edmokeski

Have to second the utility of GAM. Not something you want to put into teachers' hands, but as Google Admin it is such an amazing tool. This would be pretty easy to achieve if you have the ID of the class, as Tom said, by just feeding a CSV of student e-mails in and GAM will sign them up to the class whether they like it or not. I use it for exceptional, ad hoc changes that don't mesh w/ our sync, or for tweaking courses that sit entirely outside of the sync. New Visions Cloud Lab used to have a tool that would sync groups from a spreadsheet, too, but I think it's long deprecated, now.

If ALL blank, check your dataset isn't empty (e.g. problem w/ query). If add't'l blanks, check sizing - some object (tablix, rectangle, etc.) is probably straying off A4 dimensions. Also check out the iSAMS iCommunity. You'll find more people who do iSAMS SSRS more often over there.

Yes, we have this set up, and the user is presented first w/ a Google login where they put in their e-mail address. That then locates their account, twigs that it authenticates via Entra, and shunts you over to a MS login process (in a kind of popup) where you annoyingly often have to put in your e-mail address a second time. Mildly irritating but very much not the end of the world and worth it to maintian a single set of credentials. Means you can also rely on your Entra MFA and not worry so much about Google's implementation. And I definitely second Will here on the management licenses being a worthwhile purchase.

Am sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I think you have a little bit of apples vs oranges going on. The management licenses (Google Chrome Education Upgrade, I think is the one) for Chromebooks are a one-off but fairly unavoidable fee to bring them into your Workspace tenancy and manage them there. The tiered fundamentals vs. standard vs plus, vs teaching & learning upgrade is to do w/ user licenses. The answer there is a definite "yes," you can manage your Chromebooks perfectly fine w/in a Workspace tenancy that is entirely Fundamentals (including setting up to do your authentication via Entra, if that's what you're asking there). So the bad news is, I think you're going to have to spend a bit of money, but the good news is it's a lifetime/perpetual license and not an annual sub. I think they run in the neighbourhood of 30USD or 30GBP per device - can't quite remember which. Not impossible your Chromebooks came w/ the license depending on supplier arrangements etc. etc.? May be worth going back to check over all paperwork from when they were purchased just in case you get lucky on that score.

Have you worked out where it all is? I haven't had the issue in 6-12 months, so think maybe it's been fixed in a recent update, but in the past had issues with Spotlight going nuts and filling the disk. There'd be a huge amount of data in ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight which I had to clear out. It's something to do with Spotlight indexing being buggy. In the disk usage monitor in System Preferences, this would show up as "System Data" using tons and tons of space. I think, if you Google around for it, you can find some instructions on forcing the Mac to rebuild its Spotlight index that might fix it, or you can do as I did for a bit and just bin the stuff in that folder every six months. Doesn't look like it is happening again, so hopefully the issue is fixed as of or before Sequoia 15.7.2.

Ditto. Have had troubles with Uh oh errors since at least the start of term, more often erroring than not for some users (myself included), although others seem to have more luck.

OnShape was free, and the guys there seemed generally keen to be supportive of our pilot. I think in the end, though, it was just too big and 'pro' for what our DT were looking for, so it never really caught on.

Hi all, Thanks so much for telling me about your 1:1 programs. Given the cheap-as-chips price through LGFL, I was a bit worried about the 300e, but glad to hear that those who have had them haven't had too much trouble. I'm in a 1:1 school myself, but it is more or less the opposite of the school in question -- we're independent, they're voluntary aided; we're secondary, they're primary; we've gone iPad, they've opted for Chromebooks -- the biggest common denominator we have is G Suite (and, you know, that whole teaching and learning business). If any of you would be happy to speak to the school's Assistant Head directly about your experiences, or introduce him to someone else at your school who could, it would be great if you could DM me your contact details and I can put him in touch with you. Thanks!

