dhicks

Hilarious prank, just in time for April fool's day, for the more technically-minded pupil: write a bot that requests some pages from the policy section of a school's website, in a way that looks like the activity of an OFSTED inspector. Possibly coordinate with pupils at a couple of other schools so request IP addresses aren't all the same. Watch with amusement as your school's SMT team freak out...

Sound: the solution that I've seen for various stage setups seems to be some kind of mic(s) hung from the ceiling. They don't need to be big, or expensive, mics, either, but you probably need to get advice from someone on exactly the kind of thing you want and how to set it up properly. Of course, the proper solution is to teach the children to project their voices properly - that is what school assemblies and productions are for.

Does the client work on Mac OS? Google Drive support - will it support Team Drives? Does adding or updating a file via your client properly trigger Google Drive file / folder update watches (I imagine it would, but worth double-checking)? 9p per user per month - for 150 staff and 400 pupils that's £600-ish per year, not bad, especially if it saves us having to bother with a local storage server.

I didn't set that bit up myself - I'll have to have a rummage around the settings in the Google Admin Console.

I'll have to take a look at that, thanks. My thinking at the moment is a web-based development environment that can pull in documents and data from various sources (Google Drive, MIS, etc), procces them and produce a result, be that sending a notification email, writing a document, or whatever. So far, something like this as a development environment looks close: https://www.pythonanywhere.com/ It just needs to have a bunch of school-orientated libraries installed (GAM for Google Admin Console automation, maybe an interface for getting data from SIMS or other MIS, etc), and be flexible enough to be able to read / write data to Google Drive and Office 365.

Can it do tasks other than send emails, or is email its main communication mechanism?

Ah ha: https://agilevision.io/blog/serverless%20architecture/2017/02/12/easily-create-complex-workflows-with-aws-step-functions.html Now I could just do with a nice, simple way to be able throw together a script at no notice and run it without having an AWS-enabled development environment to hand...

We have found the Asus Chromebook Flip C100PA to be excellent for classroom use - functions as both a tablet and laptop, and just the right size for our children. We are a prep school, though, so possibly slightly smaller children. 4GB of RAM, and performance hasn't been an issue at all, and they were very reasonably priced - around £250-ish. I was impressed by the new Asus Chromebook flip C213 at BETT - adds a bigger screen, USB-C charging and stylus compatibility, but does seem like it will cost a bit more, plus it's not out for another few months as yet.

Many thanks for taking the time to organise and run the webinar, it's very useful to know we have a forum where we can get some information out of Google. My question about Google Expeditions: we didn't actually get an answer to the question, you just re-explained the question again. I get that Expeditions communicates between devices over the local network, with no Internet connection needed (apart from the initial download of VR content), and it's an excellent design decision as it means you don't have to rely on a school's often-variable Internet connection for your system to work. However, at the other end of the scale, some schools have very well organised wireless networks and reliable Internet access, and allow BYOD devices in the classroom, such as letting pupils bring in their own mobile phones. Typically, those BYOD devices cannot communicate with each other, which makes sense on that type of network, but will stop Expeditions from working. Are there any plans to add a feature to Expeditions to allow for communication through a coordinating server of some kind instead, if peer-to-peer traffic is not working, or is Google leaving Expeditions how it is?

I saw the Asus Chromebook Flip C213 previewed at BETT - I was impressed with the rear camera and stylus functionality. Use with a stylus might work very well in our Art room, although we've been considering iPads in there. Do you have any details on release date or prices for the Asus Chromebook Flip C213? I also tried out Google Expeditions at BETT, and have tried it out on my own equipment at home. If I understand correctly, Expeditions communicates between the "teacher" tablet controlling the expidition and the viewing clients via peer-to-peer style network connections. This would cause issues on many BYOD-style wireless networks, as used in some schools that allow pupils to bring their own phones and so on in (and are most probably the kind of schools that would be using Expiditions), as typically devices are isolated on the network and cannot comminicate with each other. Is there a workaround for this, either at the school's end of things (i.e. can you recommend a wireless system or network that allows for software-defined networking to allow certain types of network traffic to flow between devices), or can Expiditions fall back to communicating via Google's servers, probably via your snazzy cloud pub/sub service? At the BETT show, Google were promoting a bundle consisting of Explain Everything, WeVideo and SoundTrap. Our music teacher is interested in that bndle, but wants to know how in particular how she can make feature requests to Soundtrap. Would you know, by any chance?

Logins - is there a system that will allow our children to log in to their Google account via a token of some sort (card, etc) held up to the webcam? As detailed in this thread: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/educational-software/176008-g-suite-pictorial-logins-junior-pupils.html Google Drive - what's the best option for Workflow automation using Google Drive? Does Google offer anything to Amazon's Simple Workflow engine, or Step Functions?: https://aws.amazon.com/step-functions/?hp=tile&so-exp=below

We bought a bunch of 2009-era Acer Aspire Revo RT3090 "Nettop" machines, originally for use in the staffroom, but they've now mostly migrated off to be digital signage machines. Not, actually, a dissimilar specification to that given above - 2GB of RAM, we've upgraded them to SSD at some point, and the processor is probably an older version, but not bad for 8-year-old machines. They work very well as ChromeOS machine via CloudReady - we have some in our Reception classrooms for the very small children to use. We haven't yet moved over to ChromeOS for digital signage, but it's something that's probably worth our doing as having a Windows machine load up a Powerpoint file from a shared folder is getting a bit clunky. I have tried one of VeryPCs new OPS PCs with CloudReady, but no luck so far. That would be ideal, if possibly a little pricy, as you could then get a display with a proper OPS slot and have the computer powered by the screen.

