dhicks

If you're using GAM for this, there's a "sync" feature to sync group memberships with course memberships. You might already know this or not be using GAM, but I was sorting something similar yesterday and found this feature most handy!

I use OVH for assorted hosting purposes. Depending on how much traffic you're expecting over the whole set of sites you want to host, one of their standard small instances (about £3.80 a month) might well be enough, possibly with a disk space upgrade. I have various services run behind an Nginx reverse-proxy, which I actually found suprisingly easy to set up.

You'd need something client-side on the Chromebooks to do screen capture, then you'd need to to (securely, obviously) route that data somewhere for a web-based interface to pick up. I'd start by looking at VNC and figuring out how to get some kind of VNC client running on ChromeOS - as people have pointed out, you'll probably have to deal with an authorise-this-app process somewhere along the way. For a web-based interface, both (the confusingly named) NoVNC and Apache Guacamole can provide HTML5-based VNC viewers that work in a browser. I'm not sure what the performance of a classes worth (30?) all in one browser window would be.

I imagine / hope the subscription is included with our iSAMS subscriptions. I've just logged on to SendGrid and checked our account details - the "Billing" and "Your Products" pages report "You don't have permission to access this page", which hopefully sounds like there are billing details there but are, sensibly, being kept private.

Just looking at this today: We have a bunch of "web-based" teaching resources that are implemented as a set of HTML files with embedded Flash resources. I've set up a small Linux desktop VM to host these files and run Firefox ESR v56 with Flash support, then pointed our web-based remote access gateway at it. Our remote access gateway accepts GSuite OAuth authentication, so as long as the user is logged in with their GSuite account already they can click on a link and have the resource appear in a browser tab. It's actually running in a browser on a remote desktop, of course, so I'm not sure what performance is going to be like - just getting this set up and tested now.

Probably best off contacting iSAMS support and asking about the SendGrid account details - it might take a little while for your query to get to someone who can deal with it, but we got our issue sorted well enough in the end.

We were asked to put 3 CNAME records in our DNS settings, with what I'm guessing are specific-to-us keys of some kind included in the value strings. My guess is that you (or someone at your school) should have received an email with similar details, something along the lines of: CNAME sendgrid.SCHOOLDOMAINNAMEGOESHERE KEYGOESHERE.SOMETHING.sendgrid.net CNAME s1._domainkey.SCHOOLDOMAINNAMEGOESHERE s1.domainkey.KEYGOESHERE.SOMETHING.sendgrid.net CNAME s2._domainkey.SCHOOLDOMAINNAMEGOESHERE s2.domainkey.KEYGOESHERE.SOMETHING.sendgrid.net

You'll probably need to contact iSAMS support for this. We use iSAMS, and iSAMS sends various emails on behalf of our domain, which is also hosted by GSuite. Your setup might be different, but iSAMS seem to be using Twillo's SendGrid to do the email-sending part of things, which makes sense as they are a dedicated email service. We had to add SendGrid-related settings into our DNS settings, and the SendGrid account seems to be our responsibility to administer, although it's set up with an iSAMS-linked email address. Check with iSAMS themselves what the setup is and how they want you to organise stuff - it took a while for us to get the login details for the SendGrid account, they'd got lost somewhere along the way during the initial setup.

We just done pretty much what you're planning - set up a couple of new Server 2019 VMs, installed the Domain Services role, promoted them to Domain Controllers, moved the FSMO roles over to one machine, also moved DHCP to one of the new DCs, then demoted the old DCs and turned them off, changed IP address of new DCs to match old ones (so DNS settings can stay the same). Nothing seems to have broken so far.

I do, and getting data from Paxton / Net2 and creating some kind of report / display is on my to-do list. I haven't spent any time on this yet, though, so I'm not even sure what API documentation is available.

I was impressed by InVentry at BETT by their facilities for getting data in to / out of their system - it should be possible to write something to get data from their system to provide a list of what staff touched in at what point.

We tend to use Ricoh's transparent printable plastic, in A4 sheets that go through a laser printer. As pointed out above, all you need to do is mirror the image before printing so it looks the right way round when viewed through glass. Lasts well - we use their white A4 version for laptop covers.

