dhicks

The website seems to imply it does - could be very handy. Just thinking: you could have a Windows (or Mac?) machine boot up by default and auto-logon to an account that runs a Chrome kiosk, pointing at a web page that handles logins in whatever way you like. On succesful authentication, the web server would send a message back to a service running on the workstation which would set a one-off auto-login for the account in question and reboot the machine, logging it in.

Yes, all our year 4,5,6,7 and 8 pupils have Chromebooks, our year 1,2 and 3 pupils have shared clusters of devices. All the devices are owned by the school and stay in school overnight - avoids devices getting lost, and there was a concern with children being a target for thieves. The Chromebooks, as a whole, are holding out quite well - over 2 years, about 10% annually have needed repairs, which isn't bad. Most repairs needed have been broken screens, and it's proving more difficult to get hold of replacement parts - the devices were £200 each to begin with, and if you need to replace both a screen and a keyboard you might as well just buy a new device. The warranty doesn't cover breakages through usage, so for the next batch I think we'll look at some kind of extended service package - either that, or buy a bunch of spare parts along with the devices when they are available. Chromebooks are kept in charging cabinets in classrooms. We have a suspicion a lot of the breakages are happening as children lift the devices in and out of the storage boxes, bashing the sides against the edges of the cabinet - I don't know if anyone makes padded storage cabinets.

If you haven't purchased the Chromebooks themselves yet, would Chromebooks with built-in 4G be an option? Might be a bit more expensive than other Chromebooks, but should reduce the number of parts to be kept charged / plugged in / not lost by the pupil.

This thread is a year old - I understand iSAMS now provide a defined migration path from School Manager to iSAMS, so it should just be a case of sitting back and letting them sort it.

I've been using a 32-inch AOC Q3279VWF since January, as a display for a laptop: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0777TRHPQ As reviewed here: https://www.expertreviews.co.uk/aoc/1406536/aoc-q3279vwf-Q3279VWFD8-review-bargain-1440p-monitor For a £200 monitor it's a bargain - I'm not doing a great deal of graphics / video editing work at the moment, but picture quality has seemed okay so far. I think there is a separate VESA-mounting kit available, so you can mount two of them on a dual-screen arm or whatever. Our all-in-one PC at home has just conked out, and I was tempted to get another matching monitor to replace it. In the end I went for a 32-inch TV, which was around £40 cheaper and should work fine as a monitor - you might be able to find a nice display for cheaper as a TV than as a dedicated monitor.

We use Zandparts for parts supplies for our Asus Chromebooks if we can't find anything cheaper on Amazon or eBay.

Yes, you can use GAM to move items from the Shared With Me Folder to a user's My Drive folder - means you can have one "storage" user sync a Windows /home folder with Google Drive and share each user's home area to their My Drive.

We sync between Google Drive and a local Windows shared folder (a media folder, currently with around 3TB of assorted files / videos on) on Windows Server 2016 with Insync: https://www.insynchq.com/ I should perhaps emphasise that that syncs files, that isn't a backup - if someone starts deleting files either locally or on Google Drive then the other corresponding files will be deleted. You do get a 30 day restore window for files on Google Drive, which is only so useful as people tend to not realise such files have been deleted right away. We backup files (around 7TB, complete with grandfather / father / son versioning) to Amazon Web Services, which is costing us just under £100 a month at the moment. If you want something that you can run from a script to do periodic dumps of files to Google Drive, then try RClone: https://rclone.org/ It's basically rsync but for cloud storage (Google Drive, O365, and a whole bunch of others), and free.

We have one rack, with 2 of the blue "commando socket" connectors providing the power for the rack. Most of our servers have dual power supplies, so we make sure we have each power supply supplied by a different circuit. One of the circuits is connected just to a UPS, which then supplies a PDU in the rack, the other connects straight to a PDU. The circuits are dedicated to the server rack, there's no other sockets connected to them - we have the electrical consumer unit in the server room so we have access to the isolator switches if we need to turn things off in a hurry. If you have cooling in your area, that should probably be on a separate circuit, too, if it isn't already.

