dhicks

I had a look at some of the systems available for the schools market, plus I've been along to a couple of film/graphics industry showcases where people have been demonstrating various 3D environments and 360-degree videos. It doesn't strike me as practical to have a whole-class set of VR headsets used regularly in a classroom, I can see that being a lot for the average classroom teacher to manage. What I thought might work best is a single VR headset in a classroom tethered to the teacher's workstation, with the display mirrored to the front-of-class display. Then, as a starter to a lesson, one child per session could get to look around a VR environment, sharing that view with the rest of the class. That would still take some good classroom management from the teacher, but it should be do-able. For educational content for the above, I'm not sure if viewing content via a headset really makes much difference than viewing on a laptop or tablet - Google Street View, for instance, is a very useful tool but works fine on a PC / tablet.

Does that include an OPS slot for fitting an integrated PC?

We've had a 4G/5G connection as our main home connection for several years now, originally via Relish, but they've now been taken over by Three. That's the connection we had all through lockdown, with no issues - it handled two of us working via assorted remote desktops and video conferencing just fine. I haven't done a speed or latency test recently, my guess would be that latency might be a little higher than ideal if you're streaming games, but otherwise it's not significant. One thing I did notice with Relish's service is that SSH connections tended to drop if you weren't active on them for a few minutes, although that issue hasn't cropped up so far on Three's service.

I've not actually used Teams for video conferencing, but I'm guessing that it handles background noise in a similar way to Zoom / Google Meet and attempts to cancel-out its own audio picked up from microphones. However, if there's a fair bit of latency between what the application thinks is going out and the actual audio going out it'll have difficulty processing - I'm guessing using screen casting / reflection is adding too much latency. Try connecting the screen directly via a physical HDMI (or VGA) cable to see if that sorts the problem.

Touch screens aren't something I use myself every day / much at all - we used the board as a plain display screen at the meeting, for which it worked very well (75" display, nice and bright), but I can't give any specific feedback about the touch capabilities. None of the teachers using the new boards seem to have had any problems. I don't have any side-by-side comparison with the MX boards - they both seem like nice-looking displays, they both seem to handle touch functionality okay. The GX series has a built-in Smart-specific (Android-based?) system that is, as far as I know, non-removable - with the MX series you could replace the provided OPS PC with a managed Windows / ChromeOS device, less stuff to get in the way, but it doesn't seem to have caused too much confusion. Price was about £1,700 (with VAT), I think, but that might depend on how many you're buying in one go.

Can we force some kind of safesearch, at least on school-controlled devices / within the school's network?

I'd spend the bulk of any time / money / effort into moving to cloud-based storage, but if you already have local infrastucture anyway (and if you're the kind of place that is considering spending £50,000 on a SAN you probably have a server rack, UPS and cooling) then you could add a server for local sync / backup of that cloud storage. If it's any help, for our school of around 450 pupils / 150 staff we have a local certified Storage-Spaces capable Windows server, with a fast 1TB NVMe cache layer and a slower 70TB disk array that handles our local file hosting and backup, which cost around £10,000 a couple of years ago. That server actually handles our remote desktop aswell, so if you don't need anything to host VMs you can probably get a NAS, complete with NVMe cache layer and 10GB/sec networking, for under £5,000.

Can you use the Reports tab to create a report that exports tickets from the last month? Even if it includes all tickets in the export it should, hopefully, include current state as a field which should then be possible to filter out using Excel or whatever you're using.

If I remember correctly, I couldn't find much by way of documentation for Spiceworks' API, but it was pretty easy to figure out from looking at the network activity section in the browser's developer tools window. Hopefully, that should give you a list of open/closed tickets that you could build a report from.

If I remember correctly, I think Wonde (and similar tools) act as a SAML identity provider usable by Google, letting you use their QR-code (or emoji) cards to log in. It does mean you wind up with a bunch of cards to maintain for each class. For our Years 1 to 3 we generate (hopefully) secure-but-simple passwords similar to those generated by Dinopass: https://www.dinopass.com/ We then make those passwords available to class teachers. Our Chromebooks assigned to Years 1 to 3 are set to auto-login as a guest session - if you don't have dedicated hardware for those yeargroups you could simply enable guest sessions on the Chromebooks to let people to use them without having to log in with a username / password. That does, of course, depend on what they'll be doing - if they are using a resource that needs a Google login they'll need to log in at some point anyway.

Yes, we have one installed in our ICT suite - heafty PoE-capable switch, makes a fair bit of noise, but in a teaching classroom. It's basically a standard cabinet with foam stuffed around the outside. Works better than I might have expected - the noise from the switches in other parts of the school is quite noticeable, but very much less so in the ICT room. There doesn't seem to have been any issues with the switch overheating or anything, either, and we've had it in there for at least 6 years now. I rather wish we'd had them put in more places, there's a couple of places in corridors where the noise from our switches is a bit too loud.

It's worth getting the sockets with built-in USB power - saves taking up a socket with a USB power brick, and if you get ones with a handy shelf you've always got somewhere to park a phone / tablet on charge.

We went for the 500e - 45 1:1 devices, assigned to specific pupils, no reports of any issues so far after about half a term or so. Another school we know has the 300e, I'll check there.

