Aethon

The Red Kite Learning Trust has a number of vacancies for enthusiastic and hardworking IT Services Technicians at Temple Moor High School, Temple Learning Academy and Harrogate schools. Supporting a Senior Network Technician, you will be responsible for ensuring the effective working and development of the technical services including network, hardware and software in RKLT schools. Please note that these vacancies may involve working on multiple sites, providing support to both Primary and Secondary schools. See here for more details. Completed applications should be submitted by 12 noon on Wednesday 25 March 2020. Interviews will take place week beginning 30 March 2020 (provisionally).

Required as soon as possible an enthusiastic and hardworking Network Technician responsible for ensuring the effective working and development of the school’s technical services including network, hardware and software – supporting our Network Manager. You will have specific responsibilities for some key areas of the network including server management and security. You will be familiar with Windows, iOS or OSX operating systems, ideally across large and complex networks. You will be involved with the management and maintenance of systems including SQL Server, Office 365, Exchange, SCCM, and vSphere. We offer you excellent facilities and resources, a friendly and supportive working environment and the opportunity to contribute to our schools and the wider community. Vacancies | Temple Moor High School

It means you could enrol staff and student devices using your AD credentials. You could also assign them to locations (folders) based on their AD groups so that, for example, your staff will have access to different apps than your students or some people get more stringent password requirements than others. These credentials could also be used to automatically connect the user to their email or the wireless, if you are using a RADIUS server for authentication.

Been using it for around 6 months now and it's much more stable than the previous solution we used. The reporting functionality is particularly nice as is the ability to redeploy individual apps and profiles to single users. The account management and support teams are also pretty switched on and the account managers are very proactive with chasing up any problems or questions that you may have.

As has been kindly mentioned by @Achandler, we are using iPads and while we are outside Notts\Derbyshire we do have another conference coming up on the 26th of June (more info here: Harrogate Grammar School | iPads for Learning | 1:1 iPads for Learning Conference).

This is the best number to use: 0800 912 0207. It's the education team and they should be able to help you with any VPP queries, can't guarantee it isn't a stupid phone system though.

Oh well, if you want someone to tell you that... I think it rather depends on your definition of great but they have changed quite a few things for the better within the school - the students can access email, the Internet and various electronic resources pretty much on demand. With them having access to video recorders and cameras it's enabled them to be a lot more creative in the way they complete assignments and in the types of work teachers can ask them to do. (As the students can take them home, they all have access to the same resources and there isn't any concern about asking them to complete homework using equipment they may not be able to access.) So does this mean that you can buy a few iPads and suddenly your school is transformed? Not in the slightist. iPads are tools and nothing more; if people don't use them they won't accomplish much on their own. In order for something like this, particularly in a 1:1 setting, to really change things then it requires a whole school commitment to work. This means lots of planning and preparation getting the infrastructre in place, work on th eTeaching and Learning aspects and ensuring that the Governors and SLT are behind this and that Parents and Staff (both teaching and support) understand why it is being done and support the efforts to bring about this change. Now while all this may not apply quite so much in your situation with only 1 class having iPads - and in some ways you could substitue iPads for any other device like netbooks, Surface etc - it doesn't mean that this sort of Technology can't be used effectively within classroom and have some real benefits.

I'd think long and hard before having a class set of iPads as they are really designed for 1:1 rather than class use. That said, it is possible to set them up and to manage them without needing to have a lot of other equipment, or spending a huge amount of money. Before you do this though, I'd look at getting one for the teacher first just so they can see what the limitations are and what sort of apps they want to use and I'd also make sure you get one for yourself so you can look how to configure and manage them.

Look at Apple Configurator\iPhone configuration utility or a mobile device management solution. Meraki is free and does the basics but isn't terribly scalable. If you are going to have a lot of iPads, I'd see what something like Airwatch can do for you.

If you have SharePoint, Office 365 or even a hotmail\live account, upload the file to there and you can open it in the web browser.

I'd just attach an old keyboard and mouse (USB) to the Mac mini and use any old monitor - the Mac mini will need an HDMI connection but we use an HDMI to VGA converter and attach it to an old monitor.

The Mac mini does plug into the charger (depending on the charger, of course) and either using a remote or a KVM would work. Personally, I'd go with the server os as it isn't a huge amount more expensive and will let you get familiar with that side of things - always useful particularly if you may be doing more with macs down the line.

Meraki is alright for smaller groups of iPads, AirWatch is great but does cost money. Unless you are looking at stopping Students from installing anything, they'll always be able to install games though you can block their access to things like Games Center. If they are using the iPads at home and at school this is where you could start having a few problems. (One thing you could do with AirWatch is to block access to certain apps during specific times or setup a compliance policy to send a message to the student if they have something installed\configured that they shouldn't. Ultimately though, this sort of thing is all about student responsibility and classroom management.)

I'd find out how these are going to be used, if they are a class-set then something like a Mac mini is pretty essential. You can use this for pushing out apps and managing the iPads and it'll be far easier going forward than using Meraki - getting something like a Leba NoteSync multi-charger is vital though as you can use this to configure up to 15 iPads at once. If these are going to be given out to people, in a 1:1 arrangement, then I'd look at what you want to be able to configure with them. You can create profiles using a Mac mini or even using the iPhone configuration utility (free download and works on windows) or by using something like Meraki. To be honest, you'll probably want to have Meraki and a Mac mini once you start getting more of these things but I'd start having a play with Meraki and the iPhone utility as it will give you a feel for what can be done and they are both free tools.

