dhicks

Ah - that might be just the thing, thanks! I've just found this camera on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/V-See-Indoor-1920x1080P-HD-SDI-Security-Black/dp/B00D4R056U/ref=sr_1_5 A small, very locatable-looking CCTV-style camera, £85, with what looks like a removeable M8 lens, so I should be able to position them and use a suitible lens to cover whatever area is needed. Call it £150 per camera by the time I've bought a SDI-to-HDMI adaptor and SDI cabling. 3 of those plus the Blackmagic ATEM Mini is around £800 - not bad, and should all work off a single power switch (easy for a teascher to switch on and off) and be seen by a computer (ChromeOS included) as a simple webcam. As you point out, microphones are separate - I was looking at maybe 2 of these Hanging Condenser Mics (£50): https://www.studiospares.com/Microphones/Mics-Installation/Hanging-Condenser-Mic---Studiospares-HM10_449500.htm Plus a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 (£150): https://www.studiospares.com/Studio-Gear/Audio-Interfaces/Focusrite-Scarlett-2i2-3rd-Gen_392520.htm Around £250, and again should be seen by any computer as a simple USB audio device. Around £1,000 for the lot.

I have a non-smart phone I bought maybe 15 years ago, I just haven't got around to upgrading it. I do have a smartphone, but I bought that to test VR applications on. I finally got around to adding a SIM to it when I visited Los Angeles last year - it turns out that there you pretty much can't eat or catch a taxi without a smartphone. I live and work in London, where I'm either at home (with assorted computers around), at school (with assorted computers around) on the tube (where there's no signal) or walking somewhere in between (and I generally know where I am).

Good point - we've used HDMI-over-ethernet adaptors before which, if I remember correctly, worked okay and cost around £30 or so, so that might be a reasonable solution.

That makes sense. Does anyone make a small wall / ceiling mountable HDMI-output camera, ideally running off 5V DC power so we could run a USB cable to it from the mains or a battery pack? Affordable, maybe around the £50 sort of area? I can find a few devices on Amazon and eBay but I'm not quite sure how reliable they are.

I'd considered something similar - how reliable is the above proving to be in use? Are teachers managing okay with it? I can imagine some of our teachers struggling with OBS - a panel with big, glowing buttons that they can press to switch camera angles sounds more like something they could handle easily. What cameras are you using - the Blackmagic ATEM Mini is HDMI input only, is there a small (and, ideally, cheap) webcam-like camera that outputs HDMI? What sort of cost per classroom - under £1,000?

The iOS app does seem a bit flaky - we have around 400 pupils (or their parents) and 60-ish teaching staff using Google Classroom, we've had some parents (3 or 4) have issues with the iOS app. A uninstall and reinstall seems to fix the issue easily enough, though. No teachers have reported issues. We've had at least one pupil use "Google Classroom ate my homework" as an excuse for them not having done the work, so if pupils have got wind of a ruse believed by teachers then that might explain the sudden flurry of reports. The app, as far as I can make out, doesn't actually do anything that the web page doesn't, it's just there because iOS users are used to installing apps. The web page seems to work just fine on iOS. Indeed - Classroom doesn't seem to be a central component of GSuite's database model. There's nothing in the reports you can get from the API (via GAM) that point to Classroom items, you only get reports that feature Classroom IDs that point to other GSuite components. Classroom seems to have been someone's Google 20% project that made it big, and suddenly there's several million people relying on it on a daily basis. I think Google are, understandably, cuatious about fiddling too much - it mostly works, tinkering with any major underlying functionality is going to cause more trouble than it would fix at the moment.

You're right - it does look like a nice, affordable device. Any experience with devies with detachable keyboards in a school setting? On the one hand, I can forsee the keyboards and screens getting separated. On the other hand, it potentially makes fixing broken keyboards / screens way easier, especially if they sell the keyboards as separate spares.

