Jamman960

Does sound too good to be true, my other half has done a load of surveys/questionnaires via various sites and generally only got 30p-£1 each, some do more but not that much more

It'd be interesting to see the history of support/teaching staff ratio's, I think a lot of this stems from the way teaching staff have often done things themselves initially and then eventually handed it out to admin/support staff - back in 2005 when I visited schools to install networks/workstations more of often than not I'd find that a member of teaching staff with a vauge interest in IT was responsible for everything IT related and didn't have a technician to rely on. Even though I'm now the Network Manager I still report to the "Head of IT and Digital Strategy" who's one of our deputy heads and was originally the teacher with an interest in IT... I now get far more of a say in what goes on but ultimately he's the one that reports to the rest of SLT...

When you apply the upgrade via solus it'll install the Spring database(and any others if you needed them) then it'll go ahead and install the Summer release including client distribution etc I'll probably install it in a few weeks, we're about to run end of year reports and finace will be running the fee bills next week... I'd be lynched for even attempting it

Thanks for all the info guys, It turns out that tit isn't restricted to the organiser but is in fact any teacher that needs to be present - we've been having issues because the pupils weren't aware of this change and kept reporting the links weren't working. It ended up being a game of cat and mouse as staff were leaving and re-creating meetings because they thought their previously created ones weren't working. Its a great feature to have but a bit of a pain when its released so quietly and took effect by default because of the way our policies are configured.

I agree entirely and think teams should have been setup to stop students starting meetings in the first place but this hasn’t been the case until now. Having a teacher present is great but this seems to require the organiser to be present which isn’t always the same person

Is anyone else finding this? I've created a ticket with Microsoft - this isn't the new lobby feature and there are no settings for the meeting to change this behaviour James

IT have been roped into it for some staff, I've setup all of the lessons for our remote music staff for instance. Seems odd as its affecting some but not others, a test meeting I've just setup is affected. As a pupil I get a message stating the meeting hasn't started yet and to try again, once the organiser is present the pupils still need to come out of the meeting and re-join, they're not in a lobby I knew this feature was coming and would have implimented it either way but to be on by default is frustraiting

Morning all, up until now pupils have been able to start meetings whenever they wanted(not good), at the moment it seems as though in a limited number of meetings the organiser needs to be present before pupils can join. While this is a welcome change but in some cases the teacher isn't the one who setup the meeting so pupils can't join even though their teacher is there. I can't seem to find any settings or documentation for this and it appears to be on by default - is anyone else experiencing this or know of any settings/documentation for it? Regards James

Done:)

We currently allow all but guests all have to go through the lobby to get into meetings.

We've not allowed pupils to use 1:1 comms at all, unfortunatly this also means that staff aren't able to contact them directly either, we are doing live lessons but myself and our safeguarding lead have to be invited into all meetings, if staff feel they need to record they can. Myself and the safeguarding lead pop into meetings at random - we're an independent though so don't have rules coming down from the LA etc on how we should manage it all.

I've not come across anything on the backend that would allow you to change another users status unfortunatly, I'd say the quickest way would be to get her to do it or reset her passsword following a quick look at the powershell reference it dosen't look as though any of the commands is able to alter status messages either

It seemed to be a DNS issue, it worked from home perfectly throughout but from the schools network smtp.office365.com wasn't resolving at all during the outage but did from home, as soon as it started resolving internally it came back to life - thought our AD server was causing the issue!

I got lucky the other day with Argos, managed to buy Microsoft 5 HD-3000's for £19.99 each. I had to place 5 separate orders but they were all delivered to store a few days later. CPC seem to be a good bet although I think their stock due dates have started to slip

Had similar with ours, once one had quoted Ruckus the others suddenly Would only quote Meru or other brands

We've always used .co.uk for ours but have also recently brought intials.school which we mainly use for pupil 365 logins

You'll need to assign policys or policy packages to each pupil - there are some preprepared pols for primary and secondary that stop this(the primary one certainly does) James

Take a look at some of the self install alarms, I purchased a ring alarm with a couple of cameras recently and it was very easy to setup, I can see the status of any sensor wherever I am whether the alarm is armed or not. James

I agree, our Prep department has been 1:1 for the last few years and have coped very well with the change, our Pre Prep haven't been able to integrate tech quite so well so are finding it more difficult - we're looking at deploying iPads to Y2(50) early as they would have received them in September anyway but teacher and pupil training is making the powers that be reluctant at the moment. I'm currently in talks with our supplier to get the iPads despatched directly to parents and then provisioned via DEP if we do decide to go ahead. The cloud in general has been a godsend, if this had happened 5+ years ago we'd be looking at a very different outcome.

We're using ShowMyHomework and Showbie with our pupils which has been received well, we plan to use Teams and Stream(for video) after the easter break, My sons school have been using Google Classroom very well Teams offers much of the same functionality as Google Classroom but I'm finding that its not as useful once necessary restrictions are in place to stop pupils talking to each other via voice/video/text directly, Pupils can't receive calls or direct messages from staff either. James

Evening all, how are other Independents faring in this situation? We're an Independent Prep school in outer london/kent Fortunatly our switch to home learning has been received well by parents so far, We've been 1:1 with iPads in the prep department for a couple of years but never sent them home, They were all sent home with the pupils and they've been working via SMHW/Showbie for the last week and a half. I've pushed the use of Teams between staff and am planning to make use of it with pupils after the easter break. We've reduced fee's by 10-15% to reflect reduced costs, we're hoping a good proportion of the fee's are paid ready for the Summer term. Also are Academies affected in the same way? I met a teacher from an Academy the other day who said they've been warned that if they don't set a good amount of work they'll have their pay reduced.

One of our SLT wanted to use this, my biggest kickback was that our pupils would end up setting up their own zoom meetings between each other, not great if we’re the ones providing the devices and app... at least with teams we can block them and audit calls made The only valid complaint is that teams only shows a grid of 4 videos whereas Zoom shows up to 49 For now they’ve backed off and seem to have agreed to use teams like everyone else... I won’t be pushing the zoom app out

I went in today to ensure our staff were ready to work from home but am now going to stay at home going forward, the plan is for our technician to stay on site for now covering those staff who are going to continue going in and our key worker pupils. I live 20 miles away while our tech is about 6 miles from the school. James

I'm starting to wonder how all of our virtual learning providers are going to cope, more or less all are now on cloud infrastructure which scales but surely there's only so much free capacity in the various cloud providers, they're going to be fighting for resources against Netflix etc, there are already reports of higher bandwidth usage in Italy due to people playing more Fortnite. Showbie announced last week they'd give new customers unlimited licences until July and would give existing customers extra licences, the next day their platform couldn't cope with the load of their existing customers so have had to fall back to offering existing customers 5 extra licences, nothing free for new ones. Following this they've disabled various functions to cope with the higher loads. James

I hope they would go towards adaptive exams allowing for assessment of skills in a shorter time, it could reduce stress significantly although I guess this would be more multiple choice rather than the traditional short/long answers unless reliable AI could be used... Ensuring schools have the right level of tech access would be difficult, especially if we're talking mobile devices and some schools going BYOD or having aging equipment(poor wifi/battery life) I wonder if they could change the model entirely - get an external company to provide the infrastructure and devices in a large venue, rather than kids going back to their own school they could go a local stadium or events hall