NotSoFast

Another vote for Edulink. It's great.

I just upload our SIMS CSV files to Drive every night using GAM with a scheduled task. It works flawlessly. I wish I could find a way to do the same with OneDrive and Power BI!

And another thumbs up for Edulink. We were moved onto SIMS 12 months ago by our trust, having been used to a cloud MIS (Progresso). Edulink has made it relatively painless and in many ways is an upgrade. Most staff don't even have a SIMS login. Their support is brilliant.

It's "advanced" GAM. It's got quite a few more features.

I'd be surprised if this wasn't possible with Advanced GAM. The guy who wrote it, Ross Scroggs, is very active and helpful on the Google Group. He's done a couple of Meets with me before to figure out how to do things I needed. https://groups.google.com/g/google-apps-manager/

I never got it running on my own machine. We have it running on the server itself, which I go onto if I need to edit the batch files/scheduled tasks (almost never).

Same here. It works really well.

Ours has been fine, touch wood...

Never heard of it. Tell me more...

This is a little worrying. I think there is a reasonable chance we'll need to do some remote learning next term and we've seen recording these as a vital safeguarding tool. Does anyone have a feel for pricing on the "Teaching and Learning Plus" edition? Or is there anyone here from Google who can comment on whether the free access would be continued in the event of further lockdowns? Alternatively, has anyone got a workaround - maybe a screen recorder I suppose?

I thought gov.notify just handled SMS. What am I missing?

You could create a teacher user and add them to all classes. This way they can view any work they like. GAM can do this very quickly. That said, I'm pretty sure inspectors won't expect you to have special systems in place just for them. The question might be "How do teachers check students' work? Can I see?" Alternatively, they may get the students to show them their work during a lesson.

We set it up in September. Their support team were great and checked it before we sent the invite. We did have a problem where the new email address we used to send invites, notifications etc got identified by Google as potential spam, but that resolved itself over a week or so. I'd probably suggest sending a few invites at a time to let Google (we use Gmail) realise it's genuine. Our parents love it now. Nothing but positive feedback.

It may not be an option for you, but Google Data Studio is free.

The new Edexcel GCSE requires you to program "live" under exam conditions. There's no coursework in any GCSE CS spec now.

Yes, we've had some people unable to connect over RDP today.

Update: still broken. I assume it's the same for others on the thread?

We are in the same boat. ESS tried to blame it on us /Edulink for a while. They've now accepted it's a problem they need to fix, but don't yet know what is causing it.

Just to answer my own question, for anyone who may come and look, the issue appears to have been with hosted SIMS. We'll see how things go next week but it looks like it's been resolved.

We have been using a combination of hosted SIMS and Edulink since the start of term (we were on Progresso). It started off OK, then got slow, then got unusable. It's only the bits that make live calls to SIMS - all the rest is fine. Edulink say it's SIMS; ESS say it's Edulink. We've tried turning all other services off on the 3rd party connector box, restarting it and loading up SIMS.net. It has remained very slow (4.5 mins to log in, 1 min to load a register) but ESS have dialed in, kept testing it and that side of things is a bit quicker now. Edulink connects, but takes a long time to get to registers and sometimes times out. I suppose I'm asking if anyone else has Edulink working well with hosted SIMS, if so, were there any problems in setting it up? Equally, has anyone else had problems with this setup?

You can check guardians, delete them and send invites with GAM, if you're looking for a tool to do lots.

Starting point here. https://groups.google.com/g/google-apps-manager/c/ATbblIIzTjs

I think this would be possible with GAM. I'd be tempted to ask for help on the GAM Google Group. The guy who developed Advanced GAM, Ross Scroggs, has helped me out several times.

Google Data Studio is free and would work. I've used it for dashboards open to all members of the "Staff" group at school, but if you wanted different levels of access there are two alternatives. You can use row level security (although I never have) or just make different dashboards for different user groups. I looked at Power BI but we're a Google school and there's no benefit as far as I can see in paying the £1.70 per month per user for access.

Me please!