dhicks

My guess would be that CPOMS' (quite neat and reasonable) system of using "schoolname.cpoms.net" for each school-spcecific login page has triggered Google's phishing-spotting algorithm - it looks like an external domain name, but contains elements of the school's domain name, and is probably being passed around in email in GMail a fair bit, I can see how that's getting flagged. They might do better to use "login.cpoms/net/schoolname", or maybe allow individual schools to point DNS entries (cpoms.schoolname.com) at their servers.

We've rolled out Yubikeys to senior management and admin staff as a start, we're considering what we do with other staff - those Token2 devices look like a good option, thanks. Something we want to test out if we can: https://breakdev.org/evilginx-2-next-generation-of-phishing-2fa-tokens/ Evilginx is a server that proxies a site, to which you can point a nearly-the-same domain name (g00gle.com, etc) in the hopes of phishing someone to visit your site thinking it's the original and capturing their login details. The above article points out that using a one-time-code 2FA mechanism doesn't protect against that kind of attack. However, I suspect if your site is using login-with-Google (or Microsoft, or other provider) that should offer suitible protection as Google (for instance) requires a valid host URL to be entered on their OAuth login setup to use login-with-Google on your site.

I think you can just use the standard Windows install image, written to USB stick, with an unattend.xml file in place to automate the install process, including domain join.

If my guesses as to video numbers / length / class size / etc are correct-ish, hosting the kind of content the original poster is talking about on Cloudflare's system might cost around £100 per month per school, I'm guessing other similar products (and a bunch of them come up as paid ads when you type "cloudflare video hosting" into Google) are a similar price. They seem to offer a good set of capabilities, including a customisable video player and auto-encoding of video assets from any format to various different qualities. There would, of course, be more integration work to do between whatever front end / authentication mechanism you're using and the actual video player part of things.

Indeed - Cloudflare are charging around £70 a month (on top of what it would cost for "raw" hosting) to take care of a lot of the details, which is pretty reasonable if you're not at the kind of scale where you can hire a team to develope and monitor a solution for you (more like £10,000 a month).

As MP4 files, that's maybe around 35GB of storage. If decent-quality streaming video takes 5 Mbps, and a school's worth of pupils (500) all does their classwork / homework at the same time, I reckon you could manage with 2 Gbps of bandwidth server-side, so around a £30 per month hosting cost per school (pricing from OVH's VPS price list, includes VAT). So charge £360 per school per year to cover your hosting costs. 500 pupils each watching a 10-minute clip per "school" day is around 1700 hours of video downloaded per month. At 100MB per hour that's maybe 0.2TB total size - should be well under any total size limitations (OVH mention 4TB per month, not sure if that's just for certain regions).

Thanks for that link, some useful stuff there - got me thinking about working out hosting costs. Just had a look at Cloudflare's video hosting prices. Assuming "several thousand videos" means 2,000 10-minute videos, that's 20,000 minutes of video to host. That would cost around £75 per month to host on Cloudflare. Assuming one pupil might watch one video per day, and maybe 20 "school" days per month (averaged over the year, some months will be busier, some completly quiet), that's 200 video minutes per pupil per month - call it 250. If an average senior school yeargroup is 150 pupils, the two yeargroups using GCSE content might be 300 pupils - call it 500. 500 pupils per school using 250 video minutes per month each is 125,000 video minutes per month per school, about £90 - call it £100. Charge around £1,200 per school per year for access to your video library and you've just about covered your hosting and bandwidth costs.

If this is content you plan to license to schools for a fee, one possibility is to copy the content to a school-owned Google Drive / Office 365 shared drive, then the school could use the content directly in Classroom assignments and presentations.

Are these easy-to-replace keyboards, the kind where you can pop the keyboard off the top of the case with a flathead screwdriver, disconnect one ribbon cable and swap in a new one? If so, it might be worth replacing keyboards and upgrading to SSDs (if you haven't already) to give you refurbished machines. We have some 8-year-old laptops that just about manage to run Windows 10 - they're fine once they get going, but they can take a little while to boot and they tend to slow down rather when updating. If you want to stick with Windows devices, maybe start looking at having devices logon via Office 365 accounts rather than from a local Active Directory server. Have your local AD server sync with Office 365 to set up the accounts, users should wind up with the same login details. You'll probably find your Microsoft license agreement covers you for the basic Office 365 tier - something to check with whoever provides your Microsoft licensing.

We have our public calendars (for use by parents an so on) available in iCal format, which is then picked up by a script that generates a week-to-view PDF intended to be printed, but you could display it on a screen instead. I can't remember how "public" making a calendar public is, or whether you can export in iCal format for private calendars.

Yes, Neverware seems to work fine with the Edimax N150 "micro" USB WiFi adaptor - only just larger than the USB port itself, around £25, plenty of other brands available on Amazon, probably very similar innards.

I've found installing Neverware CloudReady to take very little effort - boot from USB, confirm you want to wipe the device, leave it to run - it turns the machine off when done. If you're handing these to children and not expecting them back I'd install the home version of CloudReady, then there's no cost to the school (although, handily, things like filtering settings still follow users around, so even if pupils are logging on with their school account at home on a non-managed ChromeOS device you can still have filtering settings apply). If you want these to still be owned by the school (and you could use them to stretch out your current device provision, assuming they're in a reasonable state) then the education licensing for CloudReady is pretty good - we went for the all-in-one CloudReady / Google management license deal, paid yearly (sorry, can't remember how many devices that's for). We have CloudReady running on some 9-year-old laptops, as well as on new NUCs in our staffroom, all seem to be working nicely.