Hi there, I've been advising a single-form primary who have decided they want to go 1:1 (starting with one or two years in KS2), and have settled on Chromebooks as the device for them (specifically they seem fairly set on the cheap LGFL Lenovo 300e ones). I know plenty of secondaries that have gone down this route, but haven't been able to directly connect them to any other primaries. So, stab in the dark, anyone out there with or familiar with a primary that's opted for 1:1 Chromebooks in at least KS2, who'd be happy to chat with the Assistant Head? Anyone out there have first-hand experience with these particular devices and happy to share some feedback? Bonus points if London-based. Thanks!

We've gone with some Zioxi as well: https://www.zioxi.com/product/ipad-charging-station-zioxi/ Solid furniture. Just wasn't keen on the included power strips, which seemed to be real cheapies that they'd just drilled screws through into the back of the cupboard. Cheap and easy to replace with the power solution of your choice, though. They make a basket version as well: https://www.zioxi.com/product/ipad-charging-station-basket-cupboard/

Well, as per paulkerton's response above, this can easily take on the lovely tones of the PC/Mac flamewars of yesteryear. Yes, the article's getting slightly dated. Obviously your mileage may vary depending on your priorities. Obviously also it's easy to pick out options on either platform that are impractical or expensive. (I shudder to think about handing out styluses to students -- the cost in lost ones alone, even at half the cost of a Logitech Crayon or HP AcitvePen.) Yes, e.g. Book Creator has gone web-based, but the web version has also introduced subscriptions (like many apps that have gone to web) instead of one-off app purchase, so in BC's case for us that'd be one-off 5k vs recurring 12k. Fab that a Chromebook can run Linux, but you're not buying them for the IT dept., so what's the practical use case? And for all arguments about keyboards, I refer you back to the simple question of "How much of what students actually do, that actually adds value to their learning, is long-form typing on a computer?" Plus, if you're desperate for keyboards, they make them in both wired and wireless form for iPads. We taught touch typing for a couple of years with a class set of lightning keyboards (until it became clear that it wasn't necessary, as the kids coming in had learned at primary), and some of our SEN students use keyboards regularly. Speaking of SEN, accessibility is another area where the iPad really excels. The only other piece of advice I'd offer is to listen to your teachers. As much as you may prefer to support platform X or Y, if your teachers aren't on board you may as well set the money on fire. Some of the most painful deployments I've seen have resulted from IT and teachers butting heads. Be pedagogy-driven. I've seen countless deployments that weren't, and have achieved nothing but shiny shiny, and "oh it's great, I can do precisely the same thing I always did, but on this beautiful piece of glass," or "We wanted X but IT only let us have Y, so nobody bothers." Or my fav, "We wanted X and IT wanted Y. We got the X devices we wanted, but IT will only support us doing Y in emulation on them."

