edmokeski

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.

Saw those yesterday, the backpacks looked brilliant. All they need now is to put this on one. Intellivision's Running Man animation

We use LiveRegister. Although we have a slightly different situation, using thumbprints and iSAMS, LiveRegister can do cards and SIMS. We've found them very reliable. Advantage to biometric registration like thumbs is that they can just give their card to a mate if they don't want to be marked absent/late.

I hear "minicomputer" and can never help but think of one of these :-) Perhaps it could double as the reception desk?

We definitely do it -- anyone who gets a device (staff or student) signs for it, agrees to look after it and take "reasonable precautions," including leaving it in the case we issue it in etc.. Don't have the wording handy, but would definitely encourage signed agreements for any issued devices. We tie it together with signing our ICT Code of Conduct, as well. In students' case, it's basically if insurance won't pay out on it (because their definition of "reasonable precautions" wasn't met etc.), then we'll bill you for it. Staff may get a bit more leniency, I think, although it's really at the bursar's discretion not IT's. I expect that actually enforcing any such agreement will obviously require the business manager/bursar and head being on board, though.

Not sure I follow their logic in wanting one class -- are they all sufficiently familiar with the fact that you can create one assignment/material/etc. and have it go out to multiple classrooms? Only compelling reason to have one rather than several seems to me to be if you want the students in different sections to communicate w/ each other via the classroom. Anyhow, teachers' logic aside... I believe you're right that no URLs in materials = no materials in the course. I'm not sure that means no posts, however - just no attachments. You can spot check easily enough by using GAM to make yourself a teacher of a few classes. I generally stick with "I'll archive them all at the end of the year, it's up to you to delete it when you get fed up with the clutter." I'd think you could just as easily go with a policy like "I'm archiving everything from 18-19, leaving everything (already archived) from 17-18, and deleting everything from 16-17," assuming it's well communicated. FWIW, you can also get some reports off of the GSuite admin console that will give you a sense of whether anybody's really using Classroom.

The SQL reporting is a big plus, to my mind. Unlike most of our other systems, iSAMS' database is an open book, and we can build reports against it any which way we like. It takes some SSRS/BI expertise to make the most of it, but it means we can get much more useful data from the system than we can from "black box" systems that don't allow you access to the underlying data (which I understand SIMS to be?). I suppose it's a trade-off of complexity for flexibility, really. Can't say anything about transitioning between them, as we've been w/ iSAMS for around a decade, now.

I'm currently evaluating this one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B076HJVSC3/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_IABTCbF67TVAE It seems alright, but it doesn't play fantastically well with our STM DUX cases -- the clip isn't really deep enough to get a secure grip, especially if the cover is folded over behind the device. Belkin's looks far more robust, although I feel like a bit more height is desirable, since the tablet's quite big and gets in your way, so you want to angle from slightly to the side. £125 is too much for me, though, at least when I'm still at the sort of proof of concept phase of trying to sell some teachers on this as a useful tool. We had a standalone visualiser for a while in our sciences faculty, but it was only ever embraced by one teacher who's now left. Having recently observed kids jostling for position to try and observe a practical demonstration, I'm having another go. I've got a few teachers interested in video marking of written work, too, which is a bit of a gentler use for the kit. Will be interested to hear what you find and how you get on!

We follow the same -- it's in policy and the user agreement students sign when getting their devices that they will always leave bluetooth on. We try to educate to dispel the myth that it makes an appreciable difference to battery life. For students who disable it, it's up to teachers to apply standard behavior sanctions. (Some of them are quicker to apply sanctions than others, of course. There are also those among the "digitally anxious" who will accept pretty much any tech-y sounding excuse a student gives.) Overall works fine, though. (In fact, has probably worked better than almost all other iPad policies that are meant to be enforced by behavior management rather than technical restrictions.)

We've got a load of these, or very similar (including one in my desk) to make ports more accessible in suites full of hidden-away NUCs and HP mini PCs. They've been pretty good, and hugely popular with students in our 6th form study suite, as they use them to charge their devices (we only deliver power on the USB in there). Our "wear and tear" may be less than some others, so YMMV, but they'd certainly do the job. Otherwise, I'd go w/ your short audio extensions fixed to the case (and/or desk?) - cheap, hard to go wrong, and easy to replace again if they get knackered. Trickiest thing would be securing them to the case in a mostly-but-not-entirely permanent way, so you can get them off to replace, but others can't to walk off w/ them. U-ring on desk, tight-fitting little padlock around cable ends is probably how we'd have done it in my last place, where things going walkies was a bigger issue.

Or Chromebooks? Our laptop trollies never got any use b/c they were perceived to take too long to boot up and log in over WiFi, compared to the already powered on and hard wired PCs in a suite. (Leaving aside the issues of irresponsible users not ensuring the laptops were on charge when put away.) Chromebooks might get you around some of this, though, if they otherwise can meet your needs. Granted, we retired the trollies a few years ago, so laptop hardware and wireless bandwidth have come on a bit since then.

