ITBadger

I have to agree with @Queensbury. We have been using Senso for a few years now after becoming frustrated with the quality of product updates and support provided by Impero. Working with Senso to fix issues is a genuine pleasure as opposed to the hit and miss affair that Impero support turned into towards the end of our use of the product. Senso is developing all the time and some of the new developments are really exciting (see from around 16 minutes in for details). The fact that it is truly cloud based has allowed me to provide support and safeguarding information even when at conferences in the past which has led to really positive comments from local safeguarding organisations. From an IT techie perspective it allows us to mange our network easily and quickly from any device, and the integration with Chromebooks (and Google Drive shortly) is of real benefit to us. The safeguarding element is covered if you have a specific interest in safeguarding but there is so much more to the product.

For those of you still following this thread and considering making the move to Senso, or for those already using it, you may be interested to know that they are hosting a live Q&A with Owen and Lisa from the team via YouTube on Wednesday the 28th August 2019. You can access the stream by visiting They have made a few key additions recently and the product is getting better and better.

Thanks @elsiegee40 and in particular @Zoom7000 for your kind words. I was absolutely flabbergasted to hear that I had won, especially after meeting Abid who is a genuinely kind, gentle and dedicated person as well as an amazing IT Director. My role as Abid's campaign manager for the 2020 award has already started! Dave.

Yes, we are all getting rather excited about the opportunity; particularly the chance to tease some of our American colleagues about their use of 'fanny packs'.

Have a look at Senso if you are looking for alternatives. It's cloud based, modular, and often cheaper than the alternatives. It was getting a lot of attention at Bett this year and works really well for us. If there is an aspect missing that you'd like then speak to the devs as they are constantly improving it.

Having said that, I'm getting nowhere with Trump's Hat and the generic suitcase one... Sack that, I've got them all. IT'S CHRIIIIISTAMAS!

The image was really helpful. Up to 97 now and the two that i haven't got are parts of the image that I hadn't been looking at. Thanks for your help, I may emerge with a shred of sanity once this is over!

Finally got the tinkerbell one! It's like being on Catchphrase in our office this afternoon. "Is there a song called 'GoPro Mount'?"

See I'd all but given up on a nice round 90, but now i'm on 91 i'm gonna have to see it through! Got the days one, will work on the mythical creature synonyms, still nowhere near Tinkerbell. Others I'm struggling with are Pinhead in the car, the spiny headed goblin thing, the empty go-pro mount on the soldier's helmet, no1 dad badge, and probably some more clock / fan / paper plane references.

Not Sully, the Harry and the Hendersons guy in the trees.

Well done @Seb1780, stuck on 90/99 myself and have exhausted my musical knowledge of yeti's / fairies / days of the week etc. Enjoyed the quiz though, as have half of our Admin staff so thanks @Andrew_C from us all for ensuring that the last couple of days before Christmas have seen a dramatic drop in productivity!

Senso allows you to exclude sites from logs if they are known to be safe. This can significantly reduce the amount of 'rubbish' that you need to sift through to find what you are looking for. I'd recommend getting in touch with them and asking for a trial. It's very simple to install and can run alongside Impero.

They can get the audio feedback in G-Suite by using the Kaizena add-on which is free.

We used to have an Urdu teacher whose IT skills were about as good as my Urdu skills. The only font that she would allow was called Cobra Nastaliq (or Cobra Nastaleeq, as I said, my Urdu is a little rusty). It was something to do with the spacing in between the characters. Many a confusing hour was spent debating that one. Thankfully she was busted down to TA which whilst it meant a pay cut for her made my life marginally easier.

Do their staff codes for this year in Manage Classroom Staff match the codes that they have been assigned in Nova-T? When you send the timetable from Nova-T to SIMS it should advise you if there isn't a corresponding teacher code in SIMS. These should have been checked in the housekeeping and end of year procedures last academic year, but this can easily be missed. - - - Updated - - - In terms of their roles, then at the least I would assign them 'Class Teacher' permissions in System Manager.

We use Google Slides running on Raspberry Pi for our signage, triggered by a script on the Pi. There's no reason why you couldn't write a script to kick off a youtube playlist ay 17:00 in place of the Google Slides file. May need some testing but in theory that would be a cheap solution.

We had a delivery of Cat5 cables from them in August. Looks like we got in just in time. Real shame as they were always helpful and mega cheap. CPC can be cheap, but their website is awful to use.

Hi all, I've just been asked how we go about distributing voting papers for a parent governor election. We need to send one paper to each parent. Simple eh? However, how do we take into account that some individuals have multiple children at school? Is there a report in SIMS that would allow us to suppress duplicate individuals and create a mailing list (or even better labels file) so that we send one voting slip to each parent? Surely other schools have had to do this? Dave.

So the news is that they have the MacOS client on their roadmap, but also a million other things too (some of which are likely to be very useful). Their aim is to have the MacOS client ready to show off at BETT in just 7 months time (scary how soon that will come around). Hope that helps @Arthur and others like us who may be looking forward to using it with Macs.

Voted, and congratulations to your bro'.

Hi @Arthur, I've not heard any dates regarding MacOS yet, although it is something that we would be keen to see too. We have noticed that with the Chrome extension pushed out to Macs we can view what they are doing in Chrome, which is a start but by no means the finished article. I'll make some enquiries and get back to you with any news. Dave.

Thought I'd update here with some of the additional functionality that Senso has seen over the last 12 months. The screen broadcast module is now up and running, and (with one or two minor issues) works well. Power management has been added and we can wake on lan to our heart's content. They came up with a cunning way to avoid having a server agent in the end so once again I was proven wrong as to how it would work! Chromebook management is in place and has a fair few features, with more to come I believe as Google have been sniffing around asking how Senso have managed to get things working so well. One of the biggest and most important additions though has been the implication of a logging (safeguarding) module which works a treat and provides reliable evidence of student (and occasionally staff) misdemeanours. If you've trialed Senso in the past and been keen to see any of these features it may be time to give it another go.

We publish a Google Slides doc to a url and then serve this to a Raspberry Pi, which runs wirelessly. Simple, as with ShowPoint, and familiar to the staff that need to edit the presentation, plus updates automatically when the source file is edited. We just set the Pi to run the url of the published file in startup so even if power dies to the local screen / pi, it auto-heals when power is restored.

Or you could use a different domain name for Google. We ran two email addresses for over a year before making the jump.

It produced a certificate when I did the training and I can see which staff have / haven't completed the training. We haven't subscribed to it yet but I am considering it. I liked the ability to amend the training materials before delivery so that I could make the course feel more school specific by including logo's references to meaningful examples etc.