the_quick

Schools already are struggling with amount of people being off to self isolare/off sick and now you will dedicate a member of staff to conduct testing. The test itself is not very accurate - only to about 50-60% - so some people who will be tested and come negative, will be spreading. And we all seen how kids mingling together. It looks more like tabloid headline than actual good idea.

According to reddit posts and downdetector it is across the globe. That is going to be a fund day, if not fixed soon

Curently with Imper, had Lanschool before as they were very competitive priced. But impero matched Lanschool renewal and we find it is a better solution. Live view is much smoother on Impero.

We now got temp canteen staff. So it is open, but not in the full capacity

Here we have lots of schools shut or partially shut. 2 Arc school in near town are shut till new year, another one is closed to two years groups. In another town near us, one school just reopened after being closed for 2 weeks. So far we were very lucky, 3 cases among pupils. But this Monday all canteen staff had to self isolate for 2 weeks. Around here cases are on the raise. Wonder when it is going to hit us strongly.

If support for iSams from iris is going to be the same they provide for fasttrack canteen system, I wouldn't touch them.

Most of the country will be in tier 2 from next Wednesday, only 3 places in Tier 1 (Cornwall, Isle of Silly and Isle of Wight) - for us most pubs will remain shut. If you want to check for yourself here is the website: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/full-list-of-local-restriction-tiers-by-area

There are questions about PS5 outputting 120Hz at 1080p on monitors that have HDMI 1.4. It works through a normal PCs fine (120Hz is the limit), but apparently it doesn't work with PS5 and you need at least HDMI 2.0 input on the monitor. Not many on the market atm.

Still not really what I'm after. There should be easier admin classroom management , where as admin we can go to every classroom. add or remove people there etc. Would be great to see better reporting that parents can access/be given Will talk to EduLink if we can feed their homework page somehow from Google classroom

Managed to get GAM-XTD3 installed, pulled the data I want. IT teacher already shown interest, that she can try use Python to put the data in more presentable way. My goal would be to be able to deliver like a report to parents: this is the homework you child was given. Not sure if this is even doable and how to do it yet. So first we would need to get data for each students (separate CSV files ?) and compose it and maybe send as an email to parent each day. Best would be If I could linked it to Edulink somehow. Will give a go and see how far I can get.

thanks @dhicks, just updated my Gam to XTD3. Need to workout exact command for teachers/students, accidently just run main command gam print course-work and it found 4544 courses lol. Let us know when you have your python script ready for sharing, really interested. Parents keep complaining they cannot see live given homework. So at least we could produce that on demand.

Google Classroom is not perfect, and I wish there would be some admin control in G suite. Salamander helps and create lots of the automatically, but we had request from teachers if houde of house, department, subject can be added - these can be added with GAM/Salamander, we just wish it could be bit easier. Parents access is really lacking - we moved from classcharts homework to classroom. Google Classroom provide better tools for teachers and pupils, but parental access is much more limited. Daily (only for parents with a google account) or weekly digest is just not enough. Parents complain all the time that they cannot see all the homework. They need to ask their kids to show them - I know what is the problem? I think parents want to look without their kids knowing about it. I hope Google will improve it with time, as classroom surely is now more popular.

We are having exactly this discussions. In the past we had same as @mdrabble , we had problem where out staff treated school laptop as a home main computer - kids using it, parents for home banking etc. SLT didn't want to get into arguments how these should be used and they decided there no money to replace old ones. Now with covid we start looking at options and most likely we will start buying Chromebooks for staff. Apart from the ICT teachers - they need proper laptops. But I'm pushing for strong rules how these should be used at home. Will see...

Hi Guys and gals Just wonder what are your procedures for longer staff cover - we have some cover teachers starting today some are here for 4 weeks, some are for 6 month. Our HR has no problem settings up 6moth one on sims, but she is not very happy to set one for 4 weeks. Head of the department wants this teacher to have own email account, sims login and classcharts and so on. We use salamander that sync with sims, classcharts does the same. I can set them up manually, but as always no one ever tells me that cover teacher left and is not coming back - so very often account stays active for quite time - access to emails and so on. Not really happy with that arrangments. So how you set these people up on your system. P.S. Yes, was told today that new people are starting up and they need accounts now ! As always....

We had one for year 7 before half term. Mostly worked fine, technical problems mainly because of the user (mostly parents were bit wobbly). We used Google Meet and created calendar invites with GAM - each teacher has one long Google Meet and we just send link for the teacher, parents join for 5 minutes and left (or kicked out) - each parent had to ask to join, so one one just appeared in the meeting. But, for the next one apparently most parents requested just a phone call, not to keen on video conference. So now 20 webcams just sit and do nothing.

Hold on, I thought that requirement was from September? Our pupils were wearing them in corridors all the time.

Yes, they are

We have something weird happening now. 2 looked after students were gve chromebooks from LA. Both of them have LA google account created for students - on one of them we were able to add our school account for this kid (by "add person") on second one this options is locked - same authority. Those LA google accounts are mainly useless for those kids, as they don't have access to their google classrooms, emails and so on.

I wonder how well it is going to work with Schools open. I have no clue how big impact in spreading schools have. We are in fairly low covid infection county (something like 45 per 100k population) - you guys up north, how was it for you? Did you have many kids/adult isolating or being ill?

That is worrying, IRIS own Biostore/FastTrack canteen system. The support is just awful, very slow to react and never have enough people at the beginning of the year. This September I was on hold for around 30-40 minutes each time. I heard good things about iSams.

There is NO agreement about Greater Manchester - as your linked article says

Short lockdown or circuit break, whatever you want to call it has ,main purpose of buying time. The most important is how this time is used. It should be used to fix track and trace system, better testing regime - faster results. Yes, we know that we test more than any other country in Europe, but it should not be badge of honour - we test so many because previous measures failed and we have many cases and it is getting out of hand. We should be looking at countries that manage better and learn from them. Spring lock down helped in reducing amount of cases, to build up testing numbers, but other system to help to stop this pandemic didn't work - so in some way that time we bought was wasted. It is political, clearly - as govt now is not "following the science". I think short lockdown is a good idea, but it has to come with a good plan and support measures for those who going to be affected - business owners and workers. Otherwise there is really no point. I have sad feeling that a decision was made to give up and just pretend something is being done, as they don't want throw any more money at it.

I just seen first one that was given to "looked after" pupil - he got directly from LA and it has LA asset sticker and his login is with LA domain ([email protected]). We needed to set it up with our domain. So far we have received around 30 chromebooks from DfE - but it was sorted by LA and we were told these are ours to keep.

I think either the invite emails are not being sent or sky email system is blocking those. I have a parent I have sent invite twice already @sky.com - apparently no emails received. So it makes me wonder.

I'm sorry, but she was just stupid and inconsiderate - she went on the train after testing positive - despite months of messages that you have to self isolate when you get symptoms and especially if you are confirmed case. She can't blame on stress, she is just making excuses to her actions - she knew well enough that she should have isolated. She didn't, as she probably hope she will get away with it. No sympathy from me, should resign - shame she cannot be forced. Covid is not old people virus - we all know someone who was middle age and suffered badly from it. Yes, it might be not dangerous to under 18 and that what really make my blood boil. All the messages, schools are save for children etc. yes they are, as children mostly do not suffer from it, but what about the staff? Why the news outlets didn't point it out, that there are adults in schools??