We're about six years in to a 1:1 program with iPads, now. We went down the G Suite path, as back when we were deciding, the MS apps were deeply unfriendly to any mixed economy, and MS Classroom was hopeless. I understand that landscape has improved quite a bit, now. I agree that a tablet device has some drawbacks compared to a traditional laptop(-like) device, but I think the pro's still significantly outweigh the con's. The #1 question that needs to be asked, as a few others above have said, is "Why?" Why are you going 1:1? What do you hope to achieve? How will X device help you achieve it? We found that tablets just offered tremendously more flexibility for content creation, and even for some activities like formative assessment (Draw a graph of blah much easier on a touchscreen). They were also much more simple for users. SLT were very keen to NOT compel staff to use devices, so we knew that if they weren't dead easy, they were going in a drawer. By focusing on students creating content, rather than staff creating and students consuming, we've allayed some of the fears that a population of quite skeptical teachers had around how much extra time was going to get sucked up by tech. Some of them even now admit that it saves them time! Laptops and Chromebooks are definitely better for long-form typing, like typing up a big research paper. But how much of students' use is that going to be? Students still have to handwrite exams. One of the #1 things we had to reassure teachers and parents of when we went 1:1 was that we weren't going to start typing everything and neglect to prepare students for hand writing their exams. That said, we also had to convince SLT that they couldn't immediately throw all of our Windows machines into a skip. Teachers do a lot more long-form writing and have much better use cases for traditional computers. And certain subjects still needed ICT suites - particularly comp sci, but also e.g. DT (if anybody's got an iOS replacement for 2D Design that doesn't require students to sign up for their own accounts (looking at you, Autodesk ), I'm all ears!) and others at certain times of the year. Plus, teachers have often found that they want to multi-screen while teaching, presenting from the classroom computer while using their iPad to administer formative assessments, keep students on task with Apple Classroom, etc., etc.. On a more basic level, the battery life and always-on nature of tablets makes a huge difference. It allows them to become just another tool in the classroom. We used to have trolleys of laptops that never got used, b/c the time you had to invest in getting your lesson going on them meant you wanted to use them for the whole lesson if you were going to bother at all. Tablets you can take out, user for one activity, put away again. They don't get in the way, they don't take over, they just expand the possibilities. And the lack of moving parts, combined with a good case, does a lot for durability. The #1 thing I encourage you and your SLT to do before spending any money is research -- visit schools that have done it, ask about their motivations, their original goals, and how their experience has lived up to their expectations. Apple Distinguished Schools and Apple Regional Training Centres are generally very happy to host a visit (OK, Covid, so maybe tricky right now), and ditto Google Reference Schools. Am sure if those two have programs, there must be an MS equivalent as well. Re: pressure from parents for allowing personal use of hte devices, this is why we opted to lease devices and lend them to students (and hide the cost in our tuition fees) rather than BYOD, make a device part of "uniform," or even put a separate line item on their bill for it. It means they're school iPads, not iPads used for school, and it makes a surprisingly significant psychological difference. We've had very little pushback on this. Pushback has more been from parents who e.g. are afraid to take the devices away from kids at bed time. Anyway, I know that's long, but hopefully there's something helpful in there. Good luck! ps - I know you're MS so not probably giving much thought to Chromebooks, but I still think this is a good article to read when thinking about a 1:1 program: The Best Chromebook is... an iPad.

We've been using GSuite for six-ish years, now, so my impressions of MS may be slightly dated, but in my experience it's just faffier for teachers. More clicks/taps to achieve the same thing. As has been said above, MS products are full of irrelevant features and unnecessary complexity. The s/w just needs to get out of the way and let teachers teach, and Google has generally done that much better. The two top reasons I see schools go MS are legacy content and because MS is in the IT team's comfort zone (don't have to worry about setting up extra SSO etc. etc., all just works with what you were already using). If you're already running G Suite, I don't see any reason to switch. That said, my kids' primary went G Suite for lockdown, and even the simplicity of Classroom was too much for some families. If you have any money for it, something like Seesaw or Showbie might work better in a primary environment. We're a secondary, and Classroom has been fantastic for us, especially over lockdown. ps - When we first evaluated it, Teams was called MS Classroom. MS decided they couldn't make money off it, and re-pitched it for business as Teams while still marketing to schools. I'd generally rather be a product's primary audience than an also-ran.

Isnt' this exactly what people use AirServer for? I think they have a 'universal' version that does chromecast/miracast/airplay all-in-one. We don't use it here b/c we're 1:1 iPad for student devices, so just use AppleTVs, but I know other schools use AirServer. (RGS Worcester and King Edward VI Southampton, I think, are two candidates that come to mind. More, I'm sure.)

Spoke to our DSO, who thinks recording is overkill and is less concerned than I am, so probably worth checking w/ yours. Re: kicking out of the meeting, I haven't yet found a way around this in the meeting, but they shouldn't be able to do it in the livestream. Trade-off is, of course, the reduced interactivity of the livestream vs meeting.

