TechMonkey

We got one a year ago and it has been well used. Yes you have to do all of the things paulkerton say, but they really aren't taxing, all done online and we marked the drone with a label maker. So when we purchased it we did it through a company that also did training so we got some training as well, not the CAA full license, as that was not needed. The trainer came to site and did a presentation on the theory and then gave us some flight time and a grasp of the basics. I created a policy that set out how the drone could be used and who could use it. We are lucky in that we are an out of town school so don't have to worry about the built up area regs. As for uses, we have used it for: - Marketing shots - Building maintenance/inspections - Survey shots for contractors - mapping the site - documenting grounds work - informational videos for parents - virtual tour for parents who couldn't make it to site - Recording sport lessons to give pupils and the staff views they couldn't get normally and help coaching - recording sport events for parents who couldn't make it - security checks We still get jibes that it is our toy and that we are playing, but most people when we talk to them then ask if it could do x and generally we can and do. The one thing we have not done yet is let it be taken off site or on trips. Pupils definitely do not fly it. You could get a Mavic Mini and not have to worry about the registering, but it really isn't arduous to register so it would seem silly to lose the capabilites of one of the bigger drones. To answer your questions: - Implications of insurance - we got specialist insurance that was about £150 for a year for the organisation - Implications of crashing into someone... 0_o Don't do that. It would hurt. But if you get a drone with sensors it won't do that. I have tested it. - Data protection - same as someone using a school camera or camcorder. The drone is just a platform to get a camera in to position, so you would have to comply with any policies your school already has about photos or video - Risk assessment flying around pupils - depends on what you mean by flying around. You wouldn't be flying it around, is in close, pupils, you would be keeping a 50m bubble around people and keeping away from them. If someone was being silly and showing off then they shouldn't be allowed to fly it. It really is a good tool if you have uses for it, and you probably have uses for it you just haven't realised yet. Feel free to ask any questions or DM me if you want further information. EDIT: One thing was said that was incorrect, Get the permission of who owns the land you are flying over. No, no one owns air space. If you want to take off from private land or land there you need permission, as you would be accessing their land, but you can stand on a public footpath and launch a drone with no issues. The only things you have to check are restricted airspace, to keep 50m from people or buildings, increasing to 150m for crowds over 1000 or built-up areas and below 400ft (120m) from ground level.

If it works for you then fantastic. My thought process is for business continuity/disaster recovery and for simplicity. If the site burns down or we have a power failure, using inTune I can send key staff to work from home or another location and they have access to everything and notice nothing different. Also when staff go to conferences there are often weird and wonderful Wifi and network setups so without having to add technologies in-between I can better guarantee a smooth experience. It also streamlines support. With AutoPilot I can turn a laptop on and it gets our details and settings. Potentially I could ship a new laptop direct from the manufacturer to a member of staff, they click a few buttons and they are up and running. Laptop is playing up? Set it to factory reset from the console and it will revert, setup and be ready for them, no need to even come to you. If MS and the manufacturers could just get image deployment like Apple have, I would be a very happy bunny. It would be the same as reasons for moving to O365 and other online services. We have been slowly moving over and when all this looked like kicking off at the beginning of the year staff came to us to ask how we would proceed and the only thing we had to show them was how to use Teams effectively and how to access their phones from offsite. Staff were used to OneDrive, shared documents in SharePoint, OWA for email and key people were used to collaborating on documents so led the others with them. I would stick my neck out and say that at one point when the school was in lockdown, we were more efficient than when we were al in school. I guess for me it is seeing how I can improve our provision for staff and make things easier, rather than getting to a point where I look at our IT estate and say "I am done, this is it".

We are using it with devices that go off site, so random laptops, tablets and mobile phones. Not sure I am ready to dive in fully and have it run the whole estate. As Supportman says, it is good, but not all there plus it uses a different philosophy so you have to change mindset.

Sorry, I have been fairly absent from Edugeek for a few days so missed all this, but glad you got it all sorted.

@Securly_Marc , just so you are aware, the ics file has the meeting at 17:30 but the notes do have the correct time.

Best I have used are LocknCharge. Top loading, proper cable management and decent baskets. Got them from Haptic. I have had some where the basket handles were the stupid way round so while being held the second a laptop was taken out it over balanced and tipped the rest out. Others where the cable management was awful leading to cut cables or cables pulled out of the usb plugs.