Ah - turns out as well as the above I also need to de-provision the device from GSuite. Right, Chromebook setting up in developer mode now...

Hello All, I'm trying to install a Linux distribution (pretty much anything will do, but I'd probably prefer something Debian-based, and it needs to be able to run a web browser) on an Asus C100PA Chromebook. To do this, I first need to turn on Developer Mode. On the C100PA there's a hardware screw to remove from the motherboard first, I've done that (fiddly - 14 screw just to get the back off!). The instructions I've found say to hit Esc-Refresh(F3) and hit power, then wait until the device reboots and hit Ctrl-D. That bit works okay, the device switches to developer mode. However, after trying to reboot into developer mode it then decides it can't do that after all and switches back again, giving the message "The owner of this Chromebook has disabled developer mode". This is a managed device, I've placed the device in a particular OU with the "Always allow developer tools" option enabled, and power-washed the device and let it re-enrol to join the correct OU and have the settings apply. Anyone had any luck getting a previously managed Chromebook into developer mode to get Linux installed?

I have a school-branded hooded top, exactly the same as the Reception years uniform except with "STAFF" written accross the back (and bigger, obviously). I find the large pocket at the front comes in very handy for storing work gloves / cable ties / hammers / etc, and it's lasted a good ten years so far. I think our school uniform was originally supplied by Harrods, so probably more on the pricy-but-long-lasting side.

Yes - iSAMS have reduced functionality for any non-2FA-enabled accounts, limiting access to facilities to contact parents. For admin staff and senior management we've linked iSAMS accounts to GSuite accounts and turned on GSuite 2FA, handing out Ubikey USB dongles to staff, so GSuite (which handles email and shared file access) is covered, too. It seems to have worked well so far, with little fuss or problem. We're just trying to figure out the best way to roll out further - Ubikeys are £25 each, so there's a bit of a cost if we roll out to all staff, we're probably going to go with authenticator app on phones.

Guacamole for web-based Windows (or, actually, anything that runs RDP or VNC) remote desktop access with an authentication gateway that handles (2FA-enabled) GSuite authentication.

Backblaze have their own intrastructure, they provide an Amazon S3 compatible interface, so anything written to write data back to Amazon's S3 should also (in theory) be able to use Backblaze. Our setup is pretty much the same as Arthur's above - same version of Veeam, same location, size and cost of data, same immutable-for-30-days protection feature. I /thought/ we were using the UK datacentre, but it turns out I'd missed selecting the location when creating the Backblaze account.

Google Classroom? Create a Classroom for each appropriate group of pupils - "Year 7 Bulletin" or similar, then when you set resources each member child should get an email, or they can look at the Classroom page to see the latest update.

Ah, good to know. We're trialing Kami school-wide, which allows for electronic annotation of "print" documents, and I've bought a tub of the cheapest styluses available to try out. I found them rather poor when trying to do handwriting, but I reckon you're right and they should be fine for diagrams. We have similar issues to the original poster, which we're hoping Kami (or similar) will solve - teachers have resources in printable format (PDFs, etc) and are in the habit of setting those as work, even online for children working at home, which is an issue if home doesn't have a printer handy. Kami allows pupils to annotate PDFs and submit the results via Google Classroom - no printing needed, and teachers can use their existing resources.

DOCX files are actually Zip files containing XML and other data, with a little bit of scripting it is possible to search-and-replace various values and duplicate pages. We have a print-ready calendar produced nightly from iCal data produced from our Google Calendar, that uses a DOCX template. The source code, if it's any help, is here: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/docx-merge The above isn't properly finished - I got as much functionality done as was needed to produce calendars, other features are currently lacking. It's handy for seeing how to open and change text inside a DOCX file, though - just unzip it, modify document.xml and re-zip the file. For converting from DOCX to PDF, I use rclone to upload the DOCX file to Google Drive then download in PDF format. This works well as long as you make sure you format your DOCX file for Google Docs, which basically seems to mean no images or text boxes floated over the main page, just stick to inline images only.

Ideally: an ultrasonic directional speaker per PC, so sound from each PC can only be heard directly in front of that PC. I'm not sure if there's anything affordable and suitable for a classroom setup - a Google search for "ultrasonic directional speakers" brings up some interesting information, plus several YouTube videos on how to make your own, but no handy Amazon link for a £30 USB device. I think Lightspeed (not the filtering company, different company) were demonstrating speakers a few years ago at the BETT show for in-classroom sound reinforcement, they might have something suitable.

A 5G router - depends on coverage, obviously, but I'm on a 5G connection at home which works fine for 2 people doing video conferencing at the same time. Should be okay for one classroom as a temporary / backup solution.

...hmmm, just been down to the hall to check, and it's not there any more...

The one we have is in our main hall, on a mic stand, but I'm fairly sure it's being used by another school ceiling-mounted - I'll see if I can get an image. It's not a big or heavy device, it's light enough to sit on a standard mic stand with a simple thread adaptor from mic to camera mount screw size. Then again, that webcam I linked to could also be ceiling-mounted with a suitable bracket if you wanted, it has a standard camera-mount thread on the underside which also flips out at 180 degrees, so you could mount it right-way-up on a ceiling with a simple screw mount.