(Shameless plug) Oh and if you are thinking about a mass deployment, this may be of interest... http://www.edugeek.net/forums/netbooks-pda-phones/106700-ipads-learning-1-1-device-conference.html

Judging from the way things are going here, I'd have thought you may need to look at getting something like a 150Mb - 200Mb connection. As @john mentioned, we're completely flatlining our 100mb connection and looking to move to 1Gb, which is probably a little excessive at the moment but should keep us going for the foreseeable future or at least the next twelve to eighteen months. As a very rough rule of thumb, I'd consider having around 40\50Mb for every 200 iPads. Of course, the actually traffic they'll generate does heavily depend on what people are doing with them. If you have classes surfing webistes and just being used "normally" then you will be able to get by with a lot less but as soon as you try pushing out apps though and that's when your connection will really start to suffer. We use a MS TMG for our firewall\filtering and it is set to allow all traffic from the iPads straight through without authentication but after checking for banned websites, etc. The TMG works really nicely for us so you shouldn't be forced to change it. If you want more information about how we have it setup, just let me know. Besides the wireless infrastructure* I'd have a think about your switches and connections out to your network cabs as you'll need to ensure they can cope with the traffic that's potentially being generated. (*We use Aerohive and it's got some really nice features that help enormously with iPads, particularly if you are looking at a decent number of devices.)

Is the printer on a different VLAN to the iPads? Bonjour doesn't work across subnets* so this could be where you are having problems. (*Unless you have another bit of kit like the Aerohive Bonjour Gateway)

This should all be resolved now so if you were having problems, I'd try again. Oh and the purchasing of apps does work with IE9 although there are some apple websites\pages that seem to only want to work properly with Safari.

Hi all, As some of you may know, I work at a school with 1800 students and 200 staff and, since September 2012, we've been rolling out a 1:1 device scheme to all of our students. We've currently got 1200 iPads used in school on a daily basis and will be adding around another 300 in the next couple of weeks - this will then encompass all of the Staff and the students in Years 7 to 11, with our Sixth Form joining up in September 2013. On the 13th of February, we'll be hosting a conference in which we'll talk through the 18 months planning and preparation that went before the lauch; looking at things from the planning and design stages to parental engagement and the distribution of the devices. As well as the implementation, we'll also be talking about the Teaching and Learning, Finance and Networking aspects of the solution, discussing things to consider as well as talking about what did and didn't work for us. Whilst this will be focused on iPads - we are using them after all - there will be a lot of things discussed that could apply to other devices as well. Full details about the day, including how to sign up, can be found here: http://www.harrogategrammar.co.uk/library/client/documents/iPads/ipad%20Conference.pdf. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Wish someone had told Capita support about this, I was advised to uninstall the agent instead. (I guess if SOLUS3 can't update the computer then the agent will have to be uninstalled at some point but when you have a couple of hundred computers that need SIMS on urgently, a manual uninstall is not the best thing to do!) If I recall correctly, just because it says it's in progress, doesn't mean it is. If the deployment service falls over then this can result in the upgrade displaying In Progress when it's stopped working and it'll never change. (I've a couple of upgrades in this state.) Just try to redeploy the update, or push it out again, to the workstations that haven't received it yet.

We've spent the last few days in the process of uninstalling SOLUS3 agents in order to get the Autumn release pushed out. Apparently there is a problem with the latest SOLUS3 release in that some machines do not automatically update if they are offline and then get turned on at a later date. If the SOLUS2 update method still worked then this wouldn't be too bad but, if the SOLUS3 agent is installed on a pc, it stops the SOLUS2 method of updating. Removing the SOLUS3 agent is the best way get things back up and running again quickly - if only the agent didn't have to be manually uninstalled from each workstation in order to do this. (There is a remove agent button in SOLUS3 but apparently this was broken with the last update as well - yay for testing.)

We had a similar thing hit us about 12 months ago. One thing to check is that all voice mailboxes have a password set on them, mailboxes are a common way in and this will help stop a lot of attempts. Some anti-phreaking software was purchased as well but this is a real pita and, when it's accessed, it breaks the phone system. (While I don't look after the phone system, I do have to look after the servers so about every month I end up spending a day on the phone trying to talk to the software devs and get their software to work properly - fun times.)

Looking at it, I think it could be due to the layout of the TMG and Proxy. If you are using a single nic TMG (and I'd really advise you get another nic put in there) then the traffic is coming in and out of the same interface. As you said the HTTP and HTTPS traffic is fine, I'd check to see if all traffic is being directed from the proxy to the TMG, otherwise this may well be going on: Handshake request from iPad hits the TMG and is passed on to the other proxy. This proxy sends the request on to the App store The request comes back and hits the proxy, which then passes it directly onto the iPad as opposed to the TMG The iPad is expecting the handshake to come back from the TMG and so ignores the one from the proxy. The TMG sits around for a bit, doesn't get the handshake reply and then closes the connection - giving you the SYN/ACK message

Thanks for all the suggestions, I'll be contacting people over the next week and will feedback in due course.

It's both really but more focussed on the switching. Part of the improvements we're looking to make would be replacing the old fibre.