dhicks

We use Panasonic camcorders, too - can't remember the exact model, but a year or two old. It's worth checking what power adaptor they take - if you can run them from USB (5v) power then you can buy a rechargable USB power pack and avoid having to have them plugged into mains if you're recording for a whole lesson / day - saves on the amount of cables running everywhere. I'd agree with the comments above about an iPad, too, or possibly an Android phone / tablet. If you're getting an iPad for video, it might be worth getting a Padcaster case - makes the iPad into quite a nice camera, complete with lens mount and external mic. For my own use, I have a Samsung Gear 360 camera. If you simply need to capture everything that happens in the lesson then it's great. Actually quite affordable (£200), and with an external battery pack and a 256GB micro SD card you can record for pretty much a whole day.

No, but for some schools and in some situations I can see how they might be very useful. Not just for the examples in the article, with people recording disruptive / violent behaviour, but it could hep change the way some teacher / pupil interactions currently happen. For instance, standard child protection policy states that you shouldn't be alone in a classroom with a child, sometimes making it difficult to have a properly private conversation with a child if they are upset about something. A bodycam could perhaps better provide the child protection aspect, recording everything that goes on to a secure and private datastore.

Gosh - came along to post this job and it had already been posted! As the subject line and link to the TES describe, we are looking for a IT Helpdesk Technician to help run the day-to-day IT services at Knightsbridge School, Knightsbridge, central London. Details are in the job description attached to the TES post, but if you have any particular questions do please post them here or send me a private message. I'm the network manager the IT technician will be working with, although the role actually reports directly to the bursar. In general, don't worry about not having any specific bit of knowledge mentioned in the job description, we just want someone with a general wide range of IT knowledge that can pick up new things up as they go along.

Depends on what, exactly, the students are trying to do, but using SQLite along with whatever language they're using to create the web page might be an option. There's no database server to install, the datastore is simply a file, so each student's data can be separate.

Following on from this thread: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mac/173154-mac-os-network-login-script.html We have our Macs run a Global Daemon that runs as root and starts at boot time, then have a launchd Global Agent run at each user login. This script can redirect desktop and documents folders to their Windows network equivilent and mount network folders - you could place shortcuts to the network folders on the desktop, if that would be th easiest place for your users to find them. The script could possibly do with some refinement and someone with a bit more experienc with Macs to tell me if I'm going about things in the right way, but I can probably post it if that would be useful.

Indeed - I'm working on something similar, it's a feature I could add. Just thought, though: no need to have print-on-demand QR codes printed individually via a label printer or similar, instead just print out (or buy) a batch of QR-code stickers in advance and have the video attach to a pre-done QR code you after you stick it in your book or wherever. Could even attach multiple videos, for groups. Hmm - it's such a good idea I can't belive someone else out there isn't already offering such a system, we just need to search a bit better!

I don't know of one, but it's a jolly good idea for an app - teacher or pupil takes a quick video, video uploads to nice secure central storage of some sort, QR code or whatever generated and sent straight to printer (or emailed to pupil / teacher) to be stuck in book / on wall.

Just checking: are you planning to run Xen or Xenserver? Xen is the open-source tool, Xenserver is the propriatory (but still free) one. It used to be that you configured Xen from the command line, but these days I think Xencentre will manage either (you might want to double-check that, though). We have infrastructure running on Xenserver 6.2 - this is now several years old, but has been trundling along reliably enough. We are running Windows Server 2016 VMs with what seem to be no problems. We have disk arrays on each server mirrored for fail-over purposes via DRBD. If starting from scratch, I think I'd aim for something a bit more user-friendly, although the above combination was a reasonable choice at the time, and fitted our budget. For the future, I'm rather think we're aiming to move our infrastructure to the cloud and let it be someone else's problem to take care of the server hardware, although that does rely on a good Internet connection.

We have limited time / budget for lighting and sound, like yourself. We've had reasonable success with cheaper Chauvette equipment, mostly bought from Amazon. Nothing fancy, but seems to be adequate for our setup. We bought new DMX-controllable dimmers to use with our existing lights, along with some LED PAR cans, so we have a mixture of the two. Also, as we had issues with running cables around our white-paneled, listed hall, we found that wireless DMX kit works surprisingly well (kits available on Amazon for under £100). You can get nice DMX-controllable spotlights for £25 a go. We have a DMX-controllable USB dingle that I need to put more time into setting up, but for basic operation we have a 6-fixture control board. Each "fixture" controls a set of DMX channels, as RGB LED lights use multiple channels for control, so one "fixture" on the board generally controls multiple physical lights.

Indeed - so with write-through caching, every disk write to the RAID controller would wait until it's actually been written to the disk(s), the value written is simply cached for the next read. It makes for write speeds that depend on the performance of your disks, which can be rather slow, instead of write speeds at the speed your RAID controller can cache them, which would be pretty much as fast as the controller's RAM.

