dhicks

Might be worth waiting a few weeks until the Asus Chromebook Flip C213 comes out - a little larger than the C100PA, plus it adds a rear camera and stylus support.

We found CloudReady's latest update seems to turn off the Flash plugin by default now, going along with how the latest version of ChromeOS itself works, and as well as having "Enable Flash" settings in the Google Admin content you also have to make sure the Flash plugin is installed via CloudReady's console, just so you know. We've found the Asus Chromebook Flips to be the equivilent of iPads for the pupils - especially with the ability to run Android apps, in most instances where a teacher has gone "...ah, but I need an iPad because only it can run..." we've been able to find the same app for Android and roll it out on the Chromebooks (which are half the price). That's the only drawback of using CloudReady devices - no support for Android apps, which is okay but if you have some devices that can use apps and some that can't, staff / pupils might get a bit confused. We've found remoter desktop access via AccessNow to work very well for when pupils and teachers want to use a Windows desktop. We currently have our own remote desktop servers set up, but we might look at moving that provision to on-demand cloud-based desktops if it proves practical.

Yes - that's what the original poster is proposing, using Cloudready's implementation of ChromeOS, installable on most older (and newer!) Intel laptops and PCs. As they point out, free to install the personal version, although if you can find the funds for the Education version and a ChromeOS management license (around £70 per device for both) you can then join the devices to your Google Admin control panel, making your Cloudready devices into managed ChromeOS devices.

Macs and Chromebooks. Garageband on the Macs, Soundtrap and Flat.io on ChromeOS (or any browser, at school or home). USB / MIDI keyboards. Chromebooks with USB keyboards might not cover absolutely every musical requirement you might have, but they might make a very useful addition / supplement and allow you to stretch your money out a bit more. £400 for a Chromebook (a snazzy new one, cheaper are available, or use existing / refurbished machines with CloudReady), £50 for a keyboard, £65 per year for 50 Flat.io accounts, £400 per year for 50 Soundtrap / WeVideo / Explain Everything licenses. A new touchscreen Chromebook with a USB/MIDI keyboard is rather less bulky than some older music technology solutions - smaller USB keyboards can be powered by the Chromebook itself, so all of a sudden you have a portable solution that just requires one USB cable to be plugged in to work.

Interesting - I'd vaguely assumed that running Sysprep would reset the MachineGUID value for a Windows machine, but a quick Google would suggest it doesn't. You could switch to automating the Windows install process via unattend.xml instead of using disk imaging, but of course that doesn't solve your immediate issue.

Check the GAPS logs, they are generally quite informative. Check that the "email address" field is set for each user in Active Directory, even if they don't actually have an email account associated with their user (our pupils don't), as Google doesn't sync the account otherwise. Also, the actual account sync only happens once a day by default - the GAPS installation process sets up a Windows Scheduled Task, check the Windows task schedular for details, but you can always manually run the task (only takes a minute or so to run) if you want everything synced right away.

They are now doing a cloud service ("PosiCloud"), where you can spin up VMs via a control panel, much like AWS or similar, and that's rather more affordable for their smaller VMs than their shared hosting. Email: I use Migadu for email hosting - they take care of all the fiddly stuff for you, you cn have your own domain and set up users with accounts and so on.

I know on our Exchange 2010 server we have to explicitly allow specific internal IP addresses to be able to connect via SMTP and send emails. In Exchange 2010 that's done with a Receive Connector (I think), there might be an equivalent in your SMTP Relay server settings.

Could try Google's snazzy new wireless kit - the access points support wireless mesh networking, so you should be able to extend the network around the house.

We've got on very well with Chromebooks - we bought a bunch of the Asus Chromebook Flip C100PA when they were £200 each, and although they've since gone up a bit in price you certainly get your money's worth. We have a total of 161 at the moment, and we're thinking to buy some of the newer model C302CA when they come out - that rear-facing camera means they'll be able to do everything we want, all in one handy package. We have iPads for our teachers, which work pretty well, however the base model isn't quite practical, so you wind up having ot get the next model up, plus you wind up having to buy a case - the Flip machines have a keyboard to cover the screen, so there's no need for a hard case.

I'm at Knightsbridge School - your headmaster used to work here! A "cloud services" provider could be pretty much anything - they might or might not be able to help you look at a new school MIS. Looking at pricing on AWS, I figured a remote domain controller and Filemaker server should cost around £50 a month in hosting charges, so at least you have a figure to compare against whatever they try to sell you this afternoon.

Theoretically, giving School Manager (or any Filemaker-based system) a web-based interface should simply be a case of enabling the web-based user interface on the appropriate database. I'm not sure if there are any complications involved in doing that, but it /should/ work. My plan here is to create a Filemaker server in the cloud somewhere (probably in an AWS virtual private cloud) to use initially as a failover server in case of on-site server failure. Which part of West Runton are you in - Beeston Hall School, the Kingswood centre, or somewhere else?