In our secondary, we've got two suites of the Zioxi ones (bought back before Isis thought maybe it was time for a name change) and have been pretty happy with them. We've gone manual (and older model of the FlipScreen ones), no servos. They occasionally break or fall apart when badly abused (students dancing/jumping on the lid), but generally hold up pretty well. I think the most common damage is just decapitating mice by closing the lid without having put the mouse back in it's hole. When we looked at them, we looked also at iDesk and decided we wanted the PC to be separate for upgrading and maintenance purposes, and we also looked at a sort of jigsaw-y one I forget the name of, which felt a bit too much like it'd been designed for a prison or something - kind of too robust.

Yes, same here as robyholmes said - it's much like losing paper (although more expensive!), but with much lower security risk for the data. They can ring the school or emergency contact for info, or get to a trusted internet-connected device to get a new copy (about to get slightly more complicated as we roll out 2FA). Big trips have multiple staff, so multiple iPads w/ copies of the info.

I'm pretty sure we use Google Docs/Sheets, which are then either set to be available offline, or otherwise saved locally as PDFs on school iPads (with minimum complexity on the device passcodes). Paper too easily lost, particularly once the threat of huge penalties under GDPR came in.

iSAMS here as well, FWIW. Independent secondary in London. 10-ish years with iSAMS... long enough that I don't actually know off-hand what we ran before it!

We've got a f/t performing arts technician who handles it, backed up by IT if she's unavailable. As said above, there is really a fair amount of crossover in the AV and IT skillsets, when push comes to shove. The technician is assisted by some students from "tech club" as well, which is organised by the Head of Drama. At my kids' primary, it's done by one of the teachers if it's during school hours. After-hours, e.g. evening fundraising events, it seems they beg among parents for anybody with theatre tech experience.

I'd (emphatically) second this. Teaching and learning needs to lead the tech. (Also, having a 10-seat lab for a school with a max class size of 3 seems a bit bonkers.) What does the curriculum look like? Are there any special demands on teaching particular to this school? (Is the small class size simply their USP, or is it because of particular needs of the students or demands of the curriculum?) Is this the school's "intended" size, or are they looking to grow? Once you know what they're doing in class, you can think about how the tech can best support it. Once you've established that, you can work out what the tech should look like. In a vacuum, not knowing the answers to any of this, I'd lean towards a 1:1 solution (and, given that your staff have them and seem happy with them, I'd lean towards it being an iPad 1:1 rather than Chromebook or MS, but there's a case to be made either way). Sure up the wifi so it's bulletproof, be that Unifi, HPE/Aruba, or otherwise. Re-evaluate that support contract. At a school this size a member of staff seems hard to justify, but getting a good outside company onboard to both help you set everything up and support it going forward is critical. You'll want someone with experience in the education space and with cloud-centric approaches, like Blue Sky, or perhaps someone who can provide not only kit and technical support, but also strong CPD support like Trams or Academia. (Obviously these examples are London-centric, but Blue Sky work nation-wide, and there are other companies like Trams and Academia elsewhere.) If teachers can't 100% rely on it, they just won't use it, so it won't matter what you bought. The speed at which teachers can turn against tech after only a couple of outages/glitches is enough to leave your head spinning. Anyhow, I'd strongly recommend a good long sit-down with the head of curriculum to hash out what the needs really are as your starting point. And get that wifi sorted, it's as essential as oxygen these days! I think crappy wifi is the #1 thing that makes teachers give up on tech. ps - Is this independent school a registered charity, or a profit-making company? The former should sort out their 365/G Suite as they should be on the Edu versions w/ virtually unlimited storage. The latter is going to need to budget for a commercial version, and be aware that if this whole project is successful, that ongoing budget will need to grow to accommodate increasing use across the school. (Ditto re: your budget for bandwidth.)

I'm in a secondary of about 1000 users. We initially (before the release of Team Drives) uploaded ours to a central "shared drives" folder owned by an admin user, and then shared that out to all staff. GAM used to have a little how-to on doing this centrally, but I can't find it at the minute. Since we did it at point of initial Drive rollout, we just walked everyone through fetching it out of their Shared With Me and using Add to My Drive rather than using GAM for it. Once Team Drives came out, we migrated to those. Our old Windows shares were set up as three shares (for different purposes/permissions/etc.), with a folder for each department within each of those shares. Our Team Drives are set up with three Team Drives per department to roughly mirror this. Users are only given access to Team Drives that are relevant to them, which means only a few of us have to put up with seeing the whole list. There are pros and cons to each approach. Team Drives is more elegant, and seems to fit better into teachers' mental model of "stuff in My Drive is mine, stuff in Team Drives is shared, just like it was with My Docs and the network shares in Windows." However there are a few places Google still haven't implemented it properly (e.g. an "add a file" type dialogue that only shows My Drive). More significantly, permissions work differently on Team Drives, meaning that a) those managing them day-to-day (HoDs for us) need to understand the two different systems of permissions, and b) granular permissions are quite limited compared to My Drive (which was already a bit limited compared to Windows shares). Against Team Drives, I wish the permissions were more granular etc., as I hate telling teachers that permissions features they're used to using aren't supported. However, for it, I haven't any more got teachers getting confused about shared resources sitting w/in their My Drive and going through and deleting everything they didn't want (happened in our first year -- luckily not too difficult to set right, or trace the culprit). Wish I could say "definitely do it X way," but YMMV depending on your situation and your users' experience/expectations!

