jmak

I think you might be thinking of Leap-pads. Learnpads are designed for schools and only make sense if you're managing sets of them - I'm pretty sure they were never marketed to the general public. Their strength was deploying lessons: you could have all of the apps installed and then a teacher or admin could force a profile or lesson with only a single app or website (or a curated selection) to any or any group of devices. It applies instantly and was a great way to control what activities the kids had available - better than an MDM from that point of view. All of the traditional MDM features were there too and when they were first around there was nothing much else for Android and Apple MDMs were much less advanced. Having said that, I found the Android version went out of date sooner than I would have liked and the devices weren't stunning - definitely not as well made as iPads. As with any Android tablet or Chromebook, you'll be up against teachers wanting apps that are iPad only. They did keep running Flash long after it was generally removed from Android though!

A huge proportion of our local school kids get THE school bus. So presumably they'll queue up together (not how the teenagers round here typically arrange themselves near the bus stop), sit on a bus together for >40 minutes on a nearly full bus, hang around in town for 30, 60, 90, 120 minutes then repeat the process in reverse as the ones who were allowed in first in the morning have longer to hang around in the afternoon. Sounds perfect. Edit: Forgot to mention that our village has the choice of 2 secondary schools and the bus for each leaves within 5 minutes of the one to the other school.

Does that mean that anyone who comes across that site can get around the BIOS password?

I seem destined to pick one of the also rans. I had Minolta SLRs until they went bust and am now on the Panasonic micro 4:3 system. I'll keep telling myself it's because they're selling the better technology at too low a price, so can't make the business work, rather than that I can't identify the best product.... (Evidence in my favour? Sony bought up Minolta's photographic business and turned it into a success. Clutching at straws?)

Maybe that's where they were going wrong [emoji6]

That's how it works for the login. Not certain for proxy, but don't have a system to test on at the minute. If you're evaluating, would it be worth spending the £20ish on a licence as you'll get a much better feel for what it can do? And you'll see more of the benefits available to you as IT support in terms of deployment and management.

When you're defining the business case, be careful with what "free" means. Having server processing resources and data storage on site is not free. Giving IT staff time to learn how to implement a system they've never used before and then manage it is not free - also bear in mind that training staff to install and manage Windows is likely to be good value as you'll need them to do it again. Designing and implementing a VLE is something they'll probably do once. Administrating and running the VLE takes someone's time which is not free. The benefit and weakness of Moodle is that it can be configured in an almost endless number of different ways. If you don't know what it can do and the teaching staff don't have a very clear list of requirements of suggest it's unlikely to be a successful deployment. You may have the answers to these questions and there are some well designed and used VLEs, but a lot of us have seen very expensive (either in time or money) systems that the teaching staff don't really buy in to leading to lots of wasted IT support time and frustration. I'd *really* recommend a long look at either MS Office 365 with Teams, SharePoint etc or GSuite. They do a lot of what most schools want from a VLE (at least to get started) have no monetary cost, there's loads of support (lots of people on here for a start and plenty of places for teachers to turn to that aren't you!) and there's a £2k grant available to have an expert help you set up at the minute.

I think it has rules like within X distance for y amount of time, so walking past shouldn't be enough to trigger an alert. Even if you walk past someone who's infected, unless they cough or sneeze directly at you as you breathe in, your chances of catching it are pretty small. By all accounts the app is.... not brilliant??? but I think they've cracked that bit of it [emoji57]

I used solarwinds free products. Link in this post and powershell scripts that others have used in the same thread: /showthread.php?p=1699360 I took a report from SIMS and manipulated in Excel to create the user names.

I think we're agreeing [emoji6]

Staff laptops with Conditional Access set up so that users can't access confidential school content on non-school devices. You can refine this so that some content is accessible (e.g. allow lesson plans, but block admin areas). USB sticks were banned by AUP. I would have liked to block, but it was too complicated as we needed to allow access to SD cards for photo transfers.

If that's a question for me, then the answer is that I think I know how they'll behave and it's a trade off I'm prepared to make. I know I'm the product, but I'm pretty sure that they won't share my data accidentally or to any government. I assume they track my location (but I like using sat nav, so I've got to give that data to someone and the government can track mobile phone locations anyway). I'm sure they track websites I visit, but they have a damned good go at that whether you use Android or any other web browser as retailers are addicted to that too. I know they try and associate data to build a profile, but again that's simply to try and sell me stuff. I respond to that by being aware of it and only buying things I really want (i.e. Items I look for rather than one suggested to me). I also use ad and cookie blockers as a back up. I also regularly clear all my Google history - not because it's creepy, but because I become aware that it's restricting search results and suggestions too much and the content I see is repetitive. Taking it back to the topic, the government intended to capture a significant amount of personal data through the app and then store it centrally and not give you the right to delete it or to know what they might use it for in the future.

Pretty sure that it doesn't give them much more than they already have. They already know where you go and who else is there at the same time. I think the main thing this offers to test and trace is allowing them to contact people you've been near who you don't know, which I reckon will mostly be on public transport and potentially once restaurants and pubs open. Otherwise, you'll mostly be able to identify people who you've been near - and if you won't share that with test and trace, you probably wouldn't download the app either. My view on all things Google - it's a pretty straightforward transaction. They want to sell my data to people who want to buy things. I don't have to buy them. Once that data is going to government (of any party) there's a long history of them finding new ways to use it that differ from what you expected. I'm probably kidding myself, but I trust Google more than Facebook as they still to go on for social engineering which seems more evil than just selling stuff.