Gosh - didn't know that's now called a "Headless CMS": https://headlesscms.org/

A static site generator, linked to a local file system or Google Drive / OneDrive / Dropbox / Foldr?: https://www.staticgen.com/

Indeed - this struck me more as free software to run your own (hopefully highly-reputable) email service with, possibly for a particular niche market (such as education) rather than something an individual developer or company would run themselves.

Can you expand on what certificate-less SSL/TLS filtering is and how we might go about implementing it on a typical school network?

Came across this today - a open-source mail platform: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14201562

We plan something similar, but probably in an AWS Virtual Private Cloud rather than in Azure (depends on pricing). We would also add a VM to sync our MIS data.

At school, we're considering moving all our photos and videos to Google Drive, then having those Drive files synced to a NAS or similar, just in case there's an issue with Drive one day. For data backups in general, is anyone using / considering a bank deposit box? They actually look quite affordable, and should, of course, be safe.

We have Lock-N-Charge cabinets with baskets in individual classrooms, it's the teacher's / teaching assistant's / classroom laptop monitor's responsibility to take care of them. We have a 1:1 device:pupil ratio for years 6,7 and 8 and a 1:2 or 1:3 ratio for lower years, so pupils in the junior school share 1 between 2 or 3. We're using Chromebooks, and I've written a script to extract name, location and asset ID from Google's management console and generate a printable A4-size sticker to go on the front of the laptops, so each laptop is easily identifiable. We're currently using laser-printable sticky labels for that but, speaking to VeryPC, they can do you laminated vinyl stickers for your laptops at a good price.

I understand that Smartthings uses the Z-Wave and / or Zigbee protocols for communication: https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-gb/articles/208672926-Z-Wave-and-ZigBee-FAQ This would seem to use the same set of frequencies as standard wireless, so you might be getting some interference between the two systems. I did wonder how well Zigbee would work in an institutional setting - at home you can probably just about get away with it, but in a larger setup with managed wireless, adding yet more devices trying to create a network on the same set of frequencies must make for crowded airwaves.

We use AccessNow for our remote access solution. Teachers and pupils find it easy to use, they just type an address into their web browser and log in with their usual login details. On our particular setup, I've created our own custom login page that does its own sticky load-balancing based on the user's username - this was to solve an issue we had with a particular package that some people needed to use. The software can be very flexible - you don't need to install the server-side component on the actual RDP server(s) you want people to connect to, you can run it as a gateway from a separate server. However, if you want to allow users to be able to directly upload and download files via the client, you need to install the server component on all your servers. Licensing is by simultanious user - in our case, 40 licenses covers us quite easily for our 550 potential users. The cost wasn't too bad, around £800 I think, and that's a one-off fee, yearly maintainance is fairly minimal. Guacamole has only recently become an Apache project, and is being worked on a lot more now, with releases and updates coming along at a fair rate. It is still a "pre-release" 0.9 version at the moment. When it is production ready it should be a very good solution, handling VNC and SSH as well as RDP, which would allow for some fun and interesting applications.

We use Neverware's CloudReady. It has offical support from Google, so your newly-installed ChromeOS machine can be managed via the Google console just like a brand new Chromebook. CloudReady license their system to schools on a per-device, one-off payment basis (for businesses they charge an annual fee), and there's a separate one-off charge for the Google admin licenses. Both cost us around £70 all done, but I think there's a special offer on at the moment, you might be able to get both in a bundle for around £50. Ideally, give your old machines an SSD each. It doesn't have to be a large SSD - 32GB is still quite large for a Chromebook - so you might even be able to get a bunch of smaller SSDs second hand. A device with an SSD should be quite quick to boot - maybe not the 8 seconds of a Chromebook, but still quite quick. More RAM in the device is always going to help, too. The only thing your devices won't be able to do that /some/ new Chromebooks can is run Android apps. It depends what you plan for the devices, and what your user's expectations are. We've just bought a bunch of Chromebook Flips, which run Android Apps and have touch screens, so now everyone is used to the idea that Chromebooks are like iPads. We felt adding a set of re-conditioned laptops wirthout touch screens and Android apps would confuse people - teachers would come along to the laptops expecting to be able to use apps, then be confused when they didn't work. We do have some desktop devices running CloudReady set up as kiosks in our Reception classrooms, though, which seem to be working well.

We use SoundTrap for audio recording and editing on Chromebooks. There is a per-user per-year cost involved, but it's pretty reasonable and you can re-assign licenses as needed between pupils, or you could create generic "Exam1", "Exam2", etc accounts to assign the licenses to. Google are currently promoting SoundTrap, WeVideo and Expain Everything as a bundle, licenses for which aren't much more than individual licenses for any one of those applications.

We found each other eventually - me and @DeGrimmy were in the team that won the build-the-tallest-tower competition / lesson! Just trying to think through what I actually learnt from that day. That competition / lesson, in itself, wasn't actually a very well prepared / run lesson, but I think I learnt more from the stuff that went wrong than I would have done from a lesson that went perfectly and seemed effortless. The chap from finance who was meant to be coming along with me couldn't make it in the end, so I probably missed out on some of the more business-case type questions to ask Google about moving services over to their system.