dhicks

This is Computeam, an IT-support company who also seem to be branchig out into curriculum content: ActiveLens Curriculum | Products & Services | Computeam I had a look at the stand in question - I didn't have a go with the Hololens, but I was impressed by the augmented reality worksheets they had on there. The Hololens is a nice idea, but expensive for classroom use, and the main advantage of their content seemed to be that it works with a standard tablet, just by pointing it at one of their worksheets. I imagine that would work very nicly with a Cardboard-style headset, as long as the camera was left uncovered.

That's the one!

Hmm - never thought of using Copy, I've always just created users using "Create New User". Our bulk-creation / MIS link needs some work - we use an MIS that no-one else has ever heard of, we need to spend some time sorting out getting data from it properly so it can be used to auto-create new users.

We use Serva: PXE Server for Windows (UEFI & BIOS) - Serva We have it deploy the basic Windows image, as provided by downloading from Microsoft, with the addition of a few drivers needed by some particular bits of USB-connected hardware we have around the school. We also periodically update the image with the latest Windows Updates. We then have an unattend.xml deployment file that runs a script that renames each computer based on MAC address, so once a machine is imaged it is named and joined to the domain. From there, we could have software deployed via MSI depending on group policy, although at the moment we are using another script as we have several bits of rather old and crusty software that needs a bit of prodding to install properly.

I didn't try the Surface Studio (£2,500-ish), but I did try out Asus' new Chromebooks (£250-ish) - the new "flip" models, now with additional rear-facing camera for use in tablet mode and with Wacom stylus technology built in. Not quite the same thing, and less screen resolution, but I was still impressed by how easy the stylus was to use compared to others I've used in the past.

Just to add that this is exactly the issue we had a few weeks ago, and after changing the UPN suffix for a few test teachers I've not had any issues reported. My worry was that it would somehow affect mail delivery for our on-site Exchange server, but all seems to be fine. I can run a script (see above) to change existing user's UPN suffixs, but I imagine a newly-created user will still use the default, so I need how to investigate changing that.

I could have sworn I saw a news article a couple of days ago about a snazzy new JPEG compression library, but a Google search now didn't turn it up. It did turn up a number of different JPEG compression libraries, though, with various space-savings claims for each of them. Could be something to look at using in an image compression tool.

Their hardware is, if I understand correctly from talking to the people on the stand, going to be around £2,000 for a box of 8 devices. That's £250 per device, although I understand they won't be selling them as individual units, only in boxes of 8. Not quite sure if that includes all their content, or whether that's a separate cost of some sort.

In what way? There's a mostly-technical discussion here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/educational-software/178147-minecraftedu.html That discussion was mainly to do with how to actually go about getting Minecraft licensed. If you mean "What are your thoughts on the educational value of Minecraft" then I'm not sure yet - I don't run the Minecraft club, and that is just a fun after-school club, we aren't using it as curriculum software at the moment.

Indeed - we would probably have run Asterisk on a VM, but we required some way of interfacing with the existing ISDN lines. Switching over to SIP is one of those things we keep meaning to look at, but it's working okay for the moment so it hasn't seemed important. Having a hardware PBX available does give us the option of adding a mobile SIM as a backup line should the main telephone line go down, too.

We use IQPBX, very similar to FreePBX (i.e. a web-based front end on top of Asterisk), but comes as a neat bundle of hardware that includes connectors for things like ISDN lines so you can hook up your existing phone lines and start using them right away. We then bought a bunch of Yealink phones, plugged them in and away we went. The central PXB appliance cost somewhere under £2,000, the phones (60-odd) cost another £8,000 in all, a couple of days worth of our time to set up the PBX and plug all the phones in, and that was it - the next nearest quote we had for a similar sized system was around £30,000.

