dhicks

We use Zuludesk MDM - now owned by Jamf, but still around £5 per device per year. From a fresh install of Mac OS (this is rather easier than on a Windows PC - Mac OS will re-install from the Internet, and there's no licensing information to fiddle with), join the machine to the MDM and reboot. Zuludesk will handle joining the Mac to your Windows domain if you want. You have a choice of forcing local profiles (everything stored locally) or network (everything stored on the network - easy, nice that it includes Desktop and Documents folders, but might cause performance issues if your application data is on the network and your users start using something like iMovie). In the end, I went for local profiles with "Documents" being redirected to the user's mounted Google Drive - requires them to authorise access to Google Drive the first time they log on to a particular machine, but otherwise pretty fuss-free. I should be able to share the script if needed.

We have a Windows desktop and a SMART board / touch screen in all classrooms, plus each teacher gets issued an iPad, which they use to take registers. Each classroom machine has software installed to allow screen casting from the iPads, so in theory any teacher can share their iPad screen on the front-of-class display, although very few seem to have got the hang of this as yet. We provide a remote desktop facility (web-based) for home / remote use. We provide Raspberry Pi based workstations in the staffroom - we did provide laptops for use in the staffroom, but those tended to wander off a bit too easily. Each classroom also has a bank of Chromebooks for pupil use, but any teacher can use those too.

I was surprised a couple of years ago when we started replacing older SMART boards with touch screens that some teachers decided they would prefer to stick with their existing boards. A couple of years later and we have about 75% of classrooms with touch screens, now we have the teachers from the remaining classrooms asking for touch screens to be installed as soon as possible! We did stick with SMART for the hardware, so staff could keep using SMART's software, which might be a consideration with some of these staff - maybe they're thinking they want to stick with their Promethean boards so they can keep the same software? If it's any help, we have some Promethean touch screens (with, in our case, appropriate licensing to use SMART's software) - they are our oldest touch screens, at around 4 years old now, and are still working pretty much as new, so you certainly get good lifetime out of them. When we had an initial issue with one (broken hardware during install) it got replaced under warrenty with no fuss, too.

That would be my guess, too - I've just got our ICT room configured with Mojave managed by an MDM (Zuludesk), and for that we've gone with local-only accounts and redirected user's Documents folders to a locally cached version of their Google Drive folder. Performance is fine in testing, I guess I'll see what happens when we have children using it in a couple of weeks. You could do similar - have local accounts and only redirect the folders you think you need to (~/Documents, maybe ~/Desktop, maybe some select settings folders)?

Does that cost include RDS session CALs, or would those be extra per user? I'm looking at something similar to the original poster, although my project involves running an older bit of software via a web-based RDP session. I can rent a whole dedicated server for around £60 a month, I just need to figure out what Microsoft licensing I need to allow users to log on to that server.

Actually, you could set each laptop to auto-login to Windows via registry settings, then, as pointed out above, if you had SSO set up with Active Directory they'd also be auto logged-in to GSuite. Windows 10 has a Kiosk Mode setting that lets you replace the default shell (Windows Explorer) with whatever you want, so you can have a machine that just auto-logins to your domain and loads up Chrome, if you want. GSuite allows you to use external SAML providors for authentication, at least one of which (Wonde, if I remember correctly) allows you to use login cards that you hold in front of the device's camera to log you in. Or, of course, you could crate your own SAML service that simply auto-logins an appropriate user.

I use an Intel NUC6CAYH running Raspian as my home PC - £130 from Amazon, plus you need to buy RAM and storage separatly. It runs everything I've tried so far, which isn't really that much - you could get a version with a chunkier CPU for gaming. The case is small enough to mount behind the screen, so there's no big computer box taking up floor space.

Wait - surely "The" is her middle name?

For video: WeVideo. Works very well, and has proper integration with GSuite - if you have classes set up in Google Classroom you should be able to use those to manage classrooms, no extra management needed. Pricing is affordable for schools, too. For more basic video editing and DTP, Adobe Spark is actually quite impressive - again, integrates with GSuite, although ina clunkier fashion that WeVideo, and is free, although you do have to register and set up an Adobe account.

The new Raspberry Pi 4 - maybe get the 4GB version at £55 each, and get a case for each one. On a modern smart TV with USB ports you might be able to power the Pi straight from the TV (this works for a Raspberry Pi 3 on my home smart TV, with two USB port powering one Pi via a Y-cable, I haven't tried it for a Pi 4 yet). The Pi is small and light enough that you can mount it to the back of a TV with Blutak or Sugru. We have ours simply loading up a web browser in kiosk mode pointing at a Google Slides presentation, then appropriate staff have permissions to edit that Slides document as needed.

For replacement fixed workstations for our staffroom and IT office, we're currently looking at NUCs - 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, should be capable of handling most stuff, around £400 without a monitor. For classroom workstations, VeryPCs all-in-ones of a similar specification are just over £500, which is pretty good for something that includes a monitor. Both options are very compact and reduce the amount of cables around the workstation. For my setup in my office, I have a laptop that connects to a monitor. There's no need to get a separate (and generally over-priced) docking station, I have a simple stand (a bit of wood with a hole in) that allows a laptop to stand upright when closed, then I have that connected to a monitor. With a suitibly modern laptop you can probably connect everything up via USB C, so there's only one cable to plug in when you put your laptop in the stand.

