dhicks

What is it you're getting for your money? The linked BBC article points out that Sony or Sennheiser headphones cost around £350. I have a pair of £50 Cowin headphones that, as far as I can tell, do the kinds of things I'd expect from headphones - the sound coming out of them seems to be okay, they work over Bluetooth, they hold a charge for a couple of days work at a time. I can, actually, imagine some people wanting to pay an additional £200 for the Apple-ness bits (integrates simply and easily with your existing Apple hardware, nice user interface, etc), but I don't get what the additional £300 gets you in terms of headphone hardware.

Video editing: We're using WeVideo - I saw your other post about it being too expensive, I guess that depends on how many users you need it for. I think we pay around £200 a year for 50 users, which isn't bad, although I guess if you're signing up a whole 1,000-pupil school it's going to get more expensive. If you want free, DaVinci Resolve is a proper, fully-featured video editing / colour grading package available for free and is starting (so I understand) to be widely used in industry. Not sure on the hardware requirements, but is probably worth a go.

If you think a component is being blocked by your gateway then your best bet is probably to take a look at the gateway's logs to see what it's blocking. Just having a quick look at the page itself, it's loading components from bitpaper.io, google-analytics, gstatic and stripe - some of those domains might be blocked by your gateway.

I've been tempted to say I'll run a robotics club in the past, but I've always been a bit worried about the amount of work involved. We're an independant school, pupils (or their parents) can afford to pay for clubs so we can do some nice stuff - it would be quite reasonable for us to be able to run a build-your-own-robot type club with the aim of each child being able to take a robot home with them at the end of the process. I can see that sucking up a bunch of time, though.

Same here - you just hand storage spaces a bunch of disks, it sorts itself out from there. It's probably worth adding that you should have an HBA card or a RAID card with appropriate pass-through features, otherwise the RAID controller just gets in the way and slows things down. Storage Spaces can use faster disks as a cache-like mechanism to improve read/write performance - give it a couple of 1TB SSDs and all your read/writes will be done at SSD speed, improving performance. I think on our server we have a RAID-1 array for the (small) SSD boot volume, then the NVMe SSDs and 8TB drives are on the HBA controller. You can also get the same functionality all-in-one in a modern NAS - we have a 12-drive QNAP device (around £2,000 new) that, given a couple of NVMe drives and left to get on with it, presents a single fast storage array. In theory, and part of the reason we bought new, is you want hardware that is certified to work with Storage Spaces so you have support if there's any issues. However, as Katy seems to be finding, in practice any reasonable bit of hardware will do and you can save a fair amount buying pre-used.

For remote access, we have a stand-alone server, separate from any Windows domain, running Guacamole for web-based access via Remote Desktop. The same server runs a Windows VM to RDP into, so I can open a browser tab and connect to a Windows desktop from where I can RDP / SSH / etc to any other machine on the network.

For comparison, I think we spent around £8,000 on a new version of something similar - fancier NVMe SSDs as the fast tier for storage spaces and 6 x 8TB drives as the main storage, but ultimatly doing a very similar job for around four times the price. Of course, if you're having everyone move to cloud-based storage anyway (Google Drive / O365 / etc) the read/write performance of any local storage probably isn't that important anyway - with a good, low-latency, high-bandwidth Internet connection we're finding we can write files to Google Drive faster than we can to an SD card locally.

How weather-proof are these? Something I've noticed about quite a lot of schools is the amount of spare flat-roof space they have - scatter a few rocks and/or other fun obstacales / discoverables around and you have an environment for a robot to explore. You'd want something that could be kept running by solar power so people don't have to keep clambering up to the roof to change batteries, and weather-proof enough to handle wind, rain, sunc, etc.

We're gradually rolling out Ubiquiti hardware to replace our older Ruckus system. The Ruckus system has, actually, been reliable and was good value for money at the time we bought it, but the Ubiquiti equipment is easy to purchase individual devices for so we can extend as we go along. We actually now have our network extended accross two buildings, with some of Ubiquiti's longer-range access points mounted in a neighbouring church tower to provide a relay point, with all the devices visible and manageable via Ubiquiti's web interface. The setup was so simple the teachers in the other budiling noticed the Internet connection was working and started using it before we even got over there to check the connection!

Apart from the testing above, I've not used it much so far - I plan to use it in my other office, but that's closed at the moment over lockdown so it's not something I've been using as a desktop machine. The keyboard is quite compact, which I suspect might get annoying after a bit - I prefer a large, mechanical keyboard. What sort of thing are you thinking you'd use it for? It's a great device if you want something to tinker with, although if that's just for software stuff you might be as well off with a cheap Linux VM server somewhere.

GAM has the option to sync from a CSV file (removing any existing members not listed in the CSV) or manually add individual users. I have a script pick up a list of additional users from a Google Sheets document which then uses GAM to add or sync users as wanted. Similar to as mentioned above, you could have something similar run every night after the main SIMS-to-Google sync to add additional users back in.

Depends on your classroom setup, but if you have classroom PCs of some sort you could replace the Smart board with a large-screen display and use Airplay running on the connected PC to connect from an iPad or Android device. Works best if PCs (or teacher laptops) have well-defined names so people can easily see which of several devices they are connecting to, and does need staff to have some kind of tablet or similar.

Most reasonably-aged PCs (5 years old-ish?) these days should be able to handle video playback easily enough, I'd be surprised if that was the bottleneck in performance. Are they trying to do something particularly fancy by way of effects? What format (video codec) is the footage in that they're editing and which of the drives in the machine are they using? A mechanical harddrive might be a bit slow if you're storing a large source file on there, especially if it's in a format not intended for editing. It's been a while since I've used Premier, but it used to have an option to render a good-for-editing version of your video file from the source footage that you could use for real-time editing. That, and make sure any cache folders and similar are pointing at the SSD and not the mechanical drive.

