enjay

Wow, so it really is a "Windows Chromebook" in that case. Still, it would be okay for most locations (although the lack of NetSupport or ReadWriteGold would be frustrating).

And the students sign in with their Office365 credentials, and you just hope they remember to sign out again at the end of the lesson (which in fairness is a problem for "proper" laptops too), right?

Ah okay. We're currently looking at CC, and if we adopt it, it would be the main place staff were working - timetabling, admissions, etc. would still be in SIMS but most teachers would never open SIMS and would just interact with CC. The tie-in isn't a concern to us, as very rarely do we need to look at per-lesson attendance from previous academic years (and we could export it all from CC before leaving anyway)

I thought Kiosk was about locking a computer down to only run a specific application. The laptop would still have to do all the GPO-processing at startup and login. Or have I got this wrong?

I think they might be. Can I run "proper" apps on them, or is it Store-only ones?

Okay, bear with me here... We potentially need to replace a load of our curriculum laptops, but now 99% of what we do is cloud-based, it seems a shame to wait while a Windows PC does all the necessary domain authentication, applying GPOs, etc., and of course to buy higher spec laptops in order to support that in a timely manner. So... can I have a Windows laptop (due to some locally-installed software) which does the basic user credentials check against AAD/365 instead and then allows a user to log in "instantly"? Alternatively, do I just get Chromebooks for those locations which don't require local applications and have students log in to those then go to Office365, and put Windows laptops in the locations where local applications are needed (and they can therefore tolerate the slower start-up times)?

Or you could ask staff to do all registers through CC, and stop using that bit of SIMS...

Agreed. We're on the verge of signing with CC, and this might actually be a deal-breaker for us.

We're about to start using CC. Can we use it to record attendance but not write it back to SIMS?

Maybe I'm missing something, but since attendance is visible in CC, why not just set it to write-back to SIMS once at 10pm, or at 9am and 2pm if you want them in SIMS a bit sooner? I'm not seeing why CC needs to write back all the time...

That's what we did at my previous school. We also printed out hard copy any time a parent was coming in, e.g. parents evenings, and said "can you just check these please", that way the details never left the school site so we didn't to worry about secure access, chasing returns, etc.

It's almost like they save up these activities for the locations which are off CCTV... Most of the toilets here are individual rooms directly off a corridor, and there's CCTV on that corridor anyway meaning we would likely identify vandals. Bullying etc. also less of a problem since there isn't a communal area (although of course some female students go in groups anyway!)

The Dells are probably more durable, but they do look like budget laptops in a way the HPs don't. They are at least a household name, unlike Dynabook and Geobook.

I got a different email:

Be slightly vague in your explicit consent, though! Use terms like "social media" rather than "Facebook", in case you also set up a Twitter account at some point and want to re-use images previously shared elsewhere. You also don't want to try and manage the parent who consents to the photo being on Twitter but not Instagram.

Interesting read. Our SIMS performance dropped dramatically after the Summer release. When we installed Autumn, we also went through a knowledge base article from our LEA about various performance improvements and things have been much better since (obviously don't know whether it was Autumn release, the tweaks or both). We have got a demo with ClassCharts next week though, so I will ask about performance impact of attendance write-back. Those of you with issues, are you writing all lesson attendance back to SIMS or just AM/PM?

How's the server doing for memory? As I mentioned earlier on in this thread, our Azure AD Connector has been doing similar, which turned out to be because it was eating all the resource with the SQL queries. We've added more RAM and turned dynamic RAM off.

"Probably"?!

That could lead to some really odd-looking cars, as manufacturers start making cars with tiny wheels to reduce the tax!

Yeah, as I posted that last comment, I realised it didn't really cover electric vehicles. Check odometer at each MOT and charge accordingly? Different prices for MOTs depending on mileage travelled? Both of these lead to a black market industry in winding odometers backwards of course! ANPR on major roads? We're already issuing speeding tickets based on these cameras (and fines for using mobiles, but that's another matter - https://www.newscientist.com/article/2300329-australias-ai-cameras-catch-over-270000-drivers-using-their-phones), so why not mileage costs? This might just mean more people start hiding their number plates, of course. That happens a lot where I live for exactly that reason - the council drive round with a roof-mounted camera on the car, reading number plates and fining cars in loading bays, overstaying parking limits or parking on the pavement by double red lines, so you see illegally parked cars with bin bags taped the number plates. We're wondering off topic here though.

Per-mile tax is an interesting idea, but would be difficult to calculate directly. Maybe ring-fence some of the duty/tax on fuel and give that to local councils specifically for road maintenance? If you go down that road (), maybe also send some funding specifically to the NHS and clean air initiatives too. Also, damage due to weight varies depending on road type and vehicle speed. The main road near me was resurfaced a few years ago and you now get troughs in the bus stops where the wheels sit. The rest of the road is fine, as are bus stops on sections which weren't resurfaced with that particular material.

That's normal. The press will twist it for a sensational click-bait headline, pro-cycling groups will take it another way, petrol-heads will hear what they want ("two abreast? That's ridiculous, they don't even pay road tax" etc.).

Teams has noise suppression built in, check what settings she has. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/reduce-background-noise-in-teams-meetings-1a9c6819-137d-4b3b-a1c8-4ab20b234c0d

Check what they'll actually pay out on, the requirements are often <3 years old and in full working order, and if it was in that condition I wouldn't be getting rid of it.

I'm not about to cross a road without looking or checking the driver is stopping just because of the new guidance, as that will hurt. These changes (most of which are guidance not law anyway) should hopefully serve to remind people about their responsibilities not to injure the more vulnerable road user. I think they also help remind motorists about what cyclists are allowed to do, e.g. ride two abreast, filter past traffic on either side, and ride in the middle of the lane when a safe pass isn't possible (as an example, I often cycle along quite a narrow bridge - when doing so, I pull out into the middle of my lane to ensure drivers wait for a gap in oncoming traffic before passing me, rather than squeezing past me on the same side of the road).