Happens in other sectors too. I have had a disgruntled supplier who went to get a price for some Wifi but was denied by the manufacturer as another supplier had already asked for pricing on our behalf. The issue was we hadn't officially asked for pricing.

It could be because MS made it free for anyone with any license (or something similar) until July. So you can use it, but don't get used to it.

Do you use Paxton? Salamander can integrate AD/MIS and Paxton. There is AD2Net as well, it works but it is a bit odd.

Just been poking around for something else nad found you can assign a package. I've not run this so you will need to test it but this code: #Connect Teams module Connect-MicrosoftTeams #Connect Azure AD module Connect-AzureAD $group = Get-AzureADGroup -SearchString "grPeoGovAccounts" $members = Get-AzureADGroupMember -ObjectId $group.ObjectId -All $true | Where-Object {$_.ObjectType -eq "User"} New-CsBatchPolicyPackageAssignmentOperation -Identity $members.UserPrincipalName -PackageName PACKAGENAME Should do the same as before but assign the package, not the individual policies. Change PACKAGENAME to Education_teacher, or what ever package you want. Just remembered what I wanted to use it for so ran it. Seems to work OK, but it isn't instant. It creates a batch job which runs at some point in the near future. To check on the job take the GUID that was displayed after the last command and use it in teh following code Get-CsBatchPolicyAssignmentOperation -OperationId GUID | fl

I used this code #Connect Teams module Connect-MicrosoftTeams #Connect Azure AD module Connect-AzureAD $group = Get-AzureADGroup -SearchString "GROUPNAME" $members = Get-AzureADGroupMember -ObjectId $group.ObjectId -All $true | Where-Object {$_.ObjectType -eq "User"} New-CsBatchPolicyAssignmentOperation -PolicyType TeamsMessagingPolicy -PolicyName "POLICYNAME" -Identity $members.UserPrincipalName -OperationName "RANDOMDESCRIPNAME" Where GROUPNAME is a group of all your pupils and POLICYNAME is one of the following: CallingLineIdentity, OnlineVoiceRoutingPolicy, TeamsAppSetupPolicy, TeamsAppPermissionPolicy, TeamsCallingPolicy, TeamsCallParkPolicy, TeamsChannelsPolicy, TeamsEducationAssignmentsAppPolicy, TeamsEmergencyCallingPolicy, TeamsMeetingBroadcastPolicy, TeamsEmergencyCallRoutingPolicy, TeamsMeetingPolicy, TeamsMessagingPolicy, TeamsUpdateManagementPolicy, TeamsUpgradePolicy, TeamsVerticalPackagePolicy, TeamsVideoInteropServicePolicy, TenantDialPlan depending on what policy you want to set.

Be careful thinking that IT are the only ones getting spun around, getting into a negative headspace and having a pity party. Everyone is being given the runaround from Heads, teachers, maintenance/estates, all the way to cleaners and kitchen staff. Schools are trying to plan for June the 1st but that could all change Thursday depending on what the latest decision is. All while parents, staff and just about anyone with an opinion is telling them how they should be doing it, shouldn't be doing it or how everyone else is doing (but aren't). Schools aren't giving full information as they don't have full information themselves. They are thinking on their feet and trying to pull the best plans (even if it doesn't seem like it) that they can out of thin air. Try and be understanding, explain technical and practical things as best as possible and let your line managers know you are there to help however you can and as early in the process as they can. Anything setup now will be temporary, and no one knows how temporary. From three weeks, when the Government release their next set of ideas, to maybe September or even a week until they change their minds. Currently I am trying to build two new PC suites from random PCs around the school as well as fixing mobile devices to desks with power daisy chained along the back of desks, and then got it dropped on me that all staff not in a class will need a dedicated PC so that there is no hot desking. I don't think that is a possibility so I'm trying to find a work around. This is on top of trying to organise, or reorganise, projects, keep the day to day working and keep my team motivated and informed. I too am torn between a U turn and letting the kids that can, come back. I have a really bad feeling that we will get everything setup and then Thursday the briefing will tell everyone to stay put. That will be very demoralising but may be the best thing. We just have to be resilient, mindful and as helpful and as supportive as we can be.

