jmak

It's free, but if you want to manage the devices through the Google workspace admin console you need to buy a management licence. They're somewhere around the £30 to £35 mark per device, but not essential depending on how you use them/who you're giving them to.

Shop the offers on Dell.com All the Dell monitors I've had over the years have been good in their class. Choosing the ones on offer trends to give better delivery dates - we had a warranty claim on one and to get the specific model for a direct replacement was a 2 month wait, so we got something slightly different and it arrived next day.

In use the only differences are trivial. The Start button is in the middle at the bottom of the screen instead of the left hand side and there's no search box. I never use either anyway - I just it's the Windows key and start typing the name of what I want. In the right click context menu there are icons at the top for cut, copy and paste instead of having them listed - but I use keyboard shortcuts most of the time. Other than that, the sounds are a bit more subtle and they've rounded off the corners of the Windows.

I used BBC bitesize online for a lunchtime club with some Year 2 pupils: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zf2f9j6/articles/z3c6tfr Essentially the same exercises that were in the course I used on my BBC micro several decades ago.

Look at the school development plan (should be a public document). Anything you propose should support the teaching and learning objectives of the school. Find out as much as you can about the school's existing IT setup - you can often glean a lot from their website - what learning platforms do they use, what state is the website in and who produces it, are they a Google or O365 school (unusual to find a school that doesn't have either nowadays), is there an IT support area on the website for parents or staff - making better use of stuff they already have is often achievable and potentially lower cost and disruption than a complete reinvention. It's often worth a chat with the recruiting manager - it shows you're serious and you can clean information about what they're looking for in a person as well as technically which will help you do better in the interview. Also - don't insult what they've already got - the person you're hoping to replace might be a well loved and trusted member of staff.

I thought about it when I was younger. Obviously partner and mother weren't keen, but the decider was the reaction from my mates I used to go mountain biking with. They expected me to die doing that and said I was totally unsuited to riding a motorbike. My own sense of fear is too strong now...

That's one of the ones that does include the CALs. I also got a quote for a server licence recently. I'm not allowed to share my quote, but think just over half of what you paid for one M365 Education A3 staff subscription for a Server Standard licence for 16 cores one year licence (minimum speed you can buy) which allows you to run one hypervisor with 2 VMs. M365 Education A3 also includes Intune for Education and Azure AD P1, so everything you need to run WUfB if you don't want a WSUS server.

We're starting to get users installing it (not a school and historically devices have been unmanaged) so I've upgraded my machine this morning. I want to familiarise myself so that I don't look clueless when I'm supporting users. It took over 3 hours for an in-place upgrade with 11th gen i7 and 32GB RAM.

That's what I ended up doing last night. I seen to have working copies of the important files so I'm ready to put a clean install of Windows on now. I felt that having got into cmd in Windows recovery I ought to have been able to copy data from there without talking the laptop apart. Stick to what I know I guess is the lesson.

Normally my answer is pretty strongly "if you don't have a backup, it's gone". However, we have a visitor recently arrived from Ukraine who has a very good reason for being unable to access any backups they might have had, so I'm not even going to mention that; I'll just do my best to help. It's a Windows 11 laptop which won't boot and none of the repair my computer, reset my computer and keep data options work. I can boot into the Windows troubleshoot menu and open command prompt. I've then run notepad.exe and can access the file structure through that. If I copy those files to an external drive, will they be accessible if I reinstall Windows and copy them back? Thanks

I'm on Win 10 21H2 and my build is 19044 [emoji848]

What other Microsoft licensing are you using? If you're using Office or Office 365 it'll be worth looking at an OVS agreement. Some of them include server CALs.

When I took off skirting boards and found similar to that I thought "excellent, I can run some Cat 6 and speaker cables behind there".