A couple of thoughts (questions rather than answers, but intended to help...) Do you have synchronisation of AD and GSuite accounts for staff. If not, why not? (Not a statement that it's wrong, just might influence other decisions you make.) Have you decided yet whether to issue individual accounts for all or some of the pupils? My view is that you may as well create individual accounts for all of the pupils. Firstly, if you don't do it now, you'll need to at some point as they progress through the school and as you're importing from a spreadsheet, it's a trivial amount of extra work. Secondly, having the accounts doesn't mean they have to be issued to the pupils or used - you could still have year group or class logins if you want. And third, even in reception it's useful for them to have individual accounts for saving work. The workflow for saving stuff so that the teacher can identify who is responsible for which file (navigate to suitable folder, give file a specific name identifying the child) is at least as complicated as logging in. As you know, in GSuite, as soon as they create a document, it's saved and even if they over write or delete work, the teacher use version history to find what was done on any particular day. Fourth, having individual accounts allows parents to be involved and view or complete work at home. The final thing I'd say is that the choice on whether to use individual accounts is a teaching and learning issue, not a technical one. I suggest you present the arguments (and feel free to sell the option you prefer) and make the teachers own it. There will be complaints from at least some that it causes difficulties and you need to try to avoid being blamed when that happens. Apologies for the ridiculously long post!

^^ Good advice. More light is more important than the magnification and to get a lot of light and a lot of magnification, you'll need a lot of money and they'll be heavy. Mine are 8x42 as well and are Viking brand. We bought them after trying several at an RSPB demo day. From memory, the RSPB ones were rebranded Vikings at the time, although no guarantee they still are.

Pricing looks stunning. As per my post in the "recommend a laptop for students to buy" thread, these might not be up to being full domain machines and might struggle with heavier software, but if the point is to give access to online learning to kids who are currently missing out, these would hit the mark and could be transformational. My learnt/inbuilt prejudice puts me off cheap Windows devices, because they seem like they've wrangled something designed for a different purpose down to meet a price point, whereas the Chromebooks have been designed from the ground up to use a lightweight computing platform for access to mostly web based services. If you already have GSuite set up, you'll know it's a whole lot easier to learn than managing Windows. If you don't, there's currently funding available to sort out the bits that'll be new to you. I assume that at the price quoted, the management licence isn't included, so you need to budget £20ish per device, which is for the life of the device. If you're sending the device or into the wild (home with the pupils) and can't guarantee how often they'll come back, I'd be much more confident of not having problems with updates or software with a Chromebook than anything Windows. Just my thoughts. Looks like a great effort by @JohnJackson and his team.

Someone's misunderstanding something somewhere. It's possible that a maintained school isn't the right type of legal entity, but it clearly is one. Other public bodies use Walkie talkies and they won't be registered at Companies House either. Could be similar to VAT registration - i.e. It belongs to the local authority?

Agree with all the above. The only thing I'd add is that it might be worth giving a couple of options of spec, i.e. an absolute bare minimum, a recommended value option and a mention that if they're doing video processing, even that might not be enough. We read lots in the press about kids being excluded because families can't afford a laptop. For most of them, something that'll run a decent number of browser tabs for online learning apps and Office 365 could be transformational whereas if you suggest a minimum of i5 with SSD, they might take one look and write the whole idea off as unaffordable.

This was the programme that originally prompted me to look at air filtration efficacy: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000jxvp (Radio 4 Inside Science) Other interesting bits about transmission too, including building design. Edit: Spoiler for those who haven't got half an hour to spare - they say it does filter out the virus.

True, it was when I got to these bits that I was surprised: 'For humans, when we shake hands or when we kiss, or when someone sneezes around you, all those are different routes of transmission for a virus or bacteria.' "And ventilation systems, such as air-conditioning units, allow the pathogens behind these deadly outbreaks to spread easily between humans and animals." "The researchers are first testing the device at a pig farm to determine if it could prevent the spread of pathogens between livestock, which sometimes go on to infect humans." Maybe I don't read the site often enough, but I was surprised that over a year ago they were reporting the need for technology to reduce the spread of a virus that had originated in livestock.

Well I was surprised to find this in the Daily Fail from April 2019: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-6915619/Air-filter-kill-99-9-deadly-bacteria-viruses-floating-air.html Very prescient. I was ambling around Google looking for articles on how effective air filtration systems are against spread of viruses.

I've started making my own as we're going to need loads. Every time you take a facemask off, you need to put it in a sealed bag until you wash it and then put a fresh one on. That means every time you have a drink or eat anything or remove it even temporarily for any other reason. If you touch it, you need to wash your hands. Put one on as you leave your office to go to a classroom? Then you either need to keep it on all day or put it in the bag and have another one ready for next time you leave them office. Granted, most people won't do that, but even when used correctly the evidence for wearing them is limited. Used improperly, you run the risk of increasing the spread, especially the risk of infecting yourself.

I'd been working at the school for years before I found out that I could have had an electronic version of the ATF from county. It was in pdf format, but it was a helluva lot easier to convert that to a spreadsheet that manually type the details across.

Capita have introduced this on the latest update (only 8 years after@matt40k developed a solution...) /showthread.php?t=99098 I'd be amazed if it does all of the fields you're after, but the ATF from admissions should have a good chance of the pupil and parent names being as well the contact email address being accurate (since that's the email the offer of the place would have been sent to). At least you could then automate sending a request to the patterns for the rest of the information.