We had a similar issues - we were using Lightspeed's email filtering, but they are now discontinuing that functionality. We now route our email through our Google domain, which seems to be working very well - spam gets filtered, and users get a spam summary report so they can mark emails as spam / not spam if they want.

Indeed. I think I ned to spend a few hours re-routing some of the cabling so that the power cables are well away from anything else.

Yes, the higher the amp is set, the louder the pop.

How do I make sure leads are screened - wrap them with copper tape? Seemingly, it does also repel slugs, which is bound to come in handy.

Yes - I tried running both just the motor and then just the amp off the battery of the UPS, no mains connection - in both cases I still got a popping sound when starting the motor up. If this implies RF interference, what can I do to reduce that - shield the amp's box with conductive paint / tinfoil?

Surely running the motor off a UPS, completely disconnected from the mains, and still getting the same effect indicates it's not a mains issue?

Good points. Update: I've just tried using a UPS to power first the motor and then the amp, so isolating both items away from the mains. Made no difference - there was a still a nasty (really quite loud) popping sound when the screen started and stopped. The problem, therefore, can't be a power surge on the mains circuit, but must either be RF interference as Andrew_C suggests above, or it could simply be a current being induced by the power cables to the motor in the signal cables to the speakers, i.e. the cables are running too close together. I probably need to spend some time carefully re-running cables around the stage.

Hello All, We have a hall with an AV setup that consists partly of a couple of speakers driven by an amp and a projector and motorised drop-down projector screen. The amp and the projector screen are plugged in to the same double socket in the wall. Whenever the motorised screen starts or stops there's a loud popping sound from the speakers. I assume this is something to do with a power surge of some kind produced by the motor in the drop-down screen - does that sound right? If so, how do I stop it happening? Do I need some kind of specialist AV power-conditioning setup? A quick Google search suggest APC have a range of this kind of thing, but a look at their current websites turns up one 6-way surge-protected socket. Is that all I need - a surge-protected socket? Or is there a more heavy-duty bit of kit available to smooth out power for AV equipment?

We're rolling out Impero around the school, including on ChromeOS, this week. We've had a few issues along the way, but those have been solvable so far, although it does mean we've been concentrating on getting the client-side software distributed rather than seeing what results Impero returns while pupils are using devices. Next week is half term, so it'll be another week until we can get an idea of how well it works in practice. One issue we've come across with ChromeOS: if you have a machine that logs in as a public session, no browser extensions are allowed to run, which stops the Impero client from working. Also, any custom HTTPS certificates distributed from your web filter are not applied, so you can't monitor HTTPS connections from that device, either. Has anyone found a solution to the above?

I saw Expeditions on the Google stand at BETT, and spoke to someone there about it who went around schools doing demonstrations. Their solution to poor signal strength or general "it doesn't work with the school's WiFi" problems was to take a separate WiFi router to plug in. I thought about that for a bit, then checked how their software works, and it turns out the client on the VR device connects in a peer-to-peer fashion to the Expidition leader's (i.e. the teacher's) device. That makes good sense from the point of view of bandwidth / latency issues - if a school has poor internet connecticity in general, best not to rely on downloading content to each device and reporting head-tracking data in real time back to the teacher's device via an internet-based server, best use local networking. However, if you have a BYOD-style WiFi network, those will generally isolate each end-user device from each other. You need to see if your system will let you allow traffic between specific devices - maybe dependent on MAC address. I don't know if Ruckus Unleashed has that feature, and if so how you go about identifying MAC addresses belonging to teacher devices. In theory, you could look up the device in DHCP to see what MAC address belonged to which named device, and then allow traffic to teacher-held devices according to group membership in Active Directory (if you're ona Windows domain, of course), but I don't know if any wireless system do that for you or if that's something you'd have to add yourself.

I find that Google Drive for storage, along with Drive Notepad, makes for a surprisingly usable development environment. Drive Notepad does syntax highlighting for various languages, and I use rclone to deploy files to servers.

As pointed out above, Ruckus access points will (automatically, in most cases) act as mesh nodes in places where you can't run network cable to them, only power - they basically act as their own wireless signal boosters, but keep the capabilities of a proper managed wireless device. We use three of them linked in mesh mode to link to a room we use in the building over the road, including one in an external case, mounted on a railing outside with a clamp-on camera tripod mount. If cost is an issue, we've been buying Ruckus access points second-hand, which have worked well - although make sure you get UK versions, there's lots listed on eBay which are from US sellers, and those devices don't work in the UK.

Things have changed somewhat since this thread was started - Adobe have new pricing. From our software licensing supplier (softbox.co.uk): "Adobe recently released their K-12 licensing model for Primary and Secondary Schools. Essentially, you can avail a full Creative Cloud for teams licence [includes most of the Adobe creative applications] for £18.64 per Device (minimum purchase = 25)." We bought the minimum 25 licenses, so £466 (or £559.20 with VAT included) per year - that covers our IT suite and some teacher machines. This actually turned out cheaper than the three standard full Creative Cloud licenses we'd been paying for before.