Do the RAID controllers have thier own dedicated battery backup packs? If not, they will default to write-back caching - write-through caching could have been set before the firmware upgrade, but doing the upgrade might have set them back to their defaults. If you have a UPS powering your servers you should be covered for backup power anyway.

If you have people at your end who can develope solutions for you, then have them make something that works directly in the browser using the GetUserMedia API. It's not available on Apple devices, but should be available on pretty much any other up-to-date browser. You'll need hardware with some kind of camera embedded or attached - an Android or ChromeOS tablet / laptop might be okay, or an all-in-one desktop PC.

Yes. The issue (for us, anyway) turned out to be to do with a driver update that Windows 10 performs for the "Insyde HIDClass" device. This would seem to be the "airplane mode" button, which in some way gets seen as a separate device by Windows. The device's driver seems to get updated by Windows in the background, as if you were plugging in a keyboard or mouse, so there's no user interaction or any other indication the driver is updating. The driver for the device was updated June 2017 - before that date we were imaging PCs with 1703 with no problems, so that's probably the version that caused issues. The driver is updated as if a device is plugged in, but what actually seems to get installed gets put in Programs & Features, as if it's a piece of software. In our setup, trying to uninstall the software doesn't work as it's promptly re-installed. The solution (for us) seems to be to disable updates for the specific hardware ID, i.e.: https://www.howtogeek.com/263851/how-to-prevent-windows-from-automatically-updating-specific-drivers/ The hardware IDs reported by our laptops - yours might differ: ACPI\VEN_PNP&DEV_C000 ACPI\PNPC000 PNPC000 We disable updates for the above IDs via a registry setting, although you can also set those values via a GPO setting.

We have a soundproofed cabinet in a classroom holding a PoE switch. It actually blocks a suprising amount of sound - our PoE switches are quiet loud, and you do notice them out in the coridors in locations where they don't have soundproofed cabinets, but the cabinet in the classroom is pretty much silent. I can't remember what brand we got, but it seems to basically be a cabinet with added foam all around the inside. Also, (quiet) external fans fitted in the side. If you but something similar, check whether these fans come included or are an added extra.

The AD / Office 365 sync process should sync passwords, users should be able to log in to Minecraft with the same password as their usual Windows login (or you can probably sort out single sign-on).

Users: you need to create users in Office 365. We did this by syncing Active Directory with Office 365 - you set the tool on a domain controller. It's a bit of work, but the process is simple enough and once it's done it's done and you'll have all your pupils (and staff, if you want) synced with Office 365. For the client itself, we just manually installed on the (Mac) workstations we wanted it on.

What format does iSAMS expect data to be in? I'm guessing your task is going to be to export some data from School Manager and re-format it to fit what iSAMS takes in. School Manager / Filemaker is easy enough to get data out of, either by running reports from inside School Manager and exporting a CSV file or via an ODBC connection or via their own XML-based query system. If this is expected to be a one-off operation I'd have thought running reports and exporting the results as a CSV file would be your best bet, maybe with a re-formatting step of some kind in the middle.

I think a lot of what I'd have written has already been covered in previous posts, just specifics about some of your above points: Internet: The service you can get is going to depend on your location. We're in central London, with access to various fibre connections, and have found our fibre-based Internet connection to be very reliable for the past 2 years. Don't forget latency as a factor - as well as bandwidth you'll need short response-times to web-based applications. We use an ISP that has peering connections with Amazon / Google / Azure, so anything hosted on those platforms should have minimal response times. Auto-syncing - I've not tried Google's file streaming yet as it's still in early-access preview mode, but that sound like the kind of thing you'd be aiming for. Seems to be at the almost-there-but-not-quite stage at the moment. Printers (and wireless): you can manage them via nice cloud-based consoles, but you'll need some kind of on-site gateway. You shouldn't need anything too fancy, and not the kind of hardware that needs to sit in a dedicated air-conditioned room, but something you could shove out of the way in a network cabinet somewhere. Backup Devices - we've got on very well so far with Chromebooks. For BYOD devices, there are management applications that let the device be managed in-school and free-to-use when the pupil gets home. MIS / HR / Finance / etc - if there's not a god web-based application, then running via remote desktop to a cloud-based virtual desktop is probably your best bet. That can, initially, seem expensive as you're paying per minute for processing time. However, if you factor in not needing to hire someone to support on-site hardware you're still making a saving (although if you 're the chap the school doesn't have to hire to support on-site hardware then you've just automated yourself out of a job...). Back / disaster recovery - I'd still want some kind of on-site copy of all our files, just in case Google or whatever have a change of mind one day and start charging for storage or something. Again, this needn't be anything that needs that much on-site support - a 2U rack server stuffed full of SSDs should be able to be sat in a network cabinet with no dedicated cooling, and could sit and sync all your files from cloud storage to a local copy, just in case. Specific hardware / software for departments: cloud-based virtual desktops might work better than you might think. Not for video editing, maybe, but Photoshop / Indesign might be usable. Music keyboards, in particular, are actually easier to handle - you can now get nice USB-only ones that are powered via USB, you just plug them in to a Chromebook and start playing, there's no separate power supply needed.