For a "semi-pro" setup, you can get external storage / monitor devices that allow you to record for longer times, e.g.: https://www.atomos.com/ For a reasonable DSLR with a stock lens, external recorder, maybe an external mic and various bits of grip to stick the whole lot together, you're probably looking at around £2,000 - £3,000, which for some schools might actually be a good option. This isn't the sort of thing you can just hand to your average teacher and trust you'll get it back all in one piece, though.

Could get cheap USB-rechargable bluetooth speakers? That's what I use at home - I generally leave them plugged in and charging via USB, but I can unplug them and move them around the flat. Does mean they don't actually need to be that loud, as you can have them sat right next to you.

We subscribe to the web-based WeVideo: https://www.wevideo.com/ Something like £6 per license per year at education pricing.

We bought a few spare from Amazon / eBay to extend our original set - you can generally find them for a pretty reasonable price. Check you are getting the UK version, though, as the US region one doesn't work with UK controllers.

A headmaster with enough IT skills to plug in their own computer and install their own software? And they fired him?

If the power goes out for an extended period of time, what is the expected status of your school? If you're in a rural area, with power out in the wider area, is the school expected to stay open to provide accomodation / hot meals? What is your Internet connectivity like - can you have services off in the cloud rather than in an on-site datacentre, leaving power issues to Amazon / Microsoft or whoever? We looked in to getting a generator, but decided against it in the end. We're located in central London, and have a dedicated fibre connection, so as long as we can keep the Internet / internal network connection up we should be able to connect to vital services. We have a decent UPS connected to a separate power circuit that powers the server cupboard, some of the switch cabinets around the school and some of the front desk / office workstations. With no mains power, we should still be able to keep a minimal network (including the phones) up for serveral hours, enough for us to sort out contacting parents and so on. The separate 240V circuit run from the UPS to various locations (over several floors) turned out to be a pretty reasonable price in the end, and we have special red-coloured sockets labelled "computers only" to try and stop people plugging in heaters. From all accounts, having auto-failover power provision is tricky to get working properly. Even large providors have issues - OVH had an outage a few months back caused by power issues, even though they had generators in place and tested them every month. It turns out that the way power drops during testing (someone hits a large red switch and the power cuts out) doesn't match a real outage (the power drops a bit, then goes back up for a bit, then drops again...), which causes the generators to switch to "safe" mode and not turn on for fear of blowing valuable equipment. Amazon override this feature by buying a generator company and re-writing their control firmware, but then they can afford to loose a few millions worth of equipment if it keeps their systems up.

I live in London, and use Relish's 4G-based broadband at home, with no need for a separate phone line. £22 a month, and so far the service has been reliable and performance good. We use it for general web browsing and a bit of video (the PC at home is getting on a bit and struggles with HD video, so we stick with SD), for which it's been fine. SSH connections to servers seem to work okay, but disconnect if you don't use them for a minute or so. Discussing this with a networking expert, this might be something to do with network latency, which I can imagine is going to be a fair bit higher for a wireless-based network than fibre. It doesn't bother us, but if you use home broadband for multi-player games or stream remote desktops (I'm thinking something like https://shadow.tech, which should let you do video editing via a remote connection) you might struggle with response time. I don't know how much switching to 5G would solve that issue.

They tend to offer direct integrations with external data sources / destinations, too - banks, in particular, and for some suppliers. I see Amazon can export data from the business account section to import into your accounts package, hopefully there's some way of simply getting the two systems to automatically pass data between themselves and avoid the Bursar having to download-then-upload CSV files.

We're a private school, now part of a larger group (about 25 schools in total, I think), with that group using Xero as their finance package. The Bursar is gradually moving processes over to Xero from an on-site install of Sage. I've had very little to do with it, which I figure from an IT support point of view is what you want - it's cloud based, it works, there's nothing that seems to need support.

