dhicks

AVCHD format footage, certainly a few years ago, used to be a bit of a pain with iMovie / Final Cut in particular as, for some reason I can't remember offhand, the user had to remember to copy the whole contents of the memory card over, including all the metadata and index files, not just the video footage itself, otherwise iMovie / Final Cut would take ages to import the footage. That might be something to bear in mind if you're purchasing new cameras. I'm suitably impressed by the quality / compression of H.265 (not H.264) footage that some newer cameras are using, although I haven't tried importing any of that footage into iMovie yet.

£8,000, 30 devices, £260 per device, assuming you have suitable laptop storage in classrooms / corridors already. You could buy new ChromeOS devices for that amount, or refurbish your existing devices and convert them to ChromeOS by installing Cloudready. When you say "falling to bits" if you mean the keyboards, those can be replaced for maybe around £30 each, batteries for about the same, and you could upgrade to a small SSD for possibly about the same. A perpetual license for Cloudready plus Google console management license is around £60, so that's around £150 per device. That's £4,500, which would leave you £3,500 to buy a 3D printer.

We wound up buying our Chromebooks and management licenses from VeryPC. For Chromeboxes, you could consider using existing devices and installing Neverware Cloudready on them - it's probably not worth buying second-hand devices to install Cloudready on, as you might as well spend the money on new devices, but if you already have a set of devices it might be a good option. The only limitation is that you won't be able to run Android apps on the Neverware devices. Actually, it's generally easier to put more RAM and/or disk space into an existing device than you get from a typical new, dedicated ChromeOS device, which might be an advantage in some circumstances.

Yes, I have a Moto G4, which I bought specifically to use with Google Cardboard. It works just fine with Expeditions - looking around a scene is smooth and pretty much lag-free as far as I could see. 360-degree video on Youtube was also fine - I didn't have any problems using the phone with a Cardboard viewer for half an hour or so in one go, no headaches or anything like that. Battery life doesn't seem to be great - if I leave the phone unplugged for a couple of days it won't even switch on the next time I go to use it, the power runs down so quickly - I don't think it would manage an 8-hour school day of constant use with WiFi turned on, and I'm not sure it would charge quickly enough to be charged over lunch for the afternoon. I also bought a micro SD card which I intended to use as Adoptable Storage, but for some reason I don't seem to be able to configure it as such. How do you plan to use Cardboard / Expeditions / VR ingeneral in the classroom? Do you plan to buy a class set of phones to pair with headsets and then share them around classes? The next version of Google Expeditions to going to focus more on AR, wirth the best features requiring support for Project Tango hardware - you might want to consider buying compatible phones, although they are at the more premium end at the moment. You might also want to consider a 360-degree camera for pupils to create their own content with - the Samsung Gear 360 (2017 edition) is £220.

What video camera hardware will you have available? Final Cut Pro might handle Apple Prores encoded video better, and there's hardware available that supports Prores nativly now. Possibly as an addition to other software at A-level, I'd take a look at WeVideo - online video editing. It's not going to cover all the "pro" features you'd get from other, desktop, software, but ITN and BBC news use similar systems for their reporters to upload and edit video in the field, and it's priced cheaply enough that it could be bought in addition to other software.

These people were at BETT this year - Smartboard-like web-based whiteboard: https://awwapp.com/

Good plan. Soundtrap - audio / music editing: https://www.soundtrap.com/ WeVideo - video editing: https://www.wevideo.com/ Explain Everything - presentations (a bit like Powerpoint, Smartboard software, etc): Edit: sorry, turns out this is app-based only, there's no web-based client, but it does still come bundled with the above two web-based applications. https://explaineverything.com/ The above three all integrate with Google logins and whole-school licenses can be bought as a bundle from XMA. For Python (and blocks-based (like Scratch) / Turtle) programming - runs in the browser, nothing to install, a nice sandboxed development environment if you're worried about the security of your network: https://trinket.io Again, integrates with Google logins. Also for sound / music: https://flat.io

Nice, simple-to-use in-browser Python code editing and execution, integrates with Google / Clever.com logins: https://trinket.io/ Todays Google Doodle (22nd June 2017) is a simple interactive music-creation tool. Does anyone know how you find a permanent link to the interactive version? I can find this page: https://www.google.com/doodles/oskar-fischingers-117th-birthday

You can use WebVR to define a hotspot within a 360-degree video (or photo), and define whatever action you'd like to take place when the user interacts with that hotspot. Is that going to help, or are they after a more point-and-click sort of solution?

Do any MIS systems (for schools, universities, or any other similar institutions) directly integrate sharing files via Google Drive / Office 365 / Dropbox / etc? So the end user has a nice simple press-this-button-to-share-with-Class-5B style of interface rather than having to rely on emailing files around?

Depends on how you mean by 1:1 - I gather you mean devices the children can take home with them. We have a 1:1 ratio of available devices in classrooms to children in a number of our yeargroups now, but those are devices that stay in the school (although we could make them available for loan via the library system). We went for school-owned and controlled devices, and we chose Chromebooks. Logins integrate with Active Directory, so the children can log on to devices with their usual username and password, something which year 3 and up seem to have managed quite well. The devices (Asus Chromebook Flip CP100) seem to have lasted well so far (about 6 months), with no repairs needed - we do have nice children, though. Our 200 Mb/s connection seems to be fine, for around 160 pupil devices and 100-odd staff devices at the moment, with room to add more. Our wireless seems okay, and that's a 4/5 year old Ruckus system - we added a few more access points to cover dead spots and all seems okay. We had some issues tracking devices and distinguishing one identical device from another. In the end we went for printed covers on each laptop, customised with the laptop name and location on and a different picture for each classroom, so you can tell at a glance if you have a class set.