There are various stand-alone services (ClassDojo, Firefly, are two that come to mind), or you could possibly host your own Moodle server, but the biggest market share at the moment is probably between Google and Microsoft's systems. Both have "classroom" components as part of their wider platforms, and most schools will be setup with at least one or the other, even if they are using a separate platform for classroom management. Therefore, if you develope and host resources somewhere that can accept authentication via Google/Microsoft OAuth you should be able to use your resources from either platform. If you want to host the whole course, then maybe a Moodle server that can, again, accept OAuth logins, so all staff / pupils have to do is select "Login With Google" and use their existing account to login, which will save time and bother at either end in getting people using your system.

A lot of the cheapest microphones on Amazon will probably be cheap enough (£20?) that you can get one now to try out, and if it breaks / doesn't work it's no huge problem. Studio Spares do belt-pack lavelier mic sets from £50: https://www.studiospares.com/Microphones/Mics-Wireless/Gemini-VHF-01HL-VHF-System-Headset-Lapel-1741MHz_290420.htm There doesn't seem to be a huge amount of those in stock, though. If I understand correctly, most modern noise-cancelling bluetooth headphones (from £30-ish) will also act as microphones (because they already have mics as part of the noise-cancelling mechanism), so a set of headphones worn around the teacher's neck might work just as well.

We've had 1:1 on-site, school-owned Chromebooks for the past 3 or 4 years. We're a prep school, 1:1 provision is currently for Years 4 and above, with lower ratios in reception to Y3 classrooms. We've had them both as assigned devices and as a pool of decies per classroom. We've found the pool-per-classroom to be easiest to deal with, there's then less issues with pupils forgetting devices, not charging them or them getting broken. However, for when pupils (possibly) come back we're going back to individually-assigned devices. We don't currently limit usable hours, although we can report on usage times. We use Lightspeed for filtering, in the same way as you desribe above. It means we can assure parents that there's filtering in place when their child is using a school device, and seems to have worked well so far. Bear in mind things like filtering and browser add-ons actually follow the user, not the device, so you can actually still have filtering on a Chrome browser running on Windows - we've just been trying out the new Google Credential Provider on Windows, and it does actually seem to work. We have a couple of different models of device. All them are "flip"-style devices that can rotate their screens to become tablets. Actually, "tent" mode is more popular than you'd think - handy to have a device next to you while you do hand-written work for research or video conferencing. We have charging stations in each room. We try to get teachers / pupils to take responsibility for sotring and charging devices - a Chromebook monitor who checks the device are in the charger and set to charge overnight seems the best idea. We haven't had too many breakages. The most common issues have been keyboards failing - on our cheaper £200 devices some seem to just fail after a few years - or cracked, but not completly un-usable, screens. The newer devices, designed to be more ruggerised, do seem to have faired a lot better. We suspect the majority of the screens being cracked are side-on taps as the devices are grabbed out of the charging cabinets of a morning, with over-eager children pulling them out of the charging buckets and banging them on the underside of the cabinet. Hence we tend to prefer the simple shelf-style cabinets - they're cheaper, and tend to keep the cables neater, too.

Sorry, I'm working from home at the moment and not from my Mac at school, so I can't picture / test exactly what you're trying to do, but my guess is that the (confusingly-named, and rather hard to Google for) "Packages" application might help: WhiteBox - Packages Some more useful documentation from Jamf, who recomend using Packages to create packages for distribution: https://support.jamfschool.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002300893-How-to-build-packages-for-macOS