For school productions, with multiple cameras, I'd aim to get something that can be powered by an external mains/battery USB supply, then you can just plonk a couple of cameras down and leave them running for three hours with no worries. Set those up to do wide shots which you can cut to at any time while you concentrate on zooming in to the action. For the static cameras you can just get a couple of cheap Amazon basics tripods, but try and get a slightly nicer fluid head for the camera you'll be pointing at things so you can move it around more easily. For video editing, sticking three shots together is actually quite easy (use the zoomed-in shot when child on stage is talking, otherwise use zoomed-out shot, helps to have another wide shot in case someone walks in front of the first camera or your camera is pointing elsewhere when something interesting happens), but it helps if you have editing software that can align footage via the soundtrack, it saves a lot of messing around at the start. Don't forget to add a couple of USB battery units and some large (128GB) SD cards.

Actually, that's exactly what the new GoPro is marketed as - a camera that doesn't need a gimbal setup to produce shake-free video. It uses its extra-wide field of view from the fish-eye lens combined with data from internal acceleration sensors to process video into a shake-free version. I'm not sure if it can do this in real time - you probably have to download and process the video with their software first. GoPro's editing software is very good (they bought a couple of video editing companies), and free. With their 360 degree camera you can film a scene in 360 degrees and then produce a standard 2D version afterwards, moving the viewpoint as you want - this actually works quite well for filming productions where you haven't rehearsed scenes for camera takes beforehand, you can plonk a 360-degree camera somewhere down the front, film everything, then edit the point of view to track movement afterwards. I've done that with a couple of school productions, combined with a wide-shot from a Panasonic camcorder somewhere at the back of the hall so you can cut between the two. Again, the Panasonics will work quite nicely from an external USB battery pack, and are light enough to sit on a monopod, so you can just plug them in and leave them for 3 hours and edit the footage down later. You can stick a different lense on a GoPro - I have a Backbone modified GoPro with a zoom lense on - but that changes it from being a simple, robust device. Also, GoPros can be run from external power (battery or mains via a USB adaptor), but they tend to overheat - you wind up having to remove the internal battery and replace it with a direct-power adaptor widget, which again changes it from being a handy pick-up-and-go sort of device. The video quality from a GoPro can be excellent, but they tend to work best in nice bright, even lighting, although I've found they've got better in recent years. For productions and so on with stage lights, a well-lit area of a stage can be over-exposed while a dark section can be under-exposed, for internal stuff in a hall or similar you might be better off with a camcorder.

I could have sworn I read somewhere the new Huawei Mate 20 Pro can automatically remove the background, in real time, from a video. If so, that potentially gives you a phone / camera device you can replace a green-screen setup with, which sounds like a useful application. Handsets are around £900 at the moment, but I imagine that price will drop eventually, and the same feature will start to appear on more devices (I think the feature is actually a handy by-product of being able to do face recognition, which requires depth information from the camera as well as colour). For filming productions / drama where you just want to set a camera up and leave it to record everything for an hour or two, I have a Samsung Gear 360 (plus a stand a external battery unit). That will record, in theory, for about 24 hours with a 256GB SD card in and plugged in to a suitable power supply.

Agreed - it would take us a reasonable chunk of a day to organise getting appropriate equipment, people and tools into place, and even then there's a good chance one of us will need to rush off elsewhere to fix something else, so getting a company in that does this sort of thing all the time and has a van load of tools ready is the best option for us. They can also generally organise taking away rubbish and / or old equipment, which if you have limited storage space is something to think about. We've used ON-AV in the past, who have been consistantly excellent, and we were also impressed with the work done by Stone over the summer installing some new touch screens - they didn't just stick the screen on the wall, they took the time to cable-wrap all the cables neatly back to the desktop PC on the desk and get everything plugged in neatly.

Hello, and welcome to the forum. Most people on here are more on the technical side of educational IT than actual teaching - you might also want to try places like the TES forums for a wider range of potential answers. Saying that, the kind of thing you might be looking for is a coding club or similar - after school clubs that take on volunteers and send them in to schools to run clubs dealing with coding / robotics / electronics / etc. The Raspberry Pi community is also a good place to look to connect volunteers with schools.

You don't have to get whole new switches, you can just use PoE injectors (assuming you have a spare power socket in your switch cabinet, of course). Saying that, we actually wound up getting a couple of the smaller 8-port Ubiquiti switches just to power CCTV cameras in a couple of areas where we have several, it was the most affordable way of providing PoE connections.

If those are IBM Model Ms then they're genuine antiques, and go for maybe £100 each on eBay...