enjay

Signing up now.... :-)

We have a couple of iPads, basically set up as standalone iPads using an Apple ID linked to our departmental address. One of the students has realised they can reset this password by going to Apple's website, saying they've forgotten the password and then responding to the code which is sent to one of the iPads. They then downloaded some games from the App Store. Credit to their ingenuity, but is there a way I can stop them doing this? We don't currently have Apple School Manager, but may well be getting it anyway. Would that solve this problem?

The night mode on my Pixel definitely shows things my eyes couldn't see. It does take a second or so to take the picture, but I don't know if it is doing long exposure or stacking shots.

I've heard that too, but I also remember people taking photos of the lights previously and remarking the photos weren't as good as the actual sight, so something has apparently shifted in phone technology since then.

Is there a way to wrap the text of each announcement, so people can read everything from a single page, rather than clicking in? If not, we'll need to give some guidance on effective use of titles and opening words.

Yes, thank you!

There will certainly be a settling in period where people don't check it, but I'm optimistic they'll get used to it. If people complain, I'll just tell them shift happens :-)

That looks promising. Can you post a screen shot of what it looks like when adding a notice please?

That's certainly true if the page is buried away or can only be found on a search, but I'm assuming there's a readily-accessible link to add notices (otherwise people also won't bother) so just follow that same link to read it. If your staff can't even be bothered to do that, I doubt they're bothering to open the email either!

I recently changed our outbound email encryption to the new Purview rather than the legacy Outlook Message Encryption. Since doing that, our local authority and CAMHS cannot read our encrypted messages - PDFs are okay, but Word documents don't open apparently. We've raised this with our LA, but they say it is our problem since the document is within our M365 environment so we need to share it differently; I've explained it isn't in our environment but attached to their email, and they've gone quiet. Other than reverting to the legacy encryption or sharing everything from OneDrive rather than attaching, is there anything we can do to make our emails readable, or anything specific we can tell LA and NHS to do at their end to make them readable?

That's on option. It would need to be internal-only due to the nature of some notices though. I know SharePoint has a blog option, is it any good?

Yeah, I was having problems adding the image. My toolbar has decided to hide itself!

Yammer / Engage was suggested for other purposes too, so it could sit within that perhaps.

If all staff can access it, why bother emailing it round?

I think wiki is closer as all staff will be able to add things to it, but I need it to be painfully simple to use, basically as easy as sending an email otherwise people will just continue to send emails - unless we also lock down who can use the All Staff and All Teachers lists, do many schools do that?

To try and reduce the volume of emails flying around, we'd like to implement a bulletin board or daily notices document. I'm thinking an email address / form which people use to submit a message then a web page / Word365 document which collates them all for viewing in a single place. Has anyone done anything similar, and if so, how?

The rest of the site looks okay I think. I've excluded awscdn.cdngeek.com too, but the toolbar still isn't coming up. I can see it from our visitor WiFi which doesn't do SSL inspection, so I'm pretty confident it is a case of finding the right domain to allow.

When I write a post, I no longer have the toolbar above the box, with the bold/italics/emojis/image. It is there when I look from my phone, so it is presumably a filtering thing. Anyone know what I need to unblock? I've already excluded the site from SSL inspection but that hasn't helped.

Since we're sharing waterfall photos, here's one I took at Lodore Falls in the Lake District

Thanks. That's quite pricey isn't it, compared to some of the other options. Renting is expensive too - good as a one-off, but not if we want 10 of them twice a year.

That is an option we've considered, and may well go with. Giving them a little device and collecting it back at the end is easier though, and saves the parental concerns about whether the tracking is definitely disabled afterwards. Using their phones would remove the risk of them losing the GPS device though! How battery hungry is location sharing?

Agreed, but it is even better to have a way of doing both. Also, knowing their phone number wouldn't help us locate them in the same way a GPS tracker would.

@Chris_Cook and @pete - do you know what the monthly subscription costs? It doesn't say on their websites.

Yes. For safeguarding reasons, we'd rather not collect student's personal phone numbers. Also, we want to be able to locate them, not call them.

We did wonder about cheap Android phones with location tracking enabled, and just lock the phone so students can't use it for anything else.