For ease of use in a teaching context, a Linux-based development environment accessible behind from a web browser and with logins handled by OAuth might be handy. I'm thinking a desktop environment with a bunch of development tools already set up and ready to go, possibly different versions for different languages. My guess is that Raspbian for x86 would be a good place to start as it's well supported for updates, is intended for this kind of thing in the first place, and of course matches Raspbian for the Pi for when pupils come to do stuff based on actual physical hardware. PythonAnywhere do a command-line based version of the above, although without the OAuth bit for nice easy login management.

Er, typo: I meant one click... A number of large companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) are starting to offer streaming services of one sort or another - Microsoft's desktop-as-a-service offering is still in beta, but there's a couple of recent game streaming services (Shadow, Google Stadia, NVidia Now) that are already proving that you can do high-performance graphics over an Internet connection, possibly giving better performance than if you had local hardware - after all, as long as you have enough bandwidth and low enough latency, you can have the fancy graphics-rendering hardware in a server farm somewhere and just use a basic client. Adobe must be looking at something similar for Creative Cloud. It rather implies that, given a few years, your local desktop OS really isn't going to matter that much, your end-user applications (along with all their configurations and so on) are going to be away on a server farm somewhere.

We found it easiest to go with Ubiquiti hardware - it seems capable, and we can buy it at good prices (£150 for the Nano HD, £300 for the swish 2Gbps model) from Amazon, meaning we can purchase a couple of access points every month on the credit card and roll them out throughout the school as needed.

We have an AWS account set up that charges to our departmental credit card. You can set up alerts for when the monthly bill goes over a certain amount - we're currently spending around £200 a month on AWS storage, which we aim to cut considerably by moving to Backblaze.

I'm not aiming to run Linux "desktop" machines, but over half term we are planning to replace our staffroom workstations with Raspberry Pi 4s running Raspbian, with the desktop reconfigured to just run a full-screen web browser. The plan is that any local web browsing can be done client-side, and if a Windows application (Word, Excel, etc) is needed then staff can log in to our web-based remote desktop portal. The Raspberry Pi 4s handle web browsing really quite nicely - Youtube seems to run okay, and you can have 2 or 3 tabs open at the same time. I'm working on a new web-based remote gateway that uses OAuth authentication, allowing for one-lick access to a Windows desktop / application environment.

You'll be wanting to talk to SalamnderSoft: https://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/ They'll be able to sort out getting both user and class data out of Bromcom and into GSuite for you, all automatically updated.

Just plugging in one device by VGA and pone by HDMI should work, and the PC should now recognise it has two screens installed and give you a choice of mirroring the contents of the screens or treating them as separate. Probably best to check with the teacher what their preference will be - some like one ay, some the other. On Windows, you can switch between the two modes by pressing Windows-P - for some reason, this confuses a lot of teachers.

We've got four around the school now as add-ons to provide more PoE ports in certain locations where we need a cluster of CCTV cameras or phones. I'm impressed by the cloud-based management console - you get the device connected up and it just kind of sorts itself out, picking up setting and updates from a central console.

Not that I've discovered so far - last time I check (a few weeks ago), the "developer" section of their website was closed for updates. The batch API section is actually pretty self-explanatory - you can select which data is returned for each separate API key, and the interface for selecting that data is sensible and well-organised, with different types of data in different sections and so on. So far I've simply set up to extract basic data on pupils and staff for username export and similar, I'm working up to getting more complex data out.

Each classroom has a PoE-powered desktop phone, with an on-site VoIP PBX. We use our phone system as our public address system for emergencies, so on the same network we have various VoIP loudspeaker-type devices out in corridors and so on - in smaller areas we've just stuck a phone handset up on the wall. Teachers only occasionaly use the phones, but they are handy if , for instance, the front desk is trying to locate a child - they can just ring round to classrooms to find them.

Depending on what, exactly, your pupils are aiming to do, Soundtrap might be suitible. Actually web-based, so should work on Windows / Mac / ChromeOS, and pupils can log in and use from home. Soundtrap had a large stand at BETT this year, I get the impression they're aiming for the education market.

I keep clicking the "Load more products" button and more keep appearing! Right, what can I justify purchasing on the Humanaties department budget...

If you want a proper, managed, PoE switch, then how's about the Ubiquiti US-8-150W: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01G55FYU4/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title £180 from Amazon, "arrives before valentine's day" - you can buy a switch for the one you love!