Just for a moment, I initially read the title as "Wayne's World Immersive/VR Experience". Hmm - now thinking that would actually work quite well...

Where is that information stored - does your MIS hold information as to who is whos department head, or is that something you'll need to enter yourself? I'd aim to have a script extract the relvant data from your MIS (list of staff, along with data as to who their department head / assesor is), then have the script create appropriate folders. I'd do this on Google Drive via GAM, but that depends on what your particular school uses.

If I understand correctly, the type of Ac to DC converter used to charge most modern laptops / tablets exhibits a certain amount of ground leakage. Too much ground leakage (i.e from multiple AC-DC converters on the one circuit) will cause a modern RCD-protected power circuit to trip. A charging system that could fully charge devices on the same circuit overnight on a rolling basis might prove rather handy.

We buy ours in bulk (box of 24 rolls) from Flints Theatrical Chandlers: https://www.flints.co.uk/pdfcatalogue/adhesivetapes.pdf Flints do an assortment of handy widgets, useful for stage-related jobs but often handy for general use.

Does anyone give people like any bodyguards / minders associated with children CCTV access? We don't, I'm just wondering what other's CCTV policy states.

If the issue you've had in the past has been with PowerPoint not playing video / audio files reliably, then I've found the solution is generally to convert whatever media you've been given to something you're sure of PowerPoint being able to handle. Handbrake is generally pretty good for this, converting any videos to its default .MP4 settings seems to work okay for use in PowerPoint. Likewise, the default export settings for MP3s from Audacity seem to work fine for any audio files. If it can handle the media files okay, PowerPoint doesn't need that fancy a specification PC - we have it running fine on a 5-year-old laptop and a NUC for presentations. We've recently had presentations with embedded 1024p video, and that seemed to work okay - videos maybe take a couple of seconds to actually start when cued, but otherwise seem to run fine.

I emailed Promethean (I think via the contact form on their website rather than directly via email) at the start of May: [Me] > Licensing for Activeinspire: does the license for Activeinspire Personal Edition cover us installing it on all the classroom workstations > in the school, most of which are attached to non-Promethean interactive hardware, or would we need separate licensing for that? [Their Response] > You are free to use ActivInspire Personal Edition with all of our hardware, as well as on computers that are not attached to to any > extra hardware (say, for example, a laptop teachers want to take home to work on). If you want to connect to a non=Promethean > screen, you will need an ActivInspire Professional license, please check with your reseller for costs and options. I think that means we can stick the free version of ActiveInspire on anything not connected to a non-Promethean board. I think the cost for ActiveInspire for non-promethean boards was about £500 (price includes VAT) when we checked with a reseller.

It depends on what camera system you have - most IP-based systems these days have some sort of web client that should give you access from outside the school. My guess is that you could set up a user with appropriate access rights, then give those details to the police department, maybe in a sealed envelope complete with instructions to be opened in case of an incident. I wouldn't rely on having local access to your systems in case of a lockdown incident or similar - you're going to want the police to be able to get to the cameras they require without help. Ideally, your camera system would let you audit access times, and possibly report if a particular user logged in, so you could hand the police login details but be alerted if they logged in.

Yes, the software works fine. You need to pay a one-off fee to license SMART's software to run on a non-SMART device - currently around £800 if I remember correctly (price includes VAT), contact your usual SMART supplier for exact details. This fee is separate from any yearly license fee required for SMART's software - I think we pay around £1,000 per year for 40 devices at the moment.

You main issue with siteing CCTV cameras is probably going to be network access - do you have network ports somewhere near the areas you want to place cameras, or would you need to run more cabling? Ideally, you'd have switches that support PoE to power the cameras, but you can always use PoE injectors at the switch end of things to make individual ports PoE-capable. We use Ubiquiti cameras here, about a dozen over the school. Their software is easy enough to install on pretty much whatever hardware you have available - you could probably buy a second-hand rack server or NAS with a reasonable storage capacity, plus some cameras, for around £1,000 in total.

Darn, good point - just having a list of files isn't going to help, we're going to need the URLs assigned by Google, because that's what we're making into QR codes. You're right, using GAM is probably the best solution - that can list and get/put files from Google Drive, too.

Standard paper stickers, printed via sheets through a laser printer, just saturated in superglue, so that the entire sticker is soaked through. Might work better with thinner paper, maybe - I haven't tried with Dymo labels yet, but we're planning something similar over the summer as we re-label a bunch of laptops.

This, but automated: set up a Team Drive (or OneDrive equivilent), give appropriate teachers access, probably with a sub-folder per project ("Maths Day trail 2019", "Biology Trail", etc). Set up rclone on a server to connect to that drive. Have a script periodically scan the folder and create QR codes for the share URLs. You could output the QR codes to PDF documents formatted as standard Avery sticker sheets, ready to print out and stick up on walls, then write those documents back to Google Drive so teachers can just pick them up and print them straight from the same Team Drive. You could add a trigger to something like Zapier to watch out for changes / additions to the shared folder, so your script would run as soon as a new photo was uploaded.

Many thanks - Cameyo looks like a good place to start, around £10,000 for 80 users per year for the fully hosted version. I suspect it might be cheaper to host our own solution, but it would save us having to upgrade or maintain any on-site hardware.