Just to update this thread to answer the original question: we now have Minecraft Education Edition working for pupils with our after-school Minecraft club. First we synced our existing users in Active Directory with Office 365 - this process is less complicated than it used to be (the use of ADFS is no longer required), see this thread: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/178481-azure-ad-connect-thoughts.html Then we had to purchase and assign licenses for the pupils and the staff who would be running the club. This doesn't seem to be done from the Office 365 dashboard, you have to go to the separate Windows Store For Business, as Blue_Cookeh pointed out: https://businessstore.microsoft.com/en-us/app-detail/9NBLGGH4R2R6/0016/00000000000000000000000000000000/online I found the process easy enough - I purchased licenses using my school credit card, and assigned individual licenses to the pupils and staff in the club, only about 30 licneses, so easy enough to do by hand. If you don't have a credit card I'm not quite sure how you go about purchasing via invoice or similar, and there didn't seem to be an obvious way to bulk-assign licenses, I had to enter individual users. The licenses you are buying are per user, and Minecraft Education Edition requires you to log in with your account before you can do anything. This works out quite well - you can install the client on as many computers as you like and give out copies / links for home installation, then pupils can log in from home with their school account. We are using Minecraft in our Mac suite, I'm not sure about installation details on Windows 10, but I imagine it's simply a case of running an installer in the usual way. I don't run the Minecraft after-school club, so that's the end of my involement. Speaking to the chap running the club, it seems that he logs in to one of the machine in the ICT suite and starts up a world for the rest of the devices to connect to. We've installed an extra set of Minecraft utilities (available from the Minecraft website I think - sorry, not too sure, I just got handed an installer file to run) on the machine he uses that sets the machine up as the "teacher" machine. There doesn't seem to be a way to do this on a per-user basis instead, it seems to be per-machine. I've set aside a Windows 10 VM for the Minecraft club teacher to use, with the idea that he would run a persistant world on there that the pupils could then connect to, but I'm not sure if he's made any use of that yet. He seems to think the persistant world is stored on whatever machine he happens to be running Minecraft on at the time, but I haven't checked if this is true or not - the world (and, indeed, server that the clients are connecting to) could be away in The Cloud somewhere.

The issue can be with the model of USB extender / baluns for running longer USB connections over Cat5 cable instead of USB (even three metres seems to be a bit too long for some USB 3 ports to cope with) - we've found this one to be reliable: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001TOG6MM

If you mean "is ADFS required for the sync tool to work" then no, the tool works fine without ADFS. If you mean "is ADFS required for passwords to be written back" then I'm not sure - we're only using our Office 365 accounts for Minecraft at the moment, we don't have users using it on a daily basis yet.

I think our recent promotional video cost around the £5,000 sort of area. Interviews, in particular, take expertise to set up and make good footage from, rather than just plonking someone in front of a camera and firing questions at them.

There's still a sleeper train that runs to Penzance, we got it last year (it actually stops at several stations on the way, but you have to get up earlier for those). The actual train fair is the same as usual (book in advance for the best deal), you just pay extra for a berth - around £40, which isn't bad for a night's board. And, bearing in mind you wind up in Penzance at 8am having just gotten out of bed, you save on a night's B&B accommodation in Penzance anyway. Penzance is the end of the train line, but there's a couple of places back up the track that are worth a day trip, including the Eden Project (didn't actually make it to that last year, have to leave it for a return visit). There's also a bus route that does a loop in three stages around to the Minnack Theatre / Land's End. Everyone I've spoken to who's been there as seemed heartily unimpressed with Land's End, by the way - it doesn't seem to impress.

There's still a sleeper train that runs to Penzance, we got it last year (it actually stops at several stations on the way, but you have to get up earlier for those). The actual train fair is the same as usual (book in advance for the best deal), you just pay extra for a berth - around £40, which isn't bad for a night's board. And, bearing in mind you wind up in Penzance at 8am having just gotten out of bed, you save on a night's B&B accommodation in Penzance anyway. Penzance is the end of the train line, but there's a couple of places back up the track that are worth a day trip, including the Eden Project (didn't actually make it to that last year, have to leave it for a return visit). There's also a bus route that does a loop in three stages around to the Minnack Theatre / Land's End. Everyone I've spoken to who's been there as seemed heartily unimpressed with Land's End, by the way - it doesn't seem to impress.