The Asus Chromebook Flip C213, around £390-ish (price includes VAT) or the HP Chromebook X360 11 G1 EE, around £430-ish (price includes VAT). The second "forward facing" camera is on the keyboard, so you have to have the keyboard bent back in tablet mode to use the camera, but that's probably how they would be taking photos anyway. Both also, I think, include support for styluses for handwriting. I think Dell have something equivalent, but no-one from Dell has managed to actually tell me what the model number is or how much it might cost.

Yes, on the host we could mount the NTFS file system contained on the disk array and see normal files, there's no VHD or similar created on that volume. We should be able to switch the storage volume between VMs - this is what we plan to do to upgrade the file server to Windows Server 2016 over the summer. Simply create a new VM based on Server 2016, detach the storage volume from the old VM and attach it to the new one.

Half and half - virtual machine, with a dedicated RAID array passed through to the VM as a dedicated storage volume. Originally done for performance, but probably not really necessary.

At BETT this year I had a go with previews of a couple of the new models coming out at the end of the month: the Asus Chromebook Flip C213 and the HP Chromebook X360 11 G1 EE. Both are hybrid devices where the keyboard can fold all the way back to make the laptop into a tablet, and both also now have rear-facing cameras (like a tablet) and stylus support, and come with 32GB storage and 4GB of RAM. Bear in mind that any new Chromebook should, technically, be capable of running Android apps, so your storage might start to get used up by apps being installed - I'd have said 32GB was more of a minimum, I'd prefer 64GB, but that starts to get expensive. I have rough pricing from a couple of suppliers of around £390 for the Asus and £430 for the HP - I haven't double-checked the specifications, so there might be a performance difference between the two. That price includes VAT, so if you don't pay VAT that'll be a bit lower. I haven't heard back from Dell yet about their new model, I think they have a comparable device. We currently have 160 of the Asus Chromebook Flip C100PAs, with the same fold-back keyboard. They seem to be more robust than I was perhaps fearing - I was thinking we'd probably have a couple of broken hinges by the end of year, just in the normal course of things, but they seem to have been fine. My main worry is that some of the younger children are going to start thinking that every laptop screen bends right back...

It's good to know they're working out alright - it sounds like you have an interesting setup, with a room capable of being set up for VR lessons. We haven't managed any Android devices via an MDM yet - the Moto G4 is my own device, not the school's. Our school devices are all Chromebooks, which are managed via the Google console, which I understand can manage Android devices aswell.

We used WeVideo, which worked well with green-screen. It's probably worth adding that most of the work in setting up a good green-screen scene seems to be in the lighting of the green (or other colour) background and the subject. If you have a budget to spend on some equipment / software you might want to buy a dedicated stand / backdrop kit (various available on eBay around £100) and a maybe couple of lights. Background removal is something that Lightfield cameras are very good at, although I'm not really sure if there's anything available at the moment that's really suitable for classroom use.

The refurbish-the-laptops-you've-got method should work equally well for Windows laptops - maybe add a larger SSD than you would have done for ChromeOS, maybe add some more RAM, but if you're paying for a Microsoft volume license of some sort anyway it's probably not going to cost anything to upgrade them to Windows 10. It sounds like the laptops might be being labeled as "slow" for things that it's actually relativly easy to fix (new SSD, fix the keyboards, new batteries, fresh install of Windows). Your get-DT-specific-machines advice is a good idea too - if the original poster can spend some money on refurbishing an existing set of laptops, then spend the rest of the money on some ICT-direct desktops and some large monitors to use as DT-specific workstations, that might work too. I got the impression from the original post that they weren't necessarily looking for something to run a full version of Autodesk, but would consider "cloud based" CAD in some way. I've not tried Tinkercad, but it looks promising: https://www.tinkercad.com/ And of course there's SketchUp-in-a-browser: my.sketchup | SketchUp The above is in beta, but I think some people on these forums have been using it already, so they might be able to give an opinion on how good it is. There is always something like RollApp, which will let you run Autocad or whatever via a virtual desktop. I looked at pricing for RollApp and it was a bit expensive for schools, although it might be worth asking, depending on how many users will be using it at the same time. Of course, if a school has its own remote access server it might be possible to run your CAD software on that. Edit: Ooh, Onshape looks pretty good, too: https://www.onshape.com/