dhicks

The general advantage of private schools is the greater staff-to-pupil ratio than state schools. You can afford to have smaller classroom sizes and more staff such as teaching assistants, so any difficult behaviour can, hopefully, be dealt with in the classroom. I work in a private school, and we have both a learning support department and an on-site child counselling service, which between them should be able to get most children back on track in short order. Parents can, of course, choose the private school that is going to be the best fit for their child, and there are private schools that specialise in pupils with specific educational needs, which generally have very small class sizes and speacialist staff.

This thread just turned up on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23080240 From the comments, it would seem that dealing with (and tracking changes to) multiple OAuth providers is a pain. However, in the education world / market, just handling Google, Microsoft and Apple logins should cover a large number of schools. Authentication is, of course, different from authorisation - just knowing that [email protected] is a valid user doesn't give you much indication of what they are authorised to do - are they a pupil, or teacher, what yeargroup they are in, etc. Interestingly, for schools in particular, many schools number their accounts by yeargroup ([email protected]). If you can match that naming scheme with a regular expression of some kind you can potentially do authorisation simply by username, no additional data needed.

Yes - most of what I'm writing is built on other open-source tools, and it seems like a sensible way to create a sustainable business model. I can offer a pay-as-you-go service to people for whom "all you need to do is set up a Debian server and install the following packages" does not constitute "simple instructions", and anyone more technically capable (and, therefore, capable of thinking of and asking the kinds of questions that need time and effort to answer) is welcome to download the source code and tinker away.

Oh, absolutly - everyone should feel free to sign up with my service when it launches and pay me lots of money :-)

Yes, if you're having a non-domain user join a Meet (as a guest speaker for a Classroom, maybe) you can email them a URL, the host then has to accept them before they can actually join the Meet, and the host can boot them out at any time. The host can also mute anyone, which comes in handy for a teacher hosting a class. Would be a handy feature to bring back into the physical classroom...

It's just popped up when I logged back in after lunch.

I'm writing one - the user logs in via OAuth, then gets a simple grid of icons that link to whatever resources the school wants to point users at. I'm aiming to make it customisable by user / group and to act as an OAuth-capable frontend for other applications, so my tool will handle OAuth and pass on authorisation to other applications. I'm currently working on setting up a reporting tool as one of those applications, although written in Python rather than PowerBI. I'm also working on a plugin for Guacamole, so you'll be able to put an OAuth front-end on remote access to desktops or applications.

Good summary. If users record Meet sessions they get placed in a "Meet Recordings" folder in Google Drive, and as GSuite domain admins we can access those recordings if needed for audit / safeguarding purposes. Also, for Education GSuite domains, there's no storage limit, so each teacher can record Meet sessions as needed without any worry about storage space or costs. With either solution (and probably Teams as well), if you have an open URL that finds its way to the outside world, people have written tools to scrape public Zoom / Meet / etc URLs from any available source and post them in forums where people can go an "Zoom bomb" the meeting (I was on a non-school Zoom meeting the other day where a naked, fat sweary person turned up - an silly prank in this case, but not the sort of thing you'd want happening in anything school related). Meet's integration with Classroom means there's no need for Meet URLs to be posted around by email / on websites - pupils log in to Google Classroom and connect to the Meet session for invidual lessons from there, teachers don't need to copy-and-paste URLs or join codes around.

As pointed out already, tools such as Wordpress and similar are web-based, it won't matter what computer you are using them from. Your easiest option might be to have a tool crawl the site and convert the content to plain text, then paste that into whichever content management system your newly chosen website provider uses. Personally, I prefer static site generators such as Hugo or Jekyll, with the source content stored as Markdown, but that's going to depend on who is maintaining the content.

Not really a direct answer to your actual question, but since the original post was created Google now do their own MDM: https://gsuite.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/products/admin/endpoint/ That includes GSuite sign-on integration for Windows - I haven't had a chance to try any of the setup of features yet, although I've just noticed there's some sort of support for MacOS and Linux too.

Make sure you separtly account for the power supply - make it a separate item to be ticked off on return (possibly even two items - power brick and kettle / cloverleaf lead). I don't think we've had a single iPad power supply returned from any iPads we've lent out - we sometimes get the USB cable, but the power supply itself seems to always get forgotten.

Using Google Meet, we have daily reoccuring events at 10am (Morning Teabeak Meeting) and 3pm (Afternoon Teabreak Meeting) - just having a meeting open the whole time is going to be a bit hit-and-miss as to whether people happen to be in front of their cameras at the same time.

Yes - just remember to put the course name in quotes, i.e. "GAM TEST" or 'GAM TEST'.