We have a PayPal account set up so we can purchase stuff from eBay, and it also comes in handy for some website subscriptions and similar. Most purchasing is done via Amazon. Both the Amazon and eBay accounts use my school-provided credit card, so ultimatly there's only one source of spending (the credit card) for the bursar to keep track of. I put in details of each transaction when the credit card statement comes through each month (what was purchased, who authorised it, what department it's used for, etc) and that seems to work quite nicely. What is it you're aiming to sell via eBay? We use any older equipment until it simply dies, I'd have thought anything you're likely to be able to sell would be at such a low value it wouldn't be worth the bother of dealing with listing and packaging it. Your time is probably better spent doing other work. If you want still-usable equipment reused/recycled then there are dedicated recyling firms that will take care of that for you, generally for free.

Just now trying out a new Raspberry Pi 400 with a £15 HDMI-to-USB cable: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0888PBG1D/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00 Seems to be working well so far - might be a good solution for anyone wanting to use the Pi with an existing all-in-one or laptop. Update: tested it playing a YouTube video, fullscreen inside a fullscreen webcam preview browser window. Seems to work very well - framerate seems fine, there's a very occasional small glitch in the image but nothing too bad. Sound doesn't seem to be transmitted via HDMI, I guess a snazzier USB capture device might be needed for that. There's also a little bit of latency, noticeable when moving the mouse around - fine for desktop use, but might add a bit too much lag if you're playing games.

Absolutly - your average teacher should be able to just log in and find all their Classrooms set up ready for them, synced from their timetable, with pupils joined to appropriate Classrooms. I can understand Google's thinking here - they provide the basic facilities and an API, it's up to third-parties to produce solutions to provide integration with particular databases / school systems, etc. As you also point out, there's bits of functionality missing from the API - we lack the ability to turn on Guardian notifications for Classrooms via the API, for instance.

Ooh - we've got choir to record tomorrow, standing in a (of course) largly empty, echoing church. The music departmewnt should have a Roland recorder somewhere, maybe we can get that hooked up to an audio input on the camera. The other option is that they lip-sync to a recording they've already done in somewhere less echoy. Has anyone tried an "echo cancelling" conference mic such as: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Conference-Microphone-Anker-PowerConf-Compatible/dp/B0899S421T/ref=redir_mobile_desktop for recording groups?

Edulink's interface looks pretty comprehensive - if that's the solution you're using you should probably check what format they can accept data in first, then work on getting your data to that format. I have a mechanism for doing mailmerge-style document templates with Word / Google Docs files and Excel / Sheets / CSV files, but that'll result in a set of Word / PDF documents which you can serve to individual parents, it won't look as snazzy as Edulink's interface.

Ah, interesting, thanks - I hadn't come accross that tool before. I'm taking a similar approach, with scripts that take settings / lists from spreadsheets to process, although with "API" access being handled by a server-side script that runs GAM rather than as anything snazzily integrated into GSuite.

My guess would be the camcorder option is going to be best - no time limit on recording, so you can set it up well beforehand and simply leave it running. I've got a setup for our hall ready for live streaming with the camera, external mic and computer and monitor all mounted in one mic stand, you just carry it in, make sure there's power and turn it on. We use £200-ish Panasonic camcorders which can be powered from a 5v USB power supply and can provide a clean HDMI output that works well with a cheap (£20) HDMI-to-USB adaptor, so if you want you can have the vidoe stream go straight into your PC's video package.

GAM-XTD3 has a "gam print course-work" command available: https://github.com/taers232c/GAMADV-XTD3/wiki/Classroom-Courses It looks like from the above you should be able to get a list of Courses and Assignments. Of course, that doesn't give you a neatly-formatted report suitible for putting in front of a parent or teacher, you would nedd to further process that data in some way. I do that with a set of Python scripts - I'm working on getting to a state where they might be useful to other users, but they're not currently in a really release-able state.

Has anyone bought / tried one of thse yet? I'd be interested to know if the HDMI output works with a (cheap) USB capture device - we have all-in-ones (PCs and iMacs) and laptops / Chromebooks throughout the school, and children tend to have laptops at home these days, so the most practical way for people to hook up the display might be a cheap HDMI-to-USB adaptor from the Pi to the PC, then a simple full-screen "camera preview" on the browser.

I'm aiming for OAuth authentication for GSuite, O365, etc. I really just need to spend more time figuring out what it is I need to set up / write to make it work. I have a slightly cludged-together mechanism where I have a server authenticate GSuite logins then pass a username / password via the URL as a GET request - not very secure as you can see the credentials in the URL, so not practical for general deployment. I've looked at the OpenID documentaton a couple of times but not had time to properly sit and concentrate on what I'm doing long enough to get anything working.

Salamander have been great: as well as their core functions they added functionality for us to sync pupil birthdays to Google Calendar, a feature the admin team wanted so teachers could be reminded. They did that for us for no extra charge, which was very decent of them. I've found Wonde's support to be good, too - a couple of resources we use now use them for getting pupil data, and from interacting with them so far they seem to know what they're doing by way of data security, whic h is important for what they're doing.

It can take a bit of skill and organisation to get a whole school photograped to a reasonable quality, although it's a solveable problem. Surley there must already be a modern web-based platform with the functionality to take photos (I'd go for a DSLR connected by USB to a laptop, with photos going straight into the system, no swapping memory cards around) and match them up with pupil IDs, exporting for common MIS formats, maybe also handling parent authentication and payments.