CyberNerd

@localzuk at the end of the day mate you've gotta cut your cloth to fit. Personally I would say that access to reliable communications and learning materials (ie, the internet) trumps the majority of what we spend on in schools bar teachers. I don't think @Galway is being unfair; it is SLT responsibility, but it is your responsibility to give them options. Sometimes radical ones. Is the SIMS contract worth the money? Do you need an EES agreement ? Is the prized bit of software for X being used? Could we run our desktops for 7,10 years? what are the barriers to this?

It also depends how many you buy. If you have quotes for a few hundred the price goes down dramatically.

MSOffice is free? Send links please - I need to see this one!

MSOffice document live integration/editing. Office costs money.

Notwithstanding editing Office documents online, GAFE quite clearly handles all of the above, and to get that office functionality you have to pay.

I disagree, there are more education specific tools for GAFE than for O365. It puts better tools into the hands of the teachers and is actually platform independent, so doesn't really matter about what device you choose. GAFE is a better product for schools than Office365. It is more mature, has more features and costs less. The only reason you would choose O365 is if you have a personal preference.

That is quite an interesting discussion; one the one hand propriety software advocates security by obscurity, whereas opensource means that many can review the code. I don't think there is much evidence that one is more secure than the other, but there is some that Opensource code is now better quality.

wow, how on earth did that get past the business manager! They tried to pull that one here - LA offer a 100mb/s connection knowing full well they couldn't deliver it as it would be contended with other schools. Unfortunately, if you don't have any guaranteed level of service there isn't much you can do about it -there is a reason why it is "cheap".

Google, rostersync, salamander or SchoolsICT ? I was really just looking for an integration solution.

Allows students to create their own custom maps using Google maps. Google Apps update alerts: Create and manage custom maps in Google Drive https://support.google.com/drive/answer/6138031

@penfold_99 Yes it is the way all of our homeworks will be set from sept. It is already massively popular with staff. pm me or give me a call about the integration as would be interested.

Manual process for now, but it looks like automation should be forthcoming: Announcing rosterSync: A free Add-on for Google Classroom | New Visions for Public Schools Google for Education: New ways to integrate with Google Classroom

Have you set MX records?

Once they've logged into the PC it will store passwords on their PC profile.

Our workaround is to instruct staff to log directly into the browser; this will sync any settings and allow us to deploy apps directly. It works at home and on BYOD too so apps and links are consistent so makes support much easier.

This works pretty well: Free Splunk Downloads and Software Trials

Just a quick BUMP. Invite your SLT too.

Hello Edugeeks I've been away from Edugeek for the last 18 months, I've been very busy organising a massive 1800 1:1 Chromebook rollout. Apologies to anyone who messaged me like a year ago and received no reply. The SLT have decided to publicise the school and help our local partners with a launch event. Our launch event will be on the afternoon of 26th June where our key partners will be exhibiting and sharing their knowledge and expertise about how they are working with us to define our teaching and learning We have speakers from : Google Education, Discovery Education, XMA, Lenovo, Meru, Switchshop, Oxford University Press, East Sussex Library Services. The event is FREE and open to educators and tech staff along with parents and members from the local community. We would be grateful if any Edugeeks could make it to: Uckfield Community Technology College, East Sussex. Sign up free here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/chromebooks-for-learning-show-2015-registration-16578805654

We redirect to a SAML service and user's don't need the @domain.com. The downside is that it authenticates directly to our active directory using servers on site - so if the power is down at the school, no one can get their email,docs etc! We bought the service from SSOEasy SAML 2.0 and SAML 1.1 SSO Products - SSO Easy they were very helpful getting us set up, We previously used the single sign in module for Moodle/Google, but this broke when we updated to 2.x (I think it's fixed now but not tried it). THere are a number of other free options; simplesamlphp etc.

It's a collection of man pages. IMHO the man command is the only one you need:

I'd sure as hell prefer to look after 18,000 chromebooks vs 18,000 windows or apple laptops.

I'm finding I'm using more battery, but I installed a few more apps so it could be that....

We are currently using thinstation with chrome installed and it boots from PXE and works well for this purpose We have Citrix client installed but thinstation will also run the spice client which will offload some of the processing to the server. I'm eagerly awaiting Redhat to support Ovirt 3.3 which II understand has a native HTML5 spice client, so no local install needed.

I'm not sure if this is related to the problem described, but it sounds like it could be. In the office we refer to this issue as "Windows Cancer" that windows gets worse with age. Ars have some evidence: Exponential algorithm making Windows XP miserable could be fixed | Ars Technica

I'd expect steamos to be faster than stock Ubuntu especially on dedicated hardware because they are free to include specific patches to make things run better.