It was the self-Deployment and white glove (pre-provisioned) I was hoping to test more. Do you generally find it fussy? I had a single Dell laptop that I was using as a test machine. Spent hours trying to work out why it wouldn't go into assigned status on Monday, logged into Autopilot console on Tuesday morning and it was there. Then spent ages trying to get it to provision and it wouldn't reliably pick up network (which is why I wanted VMs, so that I could exclude hardware issues), then it picked up the organisation and knew what profile it had assigned, but kept failing to deploy. I ran out of time until yesterday, when I just turned it on and it worked. So I have it working, but I don't know why it sometimes doesn't.

Best and clearest guides I've found [emoji41]

I've got Intune/Autopilot mostly working, but I definitely need to do more testing before moving to production. I've seen lots of guides for building labs with Hyper-V VMs, but after finding that failed, the information on the web pointed to the instructions which state that VMs aren't supported as you need TPM 2 for it to work. You can enable TPM in the Hyper-V Manager machine settings, but that doesn't seem to satisfy Autopilot. Is it possible to set up a lab with VMs?

Re packed lunch. I often take leftovers from dinner the night before - this week I've had paella, veggie shepherd's pie and veggie lasagna. Any other spare portions are frozen to take on days when we don't have leftovers. I do resort to sandwiches occasionally, but mostly if there's nothing else left I cook some pasta and add either some pesto or a jar of pasta sauce. I buy jars of sauce when they're on special offer for about £1 which is enough for 3 large portions. So I get a filling lunch for about 60p. I also keep multi-packs of crisps, chocolate and cereal bars in my desk. I used to avoid that, but ended up buying stuff from vending machines or shops which was much more expensive. Some days you're just hungry!

I read it differently. It's not that videoing an extra person makes a bigger file or more work, it's the question of whether a sample would be enough, which would be much shorter and therefore smaller than a video of the full exam. Similarly, it's easier to video several sorry extracts rather than several complete exams.

That's the same one I linked. It has Office 365 Education A1, but not Microsoft 365 Education A1. And O365 A1 is marked as not including the apps. Maybe I'm confusing what you buy for staff and what you get free for pupils. If you buy M365 for staff and sign up pupils for O365 A1, the pupils get rights to the apps iirc.

I can't find a service description for M365 Education A1, only A3 and A5. I'd definitely be interested to at least find the price difference.

In my last place when I raised that point the idea got shelved [emoji16] Where I am now there's a waiting list to get a turn to put stuff on them! Just consistency in style for everything published on paper, online, on notice boards. Set up templates in Office with preset fonts (including titles and headings) and colours. Try and have bullet points, numbered lists, text in tables properly aligned. It looks smarter, stops (well, discourages) horrible random fonts that don't render properly and makes the message clearer if there's not a whole rainbow of colors on every document.

Did you use a template or roll your own? I fancy having a go at this but haven't got time to start from scratch at the minute.

I think you need A3 to get the desktop apps - but if you buy them for staff, you should get them free for students. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/office-365-platform-service-description/microsoft-365-education Note that if you go for an M365 rather than an O365 subscription you get Intune, server CALs, Azure AD P1 which includes conditional access. Can't recommend strongly enough speaking to a licensing reseller! John Levis at very PC has always been helpful for me. There's always more than one way to get licences for the products you need.

Not sure if you're state or private school. If state, there should be a school development plan. I'd start there. If it doesn't add to teaching and learning, you shouldn't be spending money on it - although creating a place that staff and pupils can be proud of will have a positive effect, so some outlay could probably be justified. I think digital signage can be effective - although be sure that someone will produce content. I've been in several schools/businesses where they're switched off or have out of date information which doesn't add to a professional image. If it's not in place already, a house style for all communications is cheap/free and creates a good impression, even if no one can quite say why. I'd much rather have plants than backlit TVs or muzak for public areas, but that's personal preference. If you do go for music, you'll need to be careful. Everyone has different taste, you need to not drive the people who work nearby mad and if in reception areas, make sure it's at a low enough volume that it doesn't cause difficulty for people with hearing impairment.

It's two years since I dealt with them as I've changed jobs. Four years experience before that and I'd recommend without hesitation. I'm sure some individuals are better than others, so it's possible you could get unlucky, but for us the account team was always responsive and our local technician was great.