dhicks

Gah - looks like we'd run in to this problem: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/215738-allowing-guardian-summaries-administrator-google-classroom.html By default, depending on what type of school you are, Google either enables Classroom summaries (junior schools) or doesn't (senior schools). I think we /were/ classed as a junior school, so previously just adding guardians to pupil accounts got summary emails sent out to parents, but at some point our status has changed (either in the general kerfuffle at the start of lockdown or because we have now opened a senior school), so this year's batch of teacher-created Classrooms don't have Guardian Summaries enabled by default, hence parents who'd completed the Guardians sign-up still weren't getting anything coming through.

I bought a couple of these to try out for school, and was impressed enough to buy a couple more for home: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08DJYNSC8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o07_s00 £34 each - not the snazziest, but I think image and audio quality is fine. The lens is quite wide-angle, wider than most laptop built-in cameras, which I find quite useful. Also has a standard 1/4" thread on the bottom so you can mount it on a tripod or similar, and it actually comes with a small tripod stand.

The IT infrastructure is probably available, and there are probably plenty of individuals around with the skills and experience to produce a solution, but assembling those individuals and forming them into a team that can provide a specific solution to a given problem is going to take time. Hiring a developer and getting them up to speed on existing code and working practices would probably take at least 6 months normally. Parts of the system as explained in that BBC article make good sense - you want to farm out the work of gathering data to a bunch of disparate agencies, you need them to all be able to submit data in some kind of standard format, CSV files with defined headers is a reasonable choice. Something like Python's Pandas library would read / write that amount of data with no problem, but somewhere upstream (by the sounds of it) you have a system which needs to import Excel files. It's even quite possible that the choice of "XLS" was simply a one-character typo - someone forgot the last "X" in a call to "DataFrame.to_excel(filename)" at the end of the script...

Does Google Classroom send out an email summary if there's been no activity over the week / day? I have a couple of parents who aren't getting any updates, I'm wondering if that's because emails are getting lost somewhere or if there are simply no emails being sent out at the moment (pupils are in school, there probably isn't much Google Classroom activity at the moment).

Actually quite impressed by how wide-angle this webcam is - example image: That's a 3.3m by 1.2m image from 1.5m away - there's a bit of a fisheye effect noticeable as it's framed by straight lines, but that should work quite nicely as a reasonably wide-angle lens for meetings.

I think so, yes - I was connecting to the parent's laptop via a Meet session and intructing them what to type / click, there wasn't a chance to rummage around and figure out exactly what was going on. They were initially using a smartphone, as you suggested, which would mean they would follow a link from their (Outlook.com) email into a browser window already logged in to a GMail account. I'm pretty sure we've had several other parents do this with no problem - the emails just turn up in their GMail inbox, all's fine. I think the parents were getting the initial invitation email okay, they just weren't getting (or couldn't find) the summary emails. We set the summaries to come daily, we'll see if they start arriving okay this week.

Yes, turns out they had an outlook.com email address but were logged in to Google with a GMail account, and it turns out if you're already logged in Google doesn't seem to give you a just-use-this-email-address option, it assumes you want to use the Google account you're logged in with. All sortable by starting the process in a private / incognito browser window. Of course, I was sorting out the above at 8:30am this morning when Outlook.com conked out, which added some difficulties...

Ah ha - yes, could well be in this particular case, there's an email address listed in the Gaurdian request data output from GAM that doesn't match the address we sent the request to. I've removed the original Guardian request, I'm waiting for the parent to get back to me so I can create a new request and have them walk through the setup process on Googel Meet so I can see what's happening.

I looked at those - do they have a standard screw thread on the bottom for mounting to a stand? I went for one of these in the end (£34), mainly as the description actually showed them attached to a stand: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08DJYNSC8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s01

Just had a third parent with issues, out of parents for 400-ish pupils over the past 6 months or so, so not a large amount. It's tricky to pinpoint what the issue is - there's always parents who don't quite get what they're being asked, or can't figure out where their spam folder is, etc, but this parent seems to have checked all the obvious bits and just seems to not be receiving the summary emails. Hmm - something to check, this is an @Outlook.com address we're dealing with here. My solution so far has been to create an internal email address and forward emails on to the parent from there, which seems to work okay. Not ideal, and not hugely scaleable, but should work okay for smaller amounts.

So, that's this HDMI-to-USB adaptor: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0888PBG1D/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 £17, worked perfectly - plugged in a mini-HDMI-to-HDMI cable to a Panasonic HDC-SD90 camcorder, plugged the USB part into a Windows machine and it recognised the camera right away, even switching over the current live view on Google Meet. No drivers needed, I should imagine it would work fine on ChromeOS too. We have a screen, NUC and speakers bolted to one of these mic stands: https://www.amazon.co.uk/MS002-Round-Microphone-Stackable-Stand/dp/B08121NKWR/ref=sr_1_5 I'd also recommend this very handy tray: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B005GDGE2Y/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Clips to the mic stand, then tightens with a spring-loaded screw - solid enough to hold a monitor and PC or a couple fo speakers, no problem.

GAM XTD3 allows you to download attachments: https://github.com/taers232c/GAMADV-XTD3/wiki/Users-Gmail-Messages-Threads#download-attachments You'd need to write something to calculate the checksum for each file downloaded and compare with the checksum you're given.

I /think/ Guacamole supports load balancing / connection groups if you're using database authentication, not the default XML-based user-mapping.xml. It's not something I've used myself, sorry, so I guess a rummage through the documentation is needed.

