rbjames

Sorry - everything got amazingly busy and I was distracted. Thank you for your replies. To answer questions, currently we have stage boxes with xlr cables running straight to the sound room. We do also already have a cat5 cable up to the room from the floor which we attempted to use to provide an hdmi feed from the same stage box although we couldn't get a reliable signal so it's currently dormant and could be repurposed for a different stage box if required. I'm not a beginner with mixers - I ran a studiolive series 3 digital mixer at home and played around a lot with multitrack recording my drum kit and other bits and pieces. Overkill but was good experience. I would like a desk that I can use in an after school activity to teach some of our older pupils about the basics of mixing (compression/eq/reverb etc.) and multitrack recording into one of our macs on Logic. There's also a big pressure to future proof. I have experience with the Behringer X32 range but, although still perfectly capable, it is now a little old and so I'm tempted by the Wing which will likely be more relevant in 10 years (which is how long we're looking to allow for). A lot of flexibility and a touch screen to get the students excited.

Hi, We're looking to replace our failing analogue mixer with a digital one and we need some cabling running. I've been asked to put together a quote - can people recommend installation companies who specialise in this? Thanks, Richard

Hi, We're trying to use SFTP to create classes/students etc in Apple School Manager. I'd like to have the class names taken from our MIS and the names have a '/' in them (eg 3TL/Co). Does anyone know how to format the csv files to get that character uploaded? I've been working with Salamander on it for several hours now with no real luck. If I create classes manually (or rename them one by one) then I can get the character in but we just can't seem to do it from the csv file. I'd rather not have to change 191 classes by hand. We've tried substituting / for \/ with no luck. Any ideas very welcome. Thanks, Richard

Yes I guess that would be the best way. I'm presuming I'd need a csv file at least with the following fields: First Name Surname Basic office 365 generated password (with 'force user to change password on next login') Only sharepoint license assigned Location UK Add to 'Parents' group. I'm thinking of using a script similar to the one described on this page. Use PowerShell to Create Bulk Users for Office 365 - Hey, Scripting Guy! Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs Does that sound sensible? Does anyone else use this strategy for parent file access?

Any update on this? Just trying to figure out the same feature.

It's only a seed of an idea but has anyone considered onenote instead of Notebook? My main gripe is how long Notebook takes to load - I've tried the fastest computer I could find and notebook took longer to load than the windows 7 did. We're also in the process of moving people over to office 365 for file sharing and resources so onenote would fit well into this environment for file searching and just general file opening within the browser. Richard From further reading I spotted this: http://emrefirat.edublogs.org/2012/10/20/onenote/ ...but I don't know whether anyone else on this board is also working with this and could add to what he said.

Hi, I've been working on a new intranet for our school using Sharepoint 2013 online. I know that it's a beast of a system and can be very confusing. What I'd like to do is come up with a visual way of explaining the concepts and this is what I've come up with. I've set up team sites for admin, academic and pupils with sub sites by subject and estates, school resources etc. I'm thinking of tackling the subjects part as this will be most relevant to our academic staff who I feel are the ones that will need convincing the most. Our admin staff are used to using shared calendars and sharing files with several people and will (hopefully) see the benefit of it over just having a shared general folder which everyone can dump stuff in (which we have at the moment). What I'm considering is describing each subject as a room. The room will have a filing cabinet in (ie documents), a table (to represent a forum) and maybe even a secretary in the corner making a note of when document changes are made. A passcode to the room would be made on the noticeboard in the staff room (as everyone can walk into the room ie they're visitors) but only the members will have a code to the filing cabinet. The colour of the walls will equate to the template. Just before a change to a document is made, the secretary makes a photocopy and stables it to the back of the current version (which will have other documents already stapled ie versions). Picture libraries could just be pictures stuck to the wall and maybe if we have a site mailbox then it could just be represented as a letterbox in the door. Onedrive would just be a briefcase. I'm thinking I could come up with a 'before' diagram to represent how we do everything currently involving lots of photocopying and letterboxes and a huge filing cabinet with files in no particular order and describing onedrive as a briefcase. What do you reckon? If anyone has already visited this idea (or even come up with the visual representation) I'd be really interested to hear about whether it's worth pursuing. I know it will take me a while but if I can't convince people of the benefit then a lot of the intranet development time will go to waste.

Sorry - just found this in another post: SharePoint in School | Developing the use of SharePoint 2013 in a school context Ignore my question.