There's been a couple of other similar discussions on here this week. A decent webcam, mounted above the front-of-classroom display, is probably the easiest (and cheapest) option - can be pretty securly attached, less likely to wander off. Not sure if anyone's tried yet having multiple webcams plugged in so the teacher can switch camera angles (one for front-of-class, one for the teascher's chair, maybe one in a breakout area or practical work area for science or similar, etc). If you want something that can be moved around, then I'm thinking a basic mic stand (in my experience, these work well - less moving parts / rubber bits to break / fall off, stackable, easy to height-adjust, £15 each) with a tablet / phone holder (£10?) on top. If teachers don't already have suitible devices then a cheap Android phone (£100?) could be all that's needed as a video conference device. I would also suggest an external, rechargable battery pack (£30?) cable-tied to the stand if it's going to be used all day. I still think someone could do with making a mic stand similar to above but with a battery built in to the bottom stand, giving it weight and stability and a power supply, all-in-one. Google do actually have some hardware solutions availble, including integrated mic / speaker units and PTZ-capable cameras. I know someone who's trying a set out in a specific location (science lab, with the remote-controlled PTZ camera set to point at pre-set locations including a fume cupboard for practical demonstrations). That's getting a bit pricy at around £2,000, though, so might not be practical for every classroom.

Your best optionj is probably to simply give it a try - see if you can have multiple Meet windows / tabs open at the same time. In my experience yes, I think I've managed to have a couple of Meet sessions open at the same time before, but it's not something I've made much use of. I'm not sure what happens to bandwidth / processing requirements - you might well need (sessions X bandwidth) available. I think in another thread a few days ago we discusssed Meet needing "up to" 3.2Mb/s both up and down for multi-person Meets - a home ADSL connection might start to struggle for upload bandwidth with multiple sessions.

Following the documentation link you gave, I went on to the "Prepare your network" page: https://support.google.com/a/answer/1279090 Which seems to be suggesting an ideal bandwidth of 3.2 Mbps (both up and down) for "Group video meetings" per participant. If I'm reading that correctly, is that saying that each user needs 3.2 Mbps, there's no "central" device that needs 3.2 x X Mbps? I'm not sure how the Meet client requests video streams - does it get served one stream per participant from Google's servers? Does it get served one stream per participant that is on-screen at the time, so maybe one main speaker and a couple of others?

Yes - handy for noisy environments / removing stuff like traffic noise. In my experience, both Google Meet and Zoom seem to be pretty good at avoiding feedback as long as you're using the same device for both input and output. SamDavis's suggestion above of ceiling-mounted mics sounds like a good idea - a couple of directional mics mounted on the ceiling in front of the front-of-room display and speakers should avoid feedback and be able to pick up general classroom chatter.

Indeed. I've been having a bit of a tinker with sound / microphones over the past couple of days as I get a setup to do some book narrations and how-to videos. Mics that are sensitive enough to pick up sound from further away but without too much noise are available, but you're looking at around £500 and something that involves multiple components (mic, USB interface / amp, cables, etc), not something really built for a classroom environment. About the best bit of hardware I've seen is something like the Padcaster, basically a frame for the iPad which allows you to mount things like shotgun mics in the same way you would on a DSLR or video camera. That's not motorised, so it can't turn to "look" at a specific pupil. I suspect a simpler and easy-to-manage solution might simply be to mark an area in front of the camera with tape to make a box pupils can come and stand in when they want to speak to the teacher. It would be handy if someone made a mic/camera stand with a curved, weigted base, so that given a push it would simply wobble back upright again. If you're weighting a base, you might as well make that weight batteries and have it capable of powering a tablet or whatever mounted on the stand for this kind of function.

If your classroom setup is a TV or projected screen at the front connected up to a PC of some sort, then the simplest solution should be to simply add a camera of some sort to that PC, probably mounted just above the large-screen display. A decent webcam should do it, and be quite affordable - not sure what supplies are like at the moment, might be a bit limited. Something with a wider field-of-view might be best, s maybe the slightly higher-end of webcam if still affordable. You'd need someone in the classroom to set up at the start of a lesson.

It's reasonably handy - the user has control, there's no remote control facility, so the user can at least be assured that they are in control and you can't "break" their computer. More useful for walking users through doing something on a web site than for trouble-shooting hardware issues or similar - they have to already be at the point where they've managed to switch computer on, connect to the Internet, log on and start Meet.