What do you mean by a "trigger"? Is the whole bit of content to be VR / 360 degree video, or are you talking about some kind of menu system that lets the users play some 36-degree content?

We've rolled out 160 ASUS Chromebook Flip C100PA devices so far - around £300 each including VAT and management license, if I remember correctly. They seem to be working well so far - we have them in classrooms, in daily use, and children seem to be finding them usable and convenient. We've had a couple suddenly decide to stop accepting touch input, but a reset-to-factory-settings sorts that out, so the issue would seem to be software rather than hardware related. I saw ASUS' new flip model at BETT in January, the one with the rear-facing camera, which does look like a very good device, although pricing looks to be more around £400 per device. HP and Acer have very similar models due out at around the same time, too.

We did pretty much exactly that a couple of years ago to upgrade to Server 2012 R2. The process was actually smoother than I thought it might be - I don't think we had any major issues, we just took our time and double-checked everything as we went along.

Just to add that I saw this is use with a Year 4 class yesterday, and it seemed to work very well. Pupils can log in with their existing Google / Clever.com accounts, so minimal admin setup, and Trinket's Python implementation includes the Turtle module, so our year 4s yesterday were drawing pattern with turtle graphics. I think Trinket have actually written a Javascript-based version of Python, so I'm not sure their version of Python includes all of the standard library, so for more senior school exercises you might want to check what libraries you need before you start. For actual software, I'd use Python Anywhere, as they provide a nice easy-to-use Flask implementation.

Trinket lets you run Python code in a web browser: https://trinket.io/ Myself, I have an account with PythonAnywhere, who are excelent, London-based, and keen to cater for the edutcation market: https://www.pythonanywhere.com/ You could also provide a classes-worth of Raspberry Pis. Have them permanatly set up and available on the network for browser-based remote access, that way there's no setup time each lesson.

Just to add: resellers (XMA in the UK) are selling a bundle of Explain Everything, WeVideo and Soundtrap for schools. We seem to have been the first school to sign up for the bundle - we already used WeVideo and Soundtrap anyway. If you're starting from new you can quite possibly go straight to Android-based OPS touch screens - Explain Everything seems to be a good bit of software (cross-platform) for touch screens.

We have CloudReady on some older machines set aside for our Reception classes. They work very well, although it did take us a few minutes to figure out what was going on with Flash the other week when the Flash settings on ChromeOS got updated - we had to separately enable Flash on the CloudReady devices again. CloudReady devices don't run Android apps. That's fine, they work very well as web browsers, but we figured it would cause some confusion if we started having some laptops with one set of apps and some without, so we've stuck with buying new Chromebooks capable of running Android apps.

Okay, impressed - updated my (home) laptop to Windows 10 1703 (Creators Update), double-clicked a equirectangular-projection .mp4 file and Windows automatically played it in a 360-degree capable viewer.

Ooh - the new Samsung Gear 360 (2017) is now out. I bought one from the Samsung store on Oxford Street last night - it seems to still be listed as "pre-order" on Amazon, so stocks might not have arrived in other places yet. It certainly seems easy enough to use so far - press the button on the front, it starts recording, and of course the video frames are synced. Both frames are recorded as simple what-comes-from-the-lenses views side-by-side on a single video file, a 4096 x 2048 .mp4 file encoded as H.265. Theoretically, that's a 4K video file, although you loose some detail from overlapping areas and the fact that the lenses are round, so there's black areas around the frames. Samsung provide software to split the .mp4 file into two 2048 x 2048 images and stitch them back together in 4096 x 2048 equirectangular projection. It's okay, but I want to try and figure out how to split the video files in half myself so I can use different stitching software - I'm guessing a combination of ffmpeg filters should sort it.

If you get a screen with an OPS slot you can embed an OPS PC in the screen itself, so the whole thing turns on in one go, and there's no cables to connect. We currently use a Powerpoint file ourselves, but are planning to move to Google Sign Builder on a ChromeOS device: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-sign-builder/odjaaghiehpobimgdjjfofmablbaleem https://enterprise.google.com/chrome/digital-signage/

Sorry, my mistake - that should be the ASUS Chromebook Flip c213. Release date of "Q3 2017", around £400, complete with rear camera and stylus functionality.

It's what we've done, so I'd say yes. Actually, when we came to sign the contract it turned out that we could get 200mbps for the same price, so that's what we've got. Bandwidth usage will quite probably fill the space available - now we have a good, solid connection teachers can use things like video resources in classrooms, and if there's 40 of them doing that at the same the bandwidth adds up. It also allows us to use things like WeVideo for online video editing in a browser - not practical on a slow connection, but works surprisingly well if you have the bandwidth available.

Try the one with 2GB of RAM with ChromeOS (i.e. CloudReady) and see how usable it is. £200 isn't bad if you wind up with 15 usable machines. CloudReady is free for the stand-alone version, but it'll cost your around £70 per device to license CloudReady and purchase a ChromeOS management license if you want them to be managed devices.

I thought you simply had to set up your printers as Google Cloudprint devices and then you could print to them directly from ChromeOS? I thought we had this working quite nicely on our network, and could even allow kiosk machines to print if we wanted, although it might be something I haven't checked on after the updates to Chrome the other week.