dhicks

Assuming you want something you can plonk in a corner, on a tripod, and just leave to run, I'd try a 360 degree camera for this. I'm suitably impressed by my Samsung Gear 360's quality and usability for the price (£220), and with a 256GB micro SD card and an external USB power supply it should be able to record for most of a day without stopping. 360 degree cameras are great - they simply record everything around them. You'll have to either be able to show people footage in 360 degrees (not, actually, difficult, as even Windows 10 can do this natively now) or edit the footage into a standard-angle shot showing the action you want. For the latter, seemingly GoPro's new 360 camera, which includes editing software, is pretty impressive, although it's nearer £800.

That's a good point - I'd not factored in a separate backup server, although I guess for a refresh you'd probably have a spare older server around anyway. Also a good point above about 10GB networking for the server.

We run a dehumidifier at home - we've tried assorted re-usable drying widgets in the past (generally a bag containing silica gel), and none work nearly as well as a proper dehumidifier. They do tend to be a bit noisy, so you might not want one on all day when someone's in the room, but you can stick a timer on the plug easily enough and run it when people are out.

Might Alexa be suitable?: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/a4b/latest/ag/setup-conferencing.html

Assuming we kept local hardware instead of using AWS or similar: probably 3 servers, vSAN or equivalent, tiered storage in each server with a couple of SSDs backing 6 10TB SATA drives in RAID 1 (so, hopefully, SSD performance with cheaper SATA drive capacity). At least 96GB of RAM in each server (not quite sure where the current point of server-RAM-gets-really-expensive is).

I need to take a look at our setup and check that all is okay, I hope to be able to do this in the next few days, at which point I'll try and update this thread (or the original) with a few more details.

We bought an Axiomtek OPS 883-H via ON-AV 2 years ago for the Promethean board in our library. It seems to have worked reliably enough, although it doesn't get as much use as the VeryPC OPS devices we have in classrooms. We had an issue with the VeryPC OPS PCs in Promethean boards, with the touch facility stopping after a few months usage. Plugging in the OPS PC via VGA and USB solved the problem, so the devices are still usable, but it was an odd problem - I don't know if you had a similar issue with them yourself. The Axiomtek device has a rather small fan in the back, which makes a bit of a buzzing noise. There also doesn't seem to be a grill over the back to shield the fan - you could stick something over easily enough, but it seems a tad unfinished.

My previous thread about this: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mac/173154-mac-os-network-login-script.html Redirecting user documents and desktop folder should be fine, traffic and disk I/O wise, but if you want to redirect the settings folders for trhings like iMovie you might want to consider a dedicated file server.

We have a number of VeryPC all-in-ones as teacher classroom PCs - no issues with the hardware, and we've had most of them for two or three years now.

Insynchq syncs files between local storage and Google Drive, so we could have Windows shared folders that sync with their Google Drive-equivalent Team Drives. Moving straight to using Team Drive might well be a better option, I'm just being mildly paranoid about having a local copy of files, just in case.

We've trialed Insynchq, which has seemed to work well, although we're waiting for the new version (currently in beta, I think) which supports Team Drives until we use it in production: https://www.insynchq.com/

Our IT teacher asked about it the other day, and my guess was that there would be performance issues - your experience would rather seem to confirm this. The kind of hardware we have on-site isn't going to be able to handle this kind of application, although an off-site rentable-by-theminute VM (from AWS, Azure, Google, etc) might be an option. Either that, or someone like these people: Blade Shadow is a rentable $2,000 gaming PC that lives in the cloud Blade Group That's a high-end desktop, rentable by the month and streamed to your desktop. They're seeling it as a gaming service, but I'm rather thinking high-end video editing.

There was mention, somewhere, about a large-sized plastic case end section, but when I rang VeryPC the person I spoke to didn't know anything about it. If you've got a computer connected up to a projector as well as a monitor there isn't quite enough room in the standard-sized plastic end section for all the cables. Other than that they work very well - we use the Flex PCs for our senior management team, who all seem to be convinced they need huge 27" monitors, which is about the largest screen you can fit on the front of one of those cases before it unbalances. We've had the Flex PCs for at least 3 years with no significant problems (one machine had some failed RAM, but that was easily fixed). We have also been pleased with the newer actual-all-in-one Glide PCs, too - we mostly use them as the teacher's in-classroom machines. They don't have cable storage space in the case like the Flex, so we generally put a cable tray under the desk and shove the power supply and cables in that.

Any further updates, did anything further come of this thread?

Ah - that's why that happens... Is that just Apple making a point that they don't think you should be using a .local domain, or is there some other more technical reason behind it?

In my experience, Firefly (unusually in the education market) actually seem to have a proper software development methodology behind their product, so if they've logged something as a feature request I'm sure it will actually get considered for implementation at some point. That doesn't necessarily mean that will be any time particularly soon, if they have other work to prioritise. The functionality that makes sense to me would be a parent does a details update online, then an email gets sent informing the admin team to process that change from a secure login of some sort. A Google Form / Google Sheet combination might actually be the simplest way to do this at the moment.

Impressed - that's a proper Blockly-based implementation running there, there's a lesson's worth of exercises right on the Google front page! Edit: Permalink for future reference: https://www.google.com/doodles/celebrating-50-years-of-kids-coding

Your other option, of course, is to go the other way around - buy the screen with an integrated OPS slot PC and have the teacher's "PC" simply be a second monitor run from that.

We've been buying VeryPC's all-in-one Glide desktops since around June 2015, and had this exact issue in mind when we specified them. The original set we bought use, I think, the Intel HD4400 graphics chipset, and seem quite capable of driving 4k screens. We only actually have a couple of 4k screens (we've moslty wound up buying cheaper standard-definition screens), but we do have one of those Glide PCs driving a nice new Smartboard SPL-6265 with no issues that I know of. Worth pointing out that it's worth the bother of getting good-quality HDMI cables to link the two, and that seems to be the source of a couple of issues we've had getting large screens hooked up to PCs.

I'm still Impressed by the Asus Chromebook Flip C100PA - we have 230 around school for the children's use, and they're proving versatile and pretty robust. We got our last batch for £200 from John Lewis, they might still have some stock in.

The answer is going to depend rather on what sort of load you think you'll have on your servers, but in my experience in most schools the disk is more likly to be a performance bottleneck rather than the amount of raw processing power available. As such, you might want to go for the option where you spend more on a single server with multiple disks than on two servers. If you're using Hyper-V you should be able to use the built-in tiered storage facility (and also skip the need for a RAID controller), then you can basically use an SSD as a high-speed cache for a small array of cheaper large SATA drives, hopefully giving you both performance and capacity.

Gratnells trays (as generally used by the science department, or sometimes in classroom storage furniture), of assorted sizes (they actually go up to quite large) and in semi-transparent "clear" plastic so you can see what's inside. In theory, they stack without lids, although I find they do better with lids if you can get them.

That link points to The Binding Warehouse, which is the same place as The Laminating Warehouse. We've found the people on the phones there to generally be pretty good for advice on various different binding / laminating options, it might be worth contacting them for advice. Their prices for devices themselves are good, although we tend to find consumables (in our case, mostly laminating roles) are cheaper from Amazon.

I use Drive Notepad - it's a code editor, complete witrh syntax highlighting and line numbers, so might not be quite what you're looking for.

I agree that Team Drives are going to be the better solution for the above issue. However, if you do find yourself needing to share files / folders from a user's Drive and don't want to have to tell your users to go rummage in their "Shared With Me..." view, it turns out that you can move stuff between Shared With Me and a user's Drive via the command line using GAM (or, indeed, the Drive API, if you want).