So, I can control retention settings, but as far as anyone's aware I have to rely on the teachers to hit "record"? Anyone else out there trying to formulate plans to use Meet in case of forced closure? I suppose my other option is to have a dummy account "own" the Meet sessions, so we can record them without teachers' input, but we're a secondary with lots going on at any moment, so it seems a lot to manage.

I'm looking at the potential for Meet + Classroom in case of Covid-related school closure. I'm assuming I'm not alone in this one, so wondering what others' thoughts are. My main concern is re: safeguarding. While every classroom has a window in the door, a Meet session has only the teacher and students. Am I right in understanding what is logged in Vault is relatively scarce? (joining, leaving the room etc.) Now that Google have made the premium features of Meet free for non-Enterprise Edu domains, does anyone know if there is a way that we can play Big Brother, and enforce recording/retention of all Meet sessions w/in the domain (or an OU/group)? Anybody else have thoughts on Meet and safeguarding?

Had a basic one, but in the process of moving to a staff portal based on My School Portal.

(Fujitsu) Scansnap iX1500? Not 100% sure you can totally operate w/o a computer, but they're proper document scanners, about the size of a small inkjet printer, do duplex scanning, and are available in wifi flavours. They can be set up to save whatever you scan e.g. as PDFs directly to Google Drive. We used to have some of the older model ones around here - I've not got any first-hand experience w/ the current iX1500 ones.

I'd pick from the list of ASEs here: https://www.apple.com/uk/education/how-to-buy/solution-experts/ ASEs are probably best placed for the sort of turnkey solution you're after. We deal with Trams, who are great, but in London. I've talked to a number of these companies at BETT and the like, and they've all seemed pretty capable. I don't think there's a lot of wiggle room on Apple pricing, so you're probably going to be shopping based on the quality of their added value "fire and forget" services and the like.

US testing is different, though, as it's traditionally been very focused on multiple choice questions answered on an optical scan sheet (Scantron being the name brand that has stuck) and marked by machine. There's massively less emphasis on hand-written essays and the like, and most primaries have even stopped teaching joined up writing. I think I probably typed up every bit of coursework and homework I submitted that was longer than a paragraph, beginning from some time in late primary school. (And this in the dark ages when MultiMate was a leading word processing application.) I was so out of practice hand writing that I remember struggling to copy out a "I promise not to cheat on this exam" statement we had to write at the start of the university entrance tests, because most of what I'd written by hand for years was Cyrillic (just too hard to type in the 90s). The exam for entering postgrad programs already in 2005 or so had to be sat in one of those dreary computerised exam shops like where you take the DVLA's theory test. The advantages were that the exams could be computer adaptive, and because they were machine marked, you got your score straight away. I think we're a long way from GCSEs and A-levels looking like that! Computerisation of exams is inevitable, but you only have to look at the ABRSM to see how long a stubborn tradition of handwriting can persist "because it's always been that way." Despite the obvious advantages (like CAT), I can't see English exam boards going this way any time soon, and agree that the logistical challenges will likely sink Wales's attempt before it goes anywhere. Will be interesting to watch from the sidelines.

We've 900-odd mobile devices on site at any time. Plus the rest. Pre-1:1, I think we were fairly happy on 100. (We did alright on a 10 "burstable" to 100 when I started.) Now we're running our 1gb at about 2/3 capacity. I find that the average teacher's motivation to engage with and use new tech is a fairly fragile thing, and there's nothing like having the internet slow to a crawl to make them distrust the devices, so imho it's pretty critical to have robust infrastructure in place. We rolled out a bit like @AButters (well, we deployed to seven year groups over three years), so we did have an intermediate step between 100 and 1000 at one point. Can't quite remember if it was 300 or 500. Key to me seems to be having the bearer capacity. Provider was of course happy to dial up speed any time we wanted to open our wallets, which let us respond quickly when demand required. Of course, now we're gig on a gig, so have to think about the next step before too long. We've increased WiFi density over time, as well, and now have an AP in every classroom (plus more in other spaces).