We had three installed over half term, so teachers have been using them a couple of weeks. Going on the theory that no news is good news, we don't seem to have had any issues with them - installation was simple enough, teachers don't seem to have had any problems, all seems to be working okay. We had our installs done by VeryPC, including a couple of classrooms for smaller pupils with motorised height-adjustable screen mounts, they were in and out with no problems, very well organised. Edit: today's IT department meeting has just been moved to a classroom with one of the new GX's in, I guess I'll have some more direct feedback shortly :-)

A condiseration: having workbenches / furniture that isn't too costly / bothersome if it gets damaged or needs changing to fit future needs. I'm currently working in an office where the benches are made from basic wooden flooring panels - it looks a little rough, but it does mean that any time we want to screw something to the underside or put a hole in to run cables, etc, no-one's too bothered about us scuffing the furniture. What we've also found handy is standard-sized units for holding various equipment - in a school setting that can mean furniture that takes Gratnells trays, but 19" rack fittings under desks come in handy, too.

"Loud" is, of course, relative, but we've got on okay with the QTX QT12PA (£170): https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01MRY9KD9/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title Battery powered (just charges straight from mains, no external DC power brick needed), comes with wireless mics and bluetooth functionality. What can help volume a fair bit is having the speaker on a stand (£25) so the sound gets above head height: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B003BJJNGE/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title You can daisy-chain the above speakers together, although there's no XLR output, so you'll need a phono-to-XLR adaptor (£10): https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00ET0EF94/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title and, of course, a decent-length XLR cable. QTX have individual spare mics available separatly for when the originals get lost. The speaker unit doesn't have anywhere to actually store the mics, we find some industrial-strength velcro stuck each side works quite well. The mics aren't the best build-quality, you get a bit of handling noise as you move them around, but they're not too bad - you can always plug in a wired mic if preffered.

From Adobe's website, I get £16.24 per month (price includes VAT) per student / teacher user (that's for individually purchased licenses), so £1,950 per year for 10 users. However, I think starting at 10 users you can get lower prices through a reseller - I think we got a quote for around £185 per user per year for 10 users, so £1,850. At some minimum number of users (is it 500?) you can get the £4-ish-per-user schools pricing through a reseller - it might well be cheaper to just license the whole school, and I think for named-user licensing the pupils can install Creative Cloud at home, too.

Might not be exactly what he was aiming for, but might Flipgrid be appropriate?

Do you mean you've bought a Raspberry Pi (or several) and are trying to figure out fun / useful things you can do with them, either at home or in an educational IT context, or are you trying to put together a "starter kit" of Pi + keyboard + screen + etc of some sort?

Ooh, snazzy - do you need Windows / Mac specific drivers for it to work, or is it seen as a generic webcam that can be used with ChromeOS / Linux too?

We use Ericom's AccessNow, now seemingly re-branded / grouped into their "Connect" product: https://www.ericom.com/ericom-connect/ This is licensed by concurrent users, we have a 30-seat license that covers us for all our staff's remote desktop usage. Client access is simpyl via a web browser, so no client install needed for the user.

You might simply need a conference mic, maybe something like this (£90): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anker-PowerConf-Speakerphone-Conference-Compatible/dp/B0899S421T/ref=sr_1_1_sspa It might be worth buying the above (or similar) to try out with your current setup before upgrading anything else. If you're buying a new display of some sort, 75" TVs are currently around £800. What would be better in a school setup is a proper commercial display / touch screen of some sort (SMART MX Range 75" is around £1,400), ideally with an OPS slot for an embedded PC (maybe £600 for the OPS PC). The PC then turns on at the same time the screen does, so there's just one "on" button for users to press, which can lessen confusion. Depending on the layout of the room, a simple webcam might be fine - I rather like these ones, they're wide-angle enough to cover a large portion of most rooms: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08DJYNSC8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title I notice fancier pan-tilt-zoom cameras seem to have come down in price recently - this one is around £360, and doesn't seem that much different to what we paid maybe £800 for a while back: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tenveo-Conferencing-Conference-Business-Bluetooth/dp/B07ZD4CXJX/ref=sr_1_2_sspa

Is there a significant difference in price, and/or any difference in performance between the two types of SSD drive? My guess is that the 960GB SSDs should be fine - I'd be surprised if the average school had 960GB of files in active use on a daily basis, which is what you want your fast-as-possible cache layer to be holding.

We use the same - it does need mains power, so a single-gang extension cable to go with it might come in handy, too.

We're a prep school, we have a 1:1 Chromebook provision for our Year 4s upwards. We've just purchased the slightly swishier Lenovo 500e for our Y7 / Y8 / Y9 pupils, complete with built-in stylus - we've only had them in place for a week, no problems reported so far, we'll see how we get on but I think we're pretty impressed with them so far. I think another school we know bought the 300e - check the supply before you order, they had issues actually getting the devices delivered. We have our devices charged in form classrooms in school, children don't take them home. All the devices we have are full-flip style ones, so you can bend the screen right back to use the device as a tablet. That doesn't seem to have caused any problems - we did wonder if it meant that we'd be getting lots of devices with damaged hinges, but we don't seem to have done so. The main damage has been to edges of screens, and our best guess is that children are picking the devices up from a storage unit with tubs of devics in and bashing the edges as they lift the Chromebook out - we prefer storage units with individual shelves. The newer devices we've bought have also had world-facing cameras for use in tablet mode, which I think is important for a modern "tablet" device to have. I'd be happy to talk to the deputy head, or I could probably put them in touch with our IT consultant (who deals with several schools and might be able to give you a wider overview) or possibly our head. We're in central London (just round the back of Harrods) and are open again for parent tours so we should be able to accomodate visits if wanted.