As you say, the process was remarkably painless, and the setup process guides you step-by-step. I did find that adding a UPN suffix itself was easy but didn't result in user accounts being synced, I had to set the userPrincipalName Active Directory attribute for each user first. If it's any help, I used a simple .VBS script: Option Explicit on error resume next Dim objShell Set objShell = CreateObject("Wscript.Shell") Sub listUsers(strOU) Dim oOu, oUser set oOU = GetObject(strOU) For Each oUser in oOU ' An example of how you might want to set the userPrincipalName value - modify to suite your own needs. oUser.Put "userPrincipalName", Split(oUser.Get("userPrincipalName"), "@")(0) & "@YOUREXTERNALDOMAINHERE.com" oUser.SetInfo Next End Sub ' An example only - replace the string below with an actual Active Directory OU. call listUsers("LDAP://OU=Teachers,OU=Staff,OU=Users,DC=YOURINTERNALDOMAINNAMEHERE,DC=local")

Ah! That looks encouraging - we're planning to deploy on Mac OS, so I've got the Mac OS version ready to deploy, I've bought 30 licenses and assigned myself one, let's give it a try...

Specifically, does anyone have any idea who we actually give that $5 to? The Minecraft: Education Edition website itself is rather vague, when you click on "Get Started" you get prompted to put in a school email address, and you can download the client, but we can't find anywhere where we pay Microsoft any money. We've contacted our usual Microsoft license provider, through whom we license Windows and Office and so on, to see about a site license, but they seem unsure as to how we go about getting a site license, too. The place I was expecting to be able to assign licenses is the Office 365 licensing centre, where you can buy licenses to assign specific users, but I can't find any mention of Minecraft there, either.

If you don't think it's anything local (local wireless / network performance), and your external bandwidth seems okay, then the next place to check is with Google themselves. As a corporate / schools customer there is actually a support telephone number to call, so you might be able to get Google advice on what to check. It could be that, seeing a lot of traffic from one IP address, Google are rate-limiting your service, which is something to check with them.

Any rouge ideas on pricing? It does look like quite a full-blown, comprehensive solution, does pricing start at the kind of level a school would find practical?

It was interesting watching the Google webinar last week: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/vbcms-comments/177775-article-google-g-suite-webinar-08-dec-2016-a.html Someone had asked the same question ("How do I sync network-based user file areas with their matching Google Drive?"), and the answer given was that Google make a bunch of APIs available and it's up to third-party providers to fill in the functionality required by specific markets. The same held for a question about allowing users to log in by using a QR code - the API is available, implement a solution on top of Google's infrastructure if it's functionality you need.

We are using Asus Chromebook Flips - at around £250 each (price includes VAT and Google management console license) they were around half the price of an iPad and can be managed via Google's web-based console. They are usable as both tablets and laptops - our children seem to quite like halfway-in-between mode where you use the keyboard as an angled stand for the screen, they'll have them out on the desk for reference even when hand-writing an answer.

We currently have 110 Chromebooks around the school, mostly in batches of 6 in classrooms. We have a picture of a different (cute) animal on each room's laptops, printed on to sticky-backed laser-printable plastic. The label extends on to the spine of the laptop, where you can identify the animal printed there when the laptop is sat charging. There is also a barcode on each label, matched with the ID given by an RFID sticker placed on the spine of each laptop. I found that the RFID stickers only worked on the laptop spine, elsewhere on the laptops (lids, backs) and they didn't work. You can bend the stickers, though, they are quite flexible, although a little bit of superglue is needed to keep them properly in place. I'm currently halfway through writing a script to generate printable label templates from the data recorded in Google's admin console, so we just have to register each device once, then a printable label is automatically generated for us to print.