Both the Google File Streaming Client and rclone are free - the File streaming client is Google's official tool, users can download it themselves or you can set it up on your network. rclone is a third-party utility that also handles several dozen other cloud-based file systems and is an excellent tool if you're doing anything with cloud file systems.

Is Word's merge functionality not suitible in some way? When you say "login cards" do you basically mean a printed card of some sort, maybe something that can fit four-to-a-page on A4? Word should be able to handle that as a sticker sheet - you can buy stickers of appropriate size, or perforated card sheets that you can run through a standard laser printer. If you can't sort what you want with Word then I'm working on a utility at the moment to do merges from Word (or Docs) templates stored on O365 / Google Drive that might do what you want - can you provide rough examples of the page layout you're aiming for and some example (not live!) data?

The Google Drive File Streaming client should install on most computers and give users local-like access to Google Drive files.

Good to know - is this someone trying to take an HDMI output from a projector into a HDMI capture card / dongle of some sort?

It might be worth trying the new GoPro Hero 9 - seemingly both that and the Hero 8 haver a "USB webcam" mode, although it seems like you need a Mac or Windows driver of some kind, you can't just plug a GoPro in and have it discovored as a generic USB device. I'm not sure how well the new GoPro works when run of external power / batteries - they've tended to get quite hot when I've tried that in the past, although they might be better now. I'm planning to try an existing low-end Panasonic camcorder with HDMI out and a cheap HDMI-to-USB converter. If that works out, that'll be about £200 for the hardware - I think we have the equivilent of the Panasonic HC-V260, which can be powered via 5v external output from a USB battery pack, so you can the camera up on a tripod or mic stand with no external power cables needed. If you have someone available per class to point the camera, a fluid head would be good for camera positioning. If you can afford a bit more (around £750 in the UK), we have one Logitech PTZ Pro, which does plug in as a generic USB camera and has a remote for pan, tilt, zoom (10x optical zoom, I think). It can be ceiling-mounted, and you can set up pre-recorded angles, so you can have it set up to point at the teacher's desk with them seated, at the whiteboard zoomed in to show content, then maybe zoomed out to show a table for demonstrations or similar.

I would get the process automated as much as possible. Ideally, you'll have class membership / timetabling data already in Active Directory / you MIS, and using a third-party service such as Salamander or Wonde you could have the data synced between the two. You can also use GAM to join teachers / pupils to Classrooms - they don't need to be invited, they can just be joined, and it's always nice when a pupil or teacher logs into Classroom for the first time and all their classes are just there in front of them, ready to go.

We use DNSMadeEasy to monitor our on-site hosted services (our remote access server, mainly). We also use IFTTT to alert us about server cupboard temperature, which came in handy last week after a power cut (everything but the aircon unit was on UPS...).

Papercut has a cloud-based bit, I can't remember what it's called but you can print from Chromebooks with it. You can now authenticate Windows with your Google account, and GSuite offers Windows management facilities.

This has now made it to Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24464339

As already suggested, probably worth keeping a little bit of local capabilities for backup: have Google Drive sync to a local NAS / file server (I'd go for a local file server syncing with rclone) and get versioned backups, handy as a just-in-case. No need to go for something full-on rackmount, so no need need to have a rack to mount stuff in and air conditioning etc, just a small machine is fine thse days. Backup for Internet: we have a fibre line and an ADSL backup, and also a 5G connection as backup. In the most recent outage our fibre line went down but the ADSL did stay up, but if both were down due to a local issue ("backhoe-related outage") wireless stands a bit more chance of staying up - should provide enough for at least basic emails-to-parents. It might also be worth looking at backup ppower for your local network infrasturcture - we have a central UPS that powers a number of our network cabinets (as well as a couple of central admin workstations), which in turn run the wireless and telephones via PoE, so in a recent power cut we could at least contact parents and set up homework via Classroom. For filtering, if you're using Chromebooks, locally-installed filtering clients for pupil accounts work best. We've just moved to Securley, which I haven't had much experience with yet. The nice part is that setttings / extensions stay with the user rather than the device, so if a child logs in to a Chromebook from home they get the same filtering setup as at school - handy for home learners, and you can recondition a second-hand laptop for home as a Chromebook with the free version of Cloud Ready.

Yes - I haven't done any performance tests yet, but I imagine most of the read / write activity should ht the 1TB cache first. Most of our 7TB or so of "live" data is several years worth of archived images and video, there isn't that much that people actually need to use on a daily basis. Also, we're moving more towards using Google Drive first, with the local storage being used as a backup. Google Drive's performance can be very good - I've noticed it's now faster to upload a large video file to Drive than it is to download it from a camera's SD card in the first place!

We recently-ish added a new server as a virtual machine host to host our main critical functionality - Domain Controller, file server, print server, remote access host. This is a Windows Server 2019 host, with hardware certified to work with Storage Spaces - 2 * 1TB NVME SSD caches sitting in front of mechanical harddrives presenting around 24TB of storage space. It holds 96GB of RAM. We also purchased a new QNAP NAS with 70TB of storage to use as local backup storage, with older servers re-used as failover devices. Total cost for the hardware was around £10,000, with installation and configuration being done in-house. More recently, I looked at a remote-access solution with better graphics performance - the remote access host above works quite nicely, and can handle about 30 users at a time okay, but doesn't have the graphics performance of a local machine. Cost for something that could handle 30 users all running a 3D graphics environment or similar was around £60,000, with all configuration and setup included.