I just used I used: Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Education_Teacher -DesignatedPresenterRoleMode OrganizerOnlyUserOverride Where Education_teacher is the teacher policy. It isn't perfect, all it does is sets the default meeting option. I did hear that they were looking at making that pupils would always be added as attendees and staff as presenters in Education teams, but that hasn't been added yet

Supposedly the new default presenter setting should solve this. Not had a chance to test it though. @chazzy2501 - Live meetings are an additional license cost for the presenter, not attendee. Currently free but just be careful as I think the cut off was June or July.

What features do you need? What will it be used for? My first thought is Google Classroom or Teams. Pro: Free. But if it doesn't do what you need it to then there is no point. On a different tack, if it is working well, parents are happy, teachers and happy and you are happy, why change?

You can add connectors for Twitter and RSS so I have the 365 Status twitter on the chat as an easy to access check if anything is going wrong, as well as the weekly digest of the Microsoft Roadmap.

Surely just have the staff turn off the video feed when they are talking to pupils?

First you need to think of the reason for the sharing and how people want to access it. Two ideas I gave the school were: 1) Make a team for each Department/Faculty/area. THey then transfer their shared documents in to that and manage it. Head of said area manages it. If something needs to be pushed wider then it can be submitted to be added to a Staff team where forms, policies, etc are put. Whole school staff notices, reminders or questions can be published here. Pros: Their area, if they clog it up it is theirs to organise. They have ownership of it. Less chance of, Whoops I moved the folder into a different folder or Whoops, I deleted a different departments folders. Management are encouraged to get things submitted to them, rather than go hunting for it Ready made meeting system and departmental groups. More obvious where documents are. Cons: Siloed information. Staff need to 'get' the idea that to allow others see a document then it needs to go up the chain. Some head of departments will not cope or understand adding staff and keeping the area tidy. Management have less of an oversight Mappings more complicated as it depends on how many Teams they are part of. 2) Sharepoint Document library set up. Mimics your current drive. Can be setup to map via various means. Pros If you get the mapping sorted, not much change in work flows. People are comfortable Easy to navigate. Can search as a whole Management can hunt through and check what department output is like. Simple mapping as one mapping for everyone Cons Turns into the usual dumping ground No ownership so documents go there to die. I proposed number one, but ended up with two as it would have been to big a step for staff here. It is a massive workflow change. Things like departmental meeting minutes need to be submitted to someone, rather than just saved to a folder and them go get them. Alternative is SMT are members of every department team, but that gets old very quickly. I proposed that the Team should be self contained, if they want to discuss Game of Thrones and cat gifs, then so be it, just like a department staff room/office. Management liked the idea as it made it a more formal process, but it wasn't enough to win them over. Effectively, Sharepoint one small step in the right direction keeping a lot of what staff know. Teams, one giant leap, using some of what they know but a lot of what they don't I'm hoping now a core of staff have been forced to use Teams and see the benefit, we may be able to to plan a migration from one dumping area to Teams. Our other issue is where we are a smaller schools, who teaches some subjects can change yearly, so there isn't really a department. Though that could be a benefit as the Head of Subject could add those that are teaching this year, remove those that aren't and everyone would have groups to use.

For a Universtiy I would go for a team per course, with channels created by the teacher in charge for discussions, modules or seperating topics. For the current remote learning we are going a Team per year with channels per subject, but we only offering a limited set of subjects and a pupil will be in every subject. Permissions are easier to manage at Team level than in Channels. As for files, yes you can have all the course files in the team, a team has a Sharepoint site as well. It gives the course staff more visibility of their files and if they make it a horrible mess it only affects them. You could make a staff team and put staff files , policies, forms and the like, in there but a standard file library would probably suit better.

Try 1.0.2 instead?

My wife said I Was being overly obsessive when I built an Excel sheet to model the tower. Part of me agrees, but that part is weak and a loser and will not get any of the eggs when I crush all before me!!!!

Depends what you mean by tiles? We use Promoted Links for buttons. Or do you mean the new version of tiles?

Set up a Shared Mailbox. Many users can then be set up access, or even send as permissions. It doesn't use a license as you can't log in directly. To access it will either be added to their Outlook or with OWA click their face in the top right, select open other mailbox and enter the email and it will be opened in a new tab. The Outlook app can also add shared mailboxes now.

Only free during the current situation. It has a request button on the front of the Education site https://zoom.us/education You may want to check with them that the free version is the Education version. I haven't enquired as I am not intending to use it.

Safeguarding yes, what about GDPR? They share all their data far and wide from both ends of the connection, not just the meeting organiser, unless you get the Education version.