Roberto

Even if Childline was her only accomplishment, she's still made a massive contribution to improving this country.

This is obviously knocking on a bit since I was in education, but we implemented Eduroam with all the implications around RADIUS + Cert Auth for device and user identification. This allowed us to provide appropriate filtering on our connection as our WiFi and Firewall/Filtering system shared the same RADIUS identity. Users only had use of the wifi to get access to whatever services we offered externally (which even then, were considerable due to stuff being in the cloud). This made visits by 6th formers to unis, and visits to us by uni people quite painless to support which was a nice bonus. Now we were a 6th form college which made it easier to do this of course, but it should be possible to set up Eduroam wifi, and only make it available to staff/6th formers. Now I've said all that, the points about KCSIE and mobile devices fetching sites however they can are very well made. I might be tempted to steer well clear of anything that might create ambiguity about whether your school allowed browsing of anything questionable, these days. The easiest way to win an argument remains avoiding having it in the first place.

My (non edu, global) employer has been using this to support thousands of people printing across literally hundreds of offices and we've had little to no hassle. I'm not sure I entirely _like_ it, but it gets the job done and done well. Printix is well worth a look. And I used to love papercut, so this is something of a comparison call on my part, not an isolated judgement.

God, Elon gets everywhere doesn't he.

I think with things like Security Copilot they're already well on the way. I'm in two minds about this - firstly the job does evolve; virtualisation and "the cloud" vastly changed the need for firms to have local data centres and consequently reduced the number of low level technicians checking the dipsticks on servers in racks, doing basic maintenance, etc. This is (arguably!) a good thing, but without low level technicians learning the job and gaining experience, we might find we're very short of senior level technicians when all the current crop retire. This is true of AI replacing lower level coders on projects and the knock-on effect on experienced developer resources in 10 years time. Or replacing basic editors in journalism and publishing and the knock-on effect... and so-on. But the AI assistants are sometimes useful for things you're capable of doing yourself (so therefore can verify/troubleshoot when the AI goes off track) but can't be bothered to do for yourself. Vastly different scale I appreciate but I've connected Claude AI to my Home Assistant install and used it to do things like pull the relevant part of logs out for me to debug far quicker than it would have taken me to pull the relevant log sections together myself, and to put together "nice" dashboards far quicker than I could have done myself.

I think it has to be driven by the teachers and maybe to a lesser degree the students. Forcing the use of something where it doesn't fit the task is allowing the tail to wag the dog, so to speak. And I think the point about teachers working hours is well made - they're spending all their time teaching and there's no space in the timetable to allow, for want of a better word, "teaching Research and Development" in the average school. Even when people are not timetabled in front of a class, there's probably not a quiet, out-of-the way classroom setup with the fancy new whatever-it-is just going spare and unused to let people experiment with new ideas, or even gain more confidence with established ideas they've not had much time to incorporate into their lessons yet.

This is what I was digging into with my earlier comments about needing to be driven at a very high level and to concern more than just the end-user devices themselves. Identifying a list of suitable devices is, relatively speaking, the easiest part of the equation. You'd need to rethink how educational software is developed and delivered, how student devices are managed, how devices for people on low incomes could be funded, etc. This could very much be done but cannot be properly solved by one school, or even one MAT now matter how large, acting alone.

Devices with biometric readers? Like TouchID or FaceID on Apple devices, you mean?

Yep. This could absolutely be a solved problem if considered at a national level. It would mean a rethink of more than just the end user devices themselves of course, but its entirely doable if the education ministers were able to think strategically and more longer terms than how close we are to the next election (I know we're supposed to steer clear of politics and I'm not picking on any one party but it occurs to me that my statement about longer term planning at that level could apply to way more than just education...). Oh joined up thinking about housing, infrastructure, transport, education, defence... a pipedream I know.

I think there used to be a spate of people doing this on the assumption that no one could "see" the directory they were connected to, a mistaken belief that the account details in fields like that were 'secure'.

That's correct!

What Steve said. Everyone thinks they want a privacy screen for their monitor as it sounds painless, then they get annoyed as they have to rearrange their desk and workflow to ensure they're always looking at the screen at the proper angle for it. Or it's "too dark".

If your child went to a "normal state school" alongside the children of the royal family, I could well argue that this would make your child less safe - collateral damage in an attempt to attack the royal family children and all that. So it turns out that the royal family are doing you a personal solid by sending their children to a private school. Who'd have thought it eh?

I think to wrap it up in any other way would have been disrespectful to the ineffable plan - would have been nice to see more in the wrap-up but I think we can all understand why it couldn't work. There was - besides the obvious David Tenant link, I mean - quite a big feeling of it being like a Dr Who episode I thought, both my partner and I commented on this when we watched it together - and she's not the Dr Who nerd I am so she felt it without clocking who the gangster's father was and which actors had been in what Dr Who episodes

I suspect you're right about the USB-C docks. We have some old warriors in our estate there and they've almost certainly been connected to all kinds of nonsense over the years. We've now tidied up the desk space for both office and WFH and now when those docks die we replace them and the current multi-monitor deployment with a Dell monitor (U3425WE) with a built in USB-C hub. Probably not viable for classrooms but we've had real success with it in an office environment. Not sure where our replacement cables come from. I take care of my equipment, so very rarely need replacements of anything.