If you have GAM set up, you can run something along the lines of: gam report user services classroom This will return CSV data in the format: email,date,classroom:last_interaction_time,classroom:num_courses_created,classroom:num_posts_created,classroom:role So, something like (for each user): [email protected],2020-04-12,2020-04-01T09:11:15.000Z,0,0,teacher From that, you should be able to match up usernames with full names / pupil IDs. As the previous posts have pointed out, this is a rather crude metric for "How much is Google Classroom being used (by user X)?", but it should allow you to spot things like access times past a given time (if classroom:last_interaction_time > 10pm, etc) or if a pupil has never managed to log in to Classroom or hasn't logged in for, say, a week or so. Beyond that, a user could, of course, log in to Classroom first thing of a morning, ignore it for the day, then log out in the evening, so log in / log out times aren't going to tell you that much. Nor will num_posts_created - you'll need teaching staff to be evaluating what pupils are doing.

I'd be looking at the Ubiquiti range, just for the ease-of-use and nice web-based management interface. If you're looking at wireless at the same time, some wireless access points can now use two 1Gbps links or a fibre/copper 10Gbps link for connectivity, which might be worth considering if you're looking at putting any more cabling in to support wireless access points.

Just to add: do make sure it's a very small amount, at least to start with - Superglue can produce a suprising amount of heat when it reacts with your skin.

You possibly want to install GAMADV-XTD3 - I'm not quite sure what the difference is between the original and branched version now, but we're using GAM-ADV-XTD3 and all seems to be working okay. We've set up a dedicated server instance to run GAM, Salamander and our own set of scripts. Handily, Server 2019 now supports SSH, so we can SSH into our server to use GAM from the command line.

If this is a school-managed Chromebook you can limit such devices to only allow school-managed accounts to log on, and for school-managed user accounts there are various solutions for on-device filtering. The setup follows the user around, not the device, so you should be able to limit a pupil's access to undesirable sites even when they are working away from the main school building.

As pointed out above, GAM will do this for you easily. For classes, GAM will also let you sync a CSV or group with a Classroom membership, so if you can get lists of classes (by form, yeargroup, or however you can output them from your MIS) you can auto-join pupils to classes, no invite code needed.

SalamanderSoft are excellent, and really know their stuff. You do need to plan / book well in advance of work being done, and I imagine they are very busy right at the moment. iSAMS themselves should also be able to provide help in extracting data from other MIS systems, although again I imagine they have a backlog right at the moment. We moved from School Manager to iSAMS. Data was moved accross generally okay, although with the current work we're doing on getting iSAMS to sync with GSuite we're finding a couple of areas where we need to spend some admin time cleaning up some of the data. We're finding staff Roles within iSAMS need sorting through (iSAMS has imported lists of existing staff roles as text, resulting in a number of mis-spelt / duplicated Roles), as do pupil parent contact details (same kind of thing). All the data is there okay, it's just that some of it is catagorised in a way that isn't quite right - probably as much an issue of how the data was put in the original database more than anything else, but worth paying attention to during the transfer.

As with many directory systems, "setting up" is, if anything, a bit too easy - it's the ongoing management that can take time / expertise. OUs for pupils are handy to have in GSuite, but assigning membership for Groups is more useful - a single pupil might be a member of a yeargroup (Y7), a form group (Form 7A), several curriculum groups (7A Maths Group 1), etc. I'd start looking at how you get information on classes / groupings out of SIMS and into GSuite. I'm doing this for our MIS (iSAMS) with some custom Python scripts and GAM, the command line tool for administering GSuite. These scripts are publically available, although not yet in a download-and-go state ready for other schools to use.

Is this a video embedded in a Classroom exercise, or a video played directly from Google Drive? Videos in Google Drive are processed at Google's end and a preview / stream option created for each one. It does take a little while for each video to be processed - not sure what the current wait-time is, but it might be worth waiting an hour or so and trying again. If this isn't a video playing directy from Google Drive then that might be the option to try - put the video in a Google Drive folder, wait until processed, then see if you / the parent can view it.

This might be all you need - if you don't currently use Active Directory with pupil accounts then there might not be much point in starting now, and instead use GSuite as the main pupil management directory. You can manage Chromebooks from the same interface, and using CloudReady you can convert existing devices into Chromebooks, so a move to ChromeOS for pupil devices might be the most practical solution.

Which version of Firefox - a proper up-to-date one? There's this thread from a couple of years ago: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-10/196340-gemalto-active-x-plugin.html We used Firefox 32-bit ESR v52 (now a couple of years older), or possibly v60, although we've moved away from Barclays now so I'm not sure how up-to-date that advice is. Also, from that preious thread, IE in incognito mode (for some reason) might work.

This was what I was getting geared up to do - provide and support Guacamole with an OAuth-capable gateway to make it nice and easy for teachers / pupils to use. It'll be a little while until I have time to work on this again as I'm busy with school stuff at the moment, but it's something I plan to get back to sorting out as I can only see demand increasing in the future.