do sometimes get puzzled parents trying to log in to their children's account and finding the password has changed.

It's an idea - we currently have a large UPS in the basement, with (separate from the standard mains) internal cabling to power switches and a couple of workstations. The UPS needs servicing yearly, and we've replaced the batteries at least once already. Switching that for a Powerwall is something we could maybe ask our parents comittee about, it's something they might be interested in helping us with - especially if we could maybe add some solar power collection.

I have something similar on my desk at a shared workspace. It's large enough to act as a partition to the desk opposite, which is handy in my case but I can see how some would find that a little large. I do notice the difference when using that screen to the other screens I use - it has just that bit more verticle space, which is nice as you can fit all of most spreadsheets / web pages on the screen without having to scroll. I'm tempted to get a 4K version to add even more verticle resolution, although I'd stick with a standard aspect ratio rather than something ultra-wide.

If these are cameras that act as standard webcams then you can use a simple web page to get their video input - I have a pretty basic, but useable, example here: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/pi-view The above is hosted here, ready for use: https://www.sansay.co.uk/pi-view/

Not exactly Adobe Creative Cloud, but I've just got an email through from Adobe saying that their free Adobe Spark for Education plan will include Adobe Photoshop Express and Adobe Premiere Rush from next month. I think that means you can get Photoshop / Premier (basic versions, but there's a good chance a lot of teachers would be fine with those) free over the whole school and, possibly, for home use as well.

We use Evolve Accident Book: https://edufocus.co.uk/ I don't think I've had anything to do with the system, which is probably a good thing - it's something that doesn't need direct IT involvement in, it just gets on with its task without fuss.

Which, I'm guessing, are hosted on virtual machines running on an internal server, or possibly on physical hwardware in a server room / cupboard, all plugged into a central switch. If that's the case then I'd have thought there would be little risk of traffic being incercepted between VMS all on one physical / virtual switch, so you could add a reverse proxy server, set that up with HTTPS, and access everything via the proxy server. That would give you the added advantage of remote access to your various internal applications via an HTTPS-protected connection, if you wanted. For a reverse proxy server, I've used both Apache and Nginx, but I've recently been using Caddy: https://caddyserver.com/ Written in Go, it runs on both Windows and Linux, and it automatically handles HTTPS for you, via Let's Encrypt.

...expect requests from the English department as to how they can show this in class...

That's not too bad - some replacement styluses are way more. We've got a tub of old Smart pens (bits of plastic with fuzzy bits on the end to avoid scatching the screen) we can hand out if needed, and we've found these work with most touch screens: https://www.amazon.co.uk/AUZOSL-Screens-Sensitivity-Universal-Android/dp/B0994R1B3D/ref=sr_1_4 They work out about 50p each and can be used on most touch screens - not with a great deal of precision on smaller laptop-size screens, they're okay for circling / highlighting, but for handwriting they're like trying to write with a crayon. They should work better on a larger screen, though.

You can get very similar one-time code generating dongles, we considered them for our 2FA rollout. We went for USB dongles in the end, and I did wonder if we could set them as the only method of login (touch your dongle on a reader attached to the PC, logs you in), but we figured we'd stick with a username and password as well for now. Users can use the dongles to log straight in to the printers, though, and we could make the same dongles work for the door system as well.

If you want users to have to log in before they can use the machine, which you quite probably do in a school context, then the free home version of CloudReady should do nicely. We've been putting it on some older laptops for people to use at home, it works on our 10-year-old laptops quite well. If you want a managed device that you can have auto-login to a guest session I think you'll need the paid-for version of CloudReady. Alternativly, I've used Raspbian (Debian, as used on the Raspberry Pi, but also available for Intel platforms) configured to load a web browser and nothing else, not even a desktop manager. I had a configuration script somewhere, but it's been a little while since I updated it and it's probably out-of-date by now.

Oh, I see: https://www.openhab.org/docs/installation/openhabian.html openHABian installs on top of Debian / Raspbian, so you can still log in to your Raspberry Pi via SSH or by connecting up a screen and keyboard and start writing whatever Python code you want. I'm guessing you might be aiming to integrate with some existing feature, though, yes?

You are talking about openHABian, an OS image for the Raspberry Pi available at: https://www.openhab.org/ Sorry, I'm not familier with openHABian at all. By the looks of things, it provides a web-based interface for you to use from a separate device. I'm guessing that interface includes some way for you to place executable code of some sort on the device, does that sound right? If you were doing this on Raspian, you would connect to the Raspberry Pi, start up a command line interface, make sure you had the Python GPIO libraries installed and start writing code to read / write values to pins. I'm guessing openHABian might well include Python somewhere, it's probably just a case of figuring out how to add and then run scripts.

Maybe try pulling it at an angle - bring the bottom of the screen towards you, away from the wall, then try giving it a pull.

It's going ot depend on what, exactly, you mean by "integration" as to what solution(s) are going to suite you best, but you can start by having users and their Google Classroom memberships automatically created and updated from data in iSAMS with something like SalamanderSoft's integration service / solution.

