theeggmaster

The best way I found to address this is for everyone (staff, students, SLT, IT) to use the same spec of computer. That way any problems are really *felt* by people and they will be more motivated to act if things are slow or aren't working correctly. Yes, there will be exceptions, but it's good from an awareness point of view.

My daughter is in secondary school. My son is in primary going into secondary. Daughter has some work set on Teams, some on Spark Maths, some in person, some in her homework book and some she has to remember. No consistency at all. My son has an iPad which stays at school and all homework is set online, which he does from his Chromebook or my laptop. Secondary school my daughter goes to has always been against using IT, but when Covid hit they just couldn't get work to the children. So far behind the times (rant over).

You should see if you can get a few Chromebooks to try it with M365. It works surprisingly well and there is a lot of integration.

Printing is the biggest bugbear I have/had. It's definitely a cultural shift but it's embedded so deeply into education that a school has to take a stance from Governors/SLT. IT can't make that change directly unless they are represented well on SLT or are a member of that team.

I was asked to do a number of audits of other schools and you would be surprised at how many schools are sacrificing money that could be spent on education on unnecessary consulting, MSP support and unused/underused management/backup software. VMWare instead of Hyper-V, for example.

Additionally, we didn't do a straight cutover. We migrated devices as they became beyond economical repair (i.e. over 2 years out of warranty, and as they were 5 year warranties, that meant devices older than 7 years).

Correct. This wasn't an overnight thing. It took about 2 years in total, including careful budget management, planning, migration, working with the LA and Capita and stakeholder engagement.

I did this for the vast majority of devices about 10 years ago. I had to keep Windows machines for some legacy software (SIMS FMS) and some CAD stuff, but I added web-based frontends for SIMS and we did a whole school migration to Google Apps. We had embedded this in the school and then COVID hit, which meant all of our staff and students were already in the cloud. We just handed out Chromebooks to students who didn't have devices from home. In horrible circumstances, it turned out to be the best decision to continue education.

<deleted>

I was being a bit tongue in cheek, but they certainly didn't split server roles across multiple machines as per best practices. I've used CC4 across multiple schools (albeit inherited) and they were all like this. Could be the default installation.

Have they stopped putting DC, file, print and exchange on the same server?

Community-updated list of Microsoft Portals https://msportals.io/?search=

If your new Headteacher wanted to make the move from your current situation; be it on-premises, G Suite or O365, and wanted to move to something you are currently not doing, what would your response be?

Just had an email from my daughter's Primary school, asking for £17 per month to get an iPad Mini 5, plus insurance, warranty, app bundle and case. Alternatively, I can opt out and they'll give her one that she can only use in school. I'm opting out as we have devices at home.

If you notice in Philip Schiller's comments, he's talking about taking tests on a Chromebook, which is what the majority of US users do, which they can't do on an iPad. He's conveniently not looking at everything else a Chromebook can do (including Android apps). It's just a marketing ploy to sell the shiny things.

Agreed with @AButters. Use Hyper-V or Failover Cluster Manager to move the VMs.

EduLink One?

Every time I see one of those signs, I always internally say "you're a rubbish button".

When life gives you demons, make demonoid (sic).

What version of MacOS are they on? We had real issues with El Capitan when trying to access network shares, but newer versions worked fine.

I think Google Voice is US only. You can make calls outside of the US using Hangouts. - https://support.google.com/voice/answer/115061 You should probably be looking at a SIP-based system, which we'll be switching to once ISDN is phased out.

I've never found anything more effective and useful than a normal pen and pad of paper.

I believe that the principles of GDPR will be copied into the DPA 2018 to make them functionally similar, but we won't actually be following GDPR if we're not part of the EU.

You could probably build one out of a Raspberry Pi. Ours does temperature monitoring, has a PIR sensor and takes photographs on anyone entering our server room and emails it out.

Librarika is free for up to 2,000 items and is cloud-based.