Ah, interesting, thanks - I just saw your other post saying which reports you get from GAM (user's lastlogintime, gmail:last_interaction_time and classroom:last_interaction_time). I'm doing pretty much the same, but not currently using GMail activity as we've only just started using email with some of our older pupils (we're a prep school, our oldest are currently Year 8). How are you getting the data from the GAM report to the spreadsheet you show above? I'm processing the data with a Python script and outputing various reports, are you going straight from CSV to Sheets somehow?

A subtle difference when it comes to GSuite / ChromeOS: things like Chrome extensions and settings follow user accounts around, not devices (or, at least, you can choose between the two). For school-controlled devices you can limit logins to school-only accounts, but even if a user is using a different device it means they can still pick up school settings. For most home setups, of course, there's nothing to stop a child simply opening a new private session browser window, but for a school-controlled Windows machine it means if you can limit a user's ability to use different / private browsers you can be sure they have the same filtering or other settings as a ChromeOS device. It also means that for younger pupils, supervised by an adult to make sure they aren't opening new browser windows or whatever, they can be given restricted access to things like YouTube with appropriate content limitations in place.

Turns out you'd have had an issue yesterday if you were using Facebook's SDK: https://it.slashdot.org/story/20/05/07/2138212/how-a-facebook-bug-took-down-your-favorite-ios-apps To summarise the article: Facebook made a change to their API / SDK and many apps' logins stopped working. To be fair, the issue was fixed in a couple of hours - for the most part the process works well.

Just reading some of that Hacker News thread, it's interesting to see there seems to be a fair bit of a disconnect between the set of people generally developing features (silicon valley types who work for venture-backed companies) and people in corporate / educational institutions, like us, who have an idea what kind of features would be most useful. I rather get the impression there's a huge un-tapped market there for applications with better authentication integration - I think there's plenty of companies missing out on user sign-ups / retention because integration with a company's logins is just too much trouble to manage. Actually, I reckon the failure point is going to be after a few users have signed up with personal test accounts, then ask for the application to be purchased for the whole company, which maybe even gets purchased for a year or whatever, then dropped as they've found that too few people have used the service because they all forgot their new username / password. OAuth support strikes me as something that should really help with customer retention - no need for IT to have to manage accounts and do password resets, no extra work, login just works and your users don't have to think about it.

We went for the non-cushioned version: https://www.morleys.co.uk/ict-furniture/ergos-swivel-shell-chair.html Adjustable height, swivels, comes with wheels or glides and in various colours. We're hoping they last better than the last 3 sets of chairs we've gone through in the ICT suite in the last few years.

Couple of good points there: if an external user can get hold of a Meet URL (I'm thinking child passes on Meet URL to elder sibling, sibling posts URL to forum encouraging people to go and crash the meeting kind of scenario) they could turn up with a semi-convincing name and be let in. Worth emphasising to teachers that anyone joined to your Classroom should already be able to access the Meet, so unless you're specifically expecting a guest speaker for a session, simply denying any external requests is the best idea. For any domain user being able to join a Meet, we should be able to see that on the activity audit log. This becomes a discipline issue - we can find out who came and disrupted a lesson, and teaching staff can go and tell them off. How, exactly, telling a child off over video conference works I'm not quite sure - I'm guessing that's going to come down to parental support to back up the teaching staff.

For our main building, which is compact with many small corridor areas separated by fire doors, we wound up using PoE-powered SIP phones. We just took the handset off, mounted them to the wall and configured them to receive SIP broadcasts. Maybe about a 5th the price of a dedicated speaker. For larger areas (stairwells, in particular) we found we needed a dedicated speaker with a bit more power. We do have a couple of amplified speakers connected to a SIP unit, but those sit in our switch cabinets where we can have UPS-backed power direct to the speakers.