We are completely hybrid, without somehow being completely a mess. (All credit to excellent NM) We run Office on our desktops, Exchange (cloud), and Azure AD for identity. Sync that identity over to G Suite and SSO w/ Apple IDs, so one unified login and password. (further extended to all of those services out there that let you log in with one of those three services) We run 1:1 iPads, with G Suite as our mobile workflow solution. The mobile Office apps were a right mess when we started and the predecessor to Teams (MS Classroom) looked like a real turn-off. I think MS would have been easier for IT, but it would have been a waste of money b/c those devices wouldn't have had the desired impact on teaching and learning, and I think would largely have wound up in drawers. (Bold statement, perhaps, but it's what we saw when we went to visit schools that went down that route - the mobile MS device became a great tool for teachers' admin, but didn't have real impact on teaching.) Both Apple and MS have made big strides since in catching up w/ Google, but I remain skeptical that they're as easy to use. Our #1 priority was and is minimising the number of steps and taps/clicks to complete a task. Every ounce of faff doubles the chances of the device going in a drawer. We have a few issues with staff who struggle with MS vs Google, but not as much as you might think. We encourage (but don't require) all new teaching materials to be created w/in G Suite, and like to think that Office is primarily for legacy stuff (although it is, in some cases, also for 'legacy' staff). Office is still used a lot for admin stuff, and the occasion when G Suite just can't hack it (e.g. Sheets is not quite up to Excel). In general, I think G Suite has actually been massively easier to use than the MS route would have been, and is a clear winner in the classroom (collaboration, Classroom>Teams, etc.). We have the advantage of having started down this path first, so users' comparison is on-premises MS services and IT suites vs G Suite and 1:1 iPads. Perhaps more painful if you're already invested in e.g. OneDrive? One thing that helps hold it together for staff who haven't yet totally bought in to G Suite is Foldr. Anyhow, happy to describe anything better if you like. We're a secondary of about 800 pupils, with a shoestring IT team (NM, technician, & me) - no idea if your environment is at all comparable. ps - Why iPads and not Chromebooks? Because iPads are the best Chromebooks, and Google's answer to running (especially creative) apps is that your laptop can pretend to be a phone.

When you say "how are you using them" - are you asking just about login and management? If so, I'll just second all the above re getting your (free) GSuite domain and (cheap) device management licenses. If you want any recommendations on physically handling them, I quite like LapSafe and Zioxi's trolleys and cabinets. The former are a bit more indestructible, the latter a bit 'friendlier.' If you're asking about "how are they used in teaching," that's obviously a different sort of thing. I haven't got much experience w/ primary kids, but there are a couple of great (free) FutureLearn courses from the Chartered College of Teaching that go into this. I know they draw some of their examples from primaries, so the content's probably all pretty applicable to your environment. Are they one of the models that support Android apps? Probably opens some more doors functionality-wise. List is here: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/chrome-os-systems-supporting-android-apps

I believe you'll also need to get (most of) your teaching staff the Apple Teacher credential as part of the application process. They've been putting a lot of work into developing the Apple Teacher Learning Centre site, and it seems to have become the sort of epicentre of communication between Apple and schools, I think. The application process includes an ebook that you produce that discusses your vision, strategy, values, etc.. You can find a number of these for existing Apple Distinguished Schools on the Apple Book Store. Huge engagement with your reseller isn't an absolute requirement (although I'm guessing you do need some level of tie-up with an ASE-badged reseller), but they'd be able to help you get in touch with the right people. That said, so can EduGeek. What sort of school are you? A good starting point may be getting in touch with an existing and similar-ish ADS, or even engaging with your local Apple Regional Training Centre, just to put you on the radar. Also, RLR's 'guy who went to work for Apple' is really excellent if RLR's at the current ADS in Cambridge. He helped to get us started on our 1:1 program. We're not an ADS (partly due to the Apple Teacher requirement, plus a certain level of 'what's in it for us'-ness), but we're 5+ years into a really successful 1:1 program.