jthompson

May want to block the Google Doodle today. It's a collection of noisy arcade games. Blocking http://www.google.com/logos/2022/lawson/ seems to work.

You can switch user on a locked computer. I don't remember us doing anything to have to enable it, but I might be wrong. User switching seems like the sort of thing that would be enabled by default. Not allowing students to lock their computers feels to me like a recipe for pranking, and does rather go against the tide of best practice. If you've also got your computers going to sleep after a period of inactivity, you shouldn't end up with machines running all night because of locked users.

I know it hasn't and that it's just in a high orbit, but that picture gives an impression of it having missed and gone sailing by.

Careful. You might start a war.

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They offer a slightly-less-close-to-zero chance of a domestic entrant making inroads into the market.

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If it were me, I'd create a Staff ou and a Students ou with cohorts as ou's under that. For example, Students/Intake 2022. For your classes, you may want to use Google groups, so that pupils (and possibly staff, too) can belong to more than one class if needed. For leavers' accounts, place them in Staff/Leavers and Students/Leavers respectively, so that they're out of the way and not being listed alongside your active users.

Our student username convention includes the cohort intake year (calendar year in which that cohort started at the school), whereas our MIS report for new starters will include the year group (year 10, year 11, etc.). To generate a username, I wrote the following couple of PowerShell functions. Get-CohortIntakeYear computes a student's cohort intake year, based on their current year group and the current date. The $baseYearGroup value will need to be set to whatever year group your school starts at (e.g. year 7). The Generate-StudentUsername function then makes use of the ouput of that in constructing a username. This function would obviously need to be adapted to whatever username convention you need it to produce. # Function to compute cohort's intake year from it's current year group. # Returns an integer value of the intake year (yyyy). # Year group for a cohort is year 9, year 10, etc. and will therefore change over time for a particular cohort. # Intake year is the year that a cohort would have first started attending the school, so will therefore not change over time. function Get-CohortIntakeYear { [CmdletBinding()] param( [Parameter(Mandatory)] [ValidateSet(7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14)] [int] $YearGroup ) [int]$baseYearGroup = 7 # lowest year group in the school. [int]$month = Get-Date -Format MM [int]$year = Get-Date -Format yyyy if ($month -gt 8) { # August to December $cohortIntakeYear = $year - ($YearGroup - $baseYearGroup) } else { # January to July $cohortIntakeYear = $year - 1 - ($yeargroup - $baseYearGroup) } return $cohortIntakeYear } # Function to generate a student username. # Takes as input a student's first name, last name, admission number and cohort intake year. # Returns a string which is the username. # Username convention is {cohort intake year (2 digits)}{legal surname (12 chars, spaces removed)}{legal forename (1 char)}{admission number (last 2 chars)} function Generate-StudentUsername { [CmdletBinding()] param( [Parameter(Mandatory)] [string] $FirstName, [Parameter(Mandatory)] [string] $LastName, [Parameter(Mandatory)] [string] $AdmissionNumber, [Parameter(Mandatory)] [string] $cohortIntakeYear ) # Remove any spaces from last name and then limit length to max 12 characters $LastNameNoSpace = $LastName -replace '\s','' if ($LastNameNoSpace.length -gt 12) { $LastNameTrunc = $LastNameNoSpace.substring(0,12) } else { $LastNameTrunc = $LastNameNoSpace } # Username is 2 digit intake year plus up to 12 chars of surname (after removing any spaces) plus first initial plus final two digits of the admission number. $username = $cohortIntakeYear.substring($cohortIntakeYear.length - 2) + $LastNameTrunc + $FirstName.substring(0,1) + $AdmissionNumber.substring($AdmissionNumber.length - 2) return $username }

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Have they done the TLI burn yet? It looks like it from the telemetry but I wouldn't have expected that so soon after launch.

Ah yes, of course. That would make sense. Windows 10 21H2 and 22H2 here.

It worked! That's a big rocket.

+1 for EduLink One. Can't remember if they're a SIMS-only affair or not, though.

Isn't IE11 automatically unfindable and unrunnable these days anyway? Seems strange that you would need to go to such trouble. If you want to set Chrome as the default browser for everyone, the Group Policy guidance here works a treat - https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7009292?hl=en

A bit surprised that people don't want to allow shutdowns. I quite like that students are shutting computers down as it gets the update compliance numbers up faster! The time taken to cold boot these days doesn't really make it worth the effort to drill the students to not shut