Google Workspace: what Google are now calling what they used to call GSuite - the combination of Drive / Docs / Sheets / etc, with access controlled via a single login. On Google Drive, you can set access rights for individual files to particular users / groups, so you could have a folder in Drive where you stick any images / PDFs / spreadsheets, and only people who have access rights to that folder will be able to get to them. All users you require to have access will need to have a Google account (unless you make files public), although not necessarily on your domain. Most files (except, annoyingly, HTML files) on Google Drive can be viewed in "preview" mode, with that "preview" mode view being embeddable in a web page (a Google Sites website, or any web page really). I imagine the above paragraph holds for Microsoft, switching "Google Drive" for OneDrive, Google account for Microsoft account and Google Sites for Sharepoint.

What set(s) of people do you need to be able to grant access to, and what access / control do you have over their account details? I'm guessing you're starting with "all staff" at your school or similar, with a smaller set of "all senior management", but possibly with further groups such as "trust-wide senior managers" and, possibly at some point, "parents". For a single domain (your school), where you know everyone has a login of some sort (probably either Google or Microsoft), a Google Sites / Sharepoint site might work. For Google Sites, you can embed a document preview in a web page, so you can build up a "dashboard" type view of various different documents, with each document having relevant access rights handled by Google Workspace. I've not tried with O365 / Sharepoint, but I'd guess it's possible to do something similar. I'm currently working on a platform that allows a similar setup to the above but with authentication from multiple sources (Google, Microsoft, plain email). CSS is used for the front-end formatting of web pages. I think I can see what you're thinking - you want to get some data as a CSV table and have it neatly formatted in some way on a web page. I would go for a back-end approach for this - use a package that can suck in data from wherever you have it (MIS, or possibly a bunch of Excel files stuck on Google Drive or Onedrive) and output a bunch of tables / charts / etc, possibly as HTML / CSS web pages, or possibly as PNG images / SVG images / PDF documents / etc. I would use Python for that, it has a good selection of libraries available for handling large datasets and outputting tables / charts, but plenty of other packages / languages are available.

Ah - is this now (or shortly, start of August) "Windows 365"? This maybe needs a thread to itself.

How are you producing the CSV file - are you exporting from a MIS (which one) in some way? Your MIS should (hopefully) be able to export a UID for each child.

I've not had a problem from home on a 4G (now upgraded to 5G) connection - over lockdown there's been two of us connected to different remote desktop systems via RDP and web-based (both AccessNow and Gucamole), quite often all three at once plus a couple of Meet / Zoom connections. Windows Virtual Desktop: is it still priced per user? I had a look a little while back and it looked as though it was going to turn out a bit expensive at around £25 per month per user.

We use a Windows server with Remote Desktop Services (RDS) installed - there's a built-in web interface option now, but we've been using Ericom AccessNow for a number of years, which works nicely. RDS allows multiple users to log on to one machine - we have a rackmount HP server for this, but you could use a suitably speedy desktop-type machine, or even host a server away in a data centre somewhere. Actually, you could install the AccessNow client on all the appropriate desktop machines and have each user connect to their own desktop, saving having to buy any hardware, just a small machine for the gateway AccessNow server. You'd need to make sure each desktop machine stayed on the whole time, of course. You need to sort out remote licensing with your Microsoft licensing reseller - you'll need to do that whether you're having users connect to a single remote server or to individual desktops.

Does "school hardware" mean a device managed by the school? We have web-based remote desktop, any staff user can open a Window remote desktop in a browser window / tab, so should be able to use pretty much any available device, although something with a reasonably-sized monitor and a mouse works best. Our remote access server is nothing fancy, I'd have thought even a second-hand server should be quite capable, maybe around £2,000. You could then, potentially, hand out the old desktop machines to staff (for them to keep) who wanted something to use from home, reformatted with the home version of CloudReady (ChromeOS) so there's no Windows licensing to worry about - that's what we've been doing with some of our older laptops.

Working from home today, I've just ran a Google Internet speed test (the one available right from Google's home page) - it reckons around 60 Megabits/sec download, 10 Megabits/sec upload and, interestingly, 1ms latency time. This is on Three's "wireless home boradband" service - I'm not sure how available bandwidth is split between customers, or how many other people in the area are online right at the moment. I'm in a fairly densly populated area (sunny, exotic, downtown Tooting), and I'm guessing a fair few people are still working from home.

We have 170 Asus C100P Chromebooks - they should have been retired last summer, but we've kept them going for another year. Our plan (so far) this summer is to move them to all be used in our junior school (Reception to Year 3), limited to whitelist-only websites. I plan to have them boot straight into a guest session and load up a start page with links to all the sites they can use, so no logon needed. The ability to have a newer, up-to-date browser would be handy, so I'll keep an eye on the project mavhc linked to above.

This is going to depend rather on how much the teacher themselves understands and how, in their mind, they picture an "app", but I'd go for a Javascript client-side library capable of running on most web browsers. From a resources / installation point of view you then just need somewhere for the pupils to host a web page. Myself, I find Bootstrap simplest to get my head around (start web page, import Javaacript library, away you go), but I think React is rather more in fashion right at the moment.