TechMonkey

Thank you for the reply. Can you give a rough idea of not a lot of money? I guess the value ultimately comes from, as you say, off loading the IT task of running reports and allowing DSLs or Pastoral staff to dip in when every they need.

Thanks for the response. This is part of my confusion, I'm not sure what Fastvue does that makes it indispensable above and beyond what is standard. But every thread that Sophos XG is mentioned in inevitably has Fastvue mentioned as essential. This then leads to my cost query and if the reporting is so bad that an extra is needed to make it work, what is so great about Sophos that makes that issue worth it over any other solution.

We got a job lot from Amazon. Could well be the ones linked. Inventry even told us themselves not to buy the labels from them.

This keeps coming up and I always ask and never get a firm answer, but is Sophos XG priced lower than other solutions that buying a third party reporting tool is a viable option? I mean, Smoothwall reporting isn't great but I can get the info out and the safeguarding reporting is good. Is Sophos + Fastvue a similar cost to an alternative system like Smoothwall or are schools just buying Fastvue as it is a must have with Sophos and that is their chosen platform?

Same as LeMarchand but we push a proxy address, not using a script, PAC or WPAD. We tell Chrome to use the system settings as well. We set it on a default person GPO and then just add changes where needed further down the tree.

No help but thank you for bringing this up. We had O365 warnings flag the account that send our library emails and then it shut the account down due to it being suspicious. I was glad to see our systems worked but was wondering how to fix this. I'll watch with interest.

Depends on what kind of flicking. If it is mindless flicking then it is possibly slightly better than Facebook or Twitter but still just brain busy work. If you are actively engaging then it could be a fine line between work and online social. Also depends on what is going on around you. If your family are sitting around you or your friends at the pub and wondering why you are looking at technical things rather than engaging with them, I can see an issue and why they may see it as you working. As ever it is about a balance between reading all things technical and getting a break from it all. If you are looking at an Edugeek thread about something that may be relevant to work then you are engaging your brain into work mode and not disconnecting. This can, unwittingly, also stir up certain chemicals as your brain getting ready for work mode and bring all the baggage associated with it to the forefront of your mind. So TL;DR, no but it is more about context and making sure you have proper downtime

Not being awkward, but if the email being sent is a message to say the new documents are available on the portal how does that affect confidentiality or GDPR? No documents are sent, no information is in the email.

Do they need email? If not remove the license for Exchange and I think that is the only place it is. For example we have given our Governors SharePoint access but no email as they were concerned about remembering to check a second email account. So the Clerk sends out an email to their usual personal email accounts to inform them that documents are available but nothing gets sent to their email.

I think I am at half a way so far!

I'm halfway through finally reading The Phoenix Project, if you never came across it it is a story about an IT department and a major project spiralling out of control. It covers change management, the types of IT work and how to manage an IT department and projects. It is one of those books that always pops up in conversations about IT management, fire fighting or failing projects. Though it is aimed at large organisations I wondered if anyone else had read it and applied any aspects successfully? Or even what their thoughts are on it? Especially as there are more and more large MATS with IT across sites or regions I imagine this is coming more to the front of Education IT. My feeling is that it is mostly writing down those things that most of us know but when it is spelled out you have one of those "Oh yeah" moments. Nothing is a surprise but it clicks things into place and joins up bits of knowledge that you kick yourself for not linking before. I also wonder if it is worth having a Management section within the forum? The Employment section may be the place for it, but I've noticed more wetware questions and discussion on dealing with SLT from a strategy and planning aspect, not a technical and support view. I found it interesting that there is only one mention of the book on the whole forum so has it mostly passed us by or just found to not be relevant?

Kids are different I guess. 2 different schools and not had an issue with the ear pads. If they are going to rip the ear pads off then they are going to do that with any headphones. Personally I see that as a classroom management issue.

Never had any complaints about being uncomfortable and they do adjust, but I'm sure for an hour lesson they will suffice. Never noticed the ear pads getting dirty but they are silicone so a quick wipe should bring them up nicely. They need some effort to be taken off but they are meant to be removable so you can get them back on and you can buy replacements so you don't have to bin the whole headphone because you have no ear pads. We got the mic to cover all bases. I doubt they get made majorly but at one point the pupils were doing voice overs so they could at least do it. The mics are in solid booms so you would have to purposely try and bend it off or stamp on them to break. But this does mean no adjustment to get the best clarity Again never had an issue with the volume being broken, but we aren't a high breakage school. The biggest issue is getting called up because there is no sound and it is because the headphones volume is all the way down. You just get into a habit of turning the wheel at least a turn and most of the teachers now know to try this.

We go for the rugged ones that were available from Hills but now imported by Crusader. Available as: Double plug 4 pole plug Give them a buzz as they can do classroom sets for differing numbers than shown on the website. I got a couple of sets of 20, come in a tub and with bags.

Pass to your Police liaison, they may have had dealings with this 'group' or something similar before. Definitely sounds like an amateur hunter but part of me feels it would be remiss not to get the info and speak to the child in question. I imagine by photo they mean screenshot. If you get the OK from the police, maybe setup a dummy email account that if it turns out to be a scam the address can be closed. If you are feeling particularly paranoid maybe only access that email and any attachments from a fresh account with no admin rights. EDIT: I wondered about how they would know to contact the right school but it could be they were asked about it or just gave the school name out which would be a concern on its own.

We did get an ASUS Chromebook Tablet CT100PA that is quite nice. Chromebook features with tablet form. Though I'm not sure ChromeOS is quite ready for tablet input it is a nice tablet.

Problem is it is very subjective and depends on the requirements of the school and what they are trying to convey. When we were trawling sites Brambletye came up as one people liked. Wellington College often gets cited as a nice website. Eastbourne College is a nice graphical site.

We got a nice batch of Samsung Tab A (2018)s that have gone down well. We got them from Haptic. There is a slightly smaller 2019 version but it only had 2GB RAM. We use InTune as our MDM.

This was going to be my suggestion, find a Uni that has done it close by that would be willing to work with you or a company that specialises. May seem overkill but there are lots of things to cover doing one of these.

My understanding is that they are 3 year pricing agreements, but you pay annually to give you the option to increase or decrease the amounts.

We had this issue with pupils. They don't always use the same device so it couldn't be guaranteed that they would get the file next time. Then there is the classic issue of a pupil coming to us 4 weeks later so no hope in heck of finding it. We managed to replicate the issue and speed of logging off.

But those issues would be the same in any Office suite. As you say they were made for printing, not being used online. That isn't an issue with not being GSuite Classroom aware, it is an issue with being old resources. Most resources made now are natively online, rather than documents dumped in a VLE or a shared drive. So to use with Google Classroom you would link to the resource page.

Never had an issue with Gdocs reading Word documents. Worst case is if they have some advanced features used but teaching resources don't tend to do that. Obviously macros won't work, but that isn't a bad thing! If there are issues you'll just have to make staff aware they need to start getting better quality resources.

... Huh?

As ever, depends on the school, the teachers, the management and the IT department. We went the same as TwistedHelixis, the having mapped drives so the staff and pupils knew no difference was a big positive though. And in fact we had to try and slow some staff down as they were starting to share files to collaborate before we had got all the files transferred, they were starting to store files in the new shared areas before we had them fully sorted and some people were getting a bit cloud happy. This made the more hesitant staff scared as it was all changing too quickly for them and we had to make a big announcement about what things weren't changing and our timetable as the rumours started flying, like how the shared areas were going to disappear next week!!