Hi all, I'm looking to create an intranet for our school. Primarily it needs to be a store for documents but further down the line we'd like to bring a few more features such as forums, room booking, support ticketing, basic blogs etc. https://stmartinsschool.sharepoint.com/Admin/ictprovisions/_layouts/15/guestaccess.aspx?guestaccesstoken=ok%2bzqTdilqPN7bNg5YKu0iiA5ay8v1ELzyUSf3pftOY%3d&docid=05e8a5ae21aae47e6b97aa94d5d8b10e0 I'm looking to set up subsites to follow the structure in the diagram above. Before I go through this process, does this look like a sensible way to do it (with subsites)? If anyone has any other ways they've implemented this kind of service I'd also be really interested. Thanks, Richard James St Martins School Northwood

Fingers crossed with that.

...but having used both macs and pcs for several years when it comes to handling music I know which one I'd trust more. No patch Tuesday update surprises or software/hardware compatibility issues. Admittedly my own personal opinion but everyone's entitled to one ;-)

Hi - one thing to add, though, would be which software you would use with it. Logic pro x is £140 where a similar solution on a windows box would be a fair amount more. Cubase springs to mind which is nearly £500. There's a good imac 27" here for £730 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Apple-iMac-27-Intel-Core-i7-2-8ghz-8GB-RAM-1TB-HD-WARRANTY-COLLECTION-ONLY-/321353309667?pt=UK_Computing_Apple_Desktops_CV&hash=item4ad2265de3 I'll concede that that pc is great value but when I looked just now no ssd was available and the max ram was 12gb. Richard

I think we just need to get some proper spam handling software. Just now moving over to office 365 so I'll worry about this later. Thanks, Richard

Hi, Does anyone know of a way to easily add a large group of email addresses to our Exchange 2013 whitelist? When new pupils join the school I'd like to add all of their parents' addresses but can't see a way to do it quickly. I found this article: How to set up safe senders and blocked senders in Office 365 but if there's a simple script that could be run to combine these commands that would be great. If I was proficient in powershell commands then I'd do it myself. But I'm not. Cheers Richard

Thank you Lee for your time with the essay :-) I completely agree with most of what you say and we do indeed have 3 or 4 teachers who really embrace it. I know exactly what you mean about not using the IT teacher as one of the trainers - he doesn't use a smart board in any case. What I was thinking of doing after sending out the video on a Monday was to (light heatedly of course) approach the teachers and ask them how they'd used what they'd learnt in the video - it would be nice for me to be able to nag them for once! As it happens we're looking to set up a media club very soon so that's a great idea. I think it may well just a case of me learning the notebook software back to front and coming up with some videos. Once we start the media club we could even get the pupils to come up with training videos themselves and then they could also nag the staff! I'll let you know how I get on. Thanks again, Richard

Hi, After several staff moaning about how they don't use their smart boards for anything more than a glorified black board I've decided to set up weekly 'tips' emails. The idea is to have short (10 min max) videos showing how to do a certain task or use a certain feature of Notebook 11. There are plenty of videos on youtube but they vary in quality. Rather than pick ones out at random does anyone know of a coherent set that gradually cover all areas of using the software? I've looked on the Smart site and they only have about 5 2 minute videos on notebook 10. I also know Lynda.com is going to be doing a course on it (and about time) but if there is a free alternative it would be really good to know about. I know we can get in a Smart trainer but they're expensive and most of the teachers will have forgotten what they'd heard about within a week! At least with short videos they can see them several times and refer back to them in the future. Thanks, Richard James

Thanks for the advice villarica - worked fine. I hope they fix this problem asap. What a pain... Richard

Hi, I had one teacher saying that when they drag an interactive flash item onto the screen from the gallery, it isn't interactive. I checked and it is indeed the case. When the item is dragged into the notebook area you see the first frame (as it were) but clicking on it doesn't do anything. Has anybody else come across this? I'm fairly sure this has only happened since we moved over to windows 7. I also tried running notebook on a completely different computer with everything up to date (flash etc.) but still have the problem. Answers welcome. Thanks, Richard

Hi, I work in a school with 400 boys and about 50 staff. Currently we have in total about 130 computers - 40 laptops and the rest desktops. We're looking to virtualise the desktops so staff will be able to see their school desktop from home (and the other usual advantages). We've been quoted about £70k to get everything set up (2 big servers, software licensing and about 25 days of consultancy to include end user application testing with the new virtual environment). We're coming up next year for an ICT refresh when we'd normally buy additional desktops and retire some of the others (we have this planned for every 4 years with a budget of approx £40k). Do you think that it will be worth going down the virtual route and spend the money we would have put on the desktops to virtualising everything instead in the undestanding that over the longer term there will be a slight cost saving? I work part time here as the technician and the computers have so far been fairly reliable so people don't tend to be without computers ever for more than an hour which has happened maybe 3-4 times in the last 4 years. Any advice welcome, Richard