We are 1:1 iPad+GSuite with about 1k devices (granted, we avoided buying the bottom-tier storage option on them). Teachers and students are in charge of managing their own storage. We have Foldr so teachers can access files on legacy network shares, but everyone is encouraged to use Google Drive. We're constantly repeating "save it to Drive," etc.. Everyone is taught to enable auto-backup on Google Photos. Where storage is an issue, the photos/videos can then be removed from the device without a problem -- Google Photos even encourages you to do it (see screenshot). I also make sure teachers lower the quality settings for video recording -- nobody needs 4k HDR video of little Susie's poster presentation, and 720p/30Hz saves a ton of space over 1080/60 or 4k/anything. The other advantage of Google Photos is that it's automatic, so when teachers need to send a photo to someone or use it for something, it's already right there in their Google Drive - no need to wait forever while it uploads over their lousy home DSL as they prep for a lesson at 10pm the night before (not that anybody ever does that, of course!). I think it's definitely worth querying the move to 365 - especially since you ARE new. I always find you get a certain amount of "new guy" credit to spend querying existing decisions and processes in the name of understanding the organisation, which sometimes puts you in a better position to initiate change or a rethink than if you'd been there all along. A change is apt to be very disruptive to teachers, putting them off device use, and I still think GSuite is the hands-down winner among the three major workflow solutions (MSFT/APPL/GSuite) - Classroom is hard to beat and collaboration is at the very core of the productivity apps. When we initially started planning our rollout, we had IT and management at the centre of our mindset and 365 appeared to be the obvious answer. As soon as we got our focus "right" and put teachers and pedagogy at the heart of the program, 365 went out the window in favour of actually rolling out out with GSuite (& Classroom), and we've not looked back. That's not to say we've ditched MSFT entirely. Our desktop suites, e-mail, and ID management are all still MS (w/ ID sync'd to Google), and staff can still use Office to access legacy MS documents, or for features unavailable in GSuite (rare, but sometimes an issue for Geography and science b/c Sheets is a bit limited compared to Excel. Word is also still popular w/ admin staff who need advanced features like mail merge.), but Google is the only mobile productivity suite and workflow we support. Too many choices just leads to confusion and muddle, as @Brimstone suggested above. It's what I call the "diner menu syndrome." OK, have yammered on for too long. Basic summary = Google Photos solves your problem w/o the cost of e.g. on prem storage, and definitely make sure they've thoroughly thought through this planned move to 365 and that it's really in the best interests of teachers & students.

We've certainly gone for the "here's a list of universities our leavers went to" instead of "here's a list of our leavers and the university they went to." Seems by far the safer approach, and other than Sally's family and friends (who can find out from, you know, Sally), who cares that it's Sally that went on to Whatsamatta U?

What on earth for? Have they got a legit learning purpose to this, or do they just like gadgets and want to make your life miserable? Have yet to hear a persuasive use case in the classroom, and can't imagine all the cans of worms having one would open re: privacy, filtering, etc., etc..

Numbers. Allows you to enter a table with a tickable list. You can then tick with your finger or most styluses. If you try to tick w/ a Pencil or Logitech Crayon, it automatically does it as a drawing sitting on top of the tickbox rather than ticking the box - kind of works, but not ideal. Might be a way to disable that and have them act like a dumb stylus.

Have you looked at RosterSync by New Visions (free) or SalamandarSoft (not free)? May save you reinventing the wheel. I don't know what's inside Salamandar's black box, but it appears to rely on class alias in Classroom more than class ID. (alias is assignable, ID is auto-generated) RosterSync appears to construct an alias as well, out of some set fields exported from your MIS. e.g. we used to use class code concatenated with academic year (as class codes were not necessarily unique, but could be repeated across years) for RosterSync. RosterSync (admin edition) works well, and it's hard to beat the price, but I don't think it's possible to automate it. Salamandar's solution runs as a scheduled task on our servers and synchronises things overnight. (Mind you, we use a different MIS, but most vendors make sure their products work first w/ SIMS, the 800-pound gorilla of MISes).

Slightly different scale! No, no per-pupil charges. And it's a one-off purchase, rather than the ever-proliferating subscription model. We're 1:1, so have 60-odd teachers on iDoceo so far.

I think it's about twelve pounds per license? There's no VPP bulk discount at all, though, so it adds up quickly. We buy licenses one at a time on request, whereas with most other apps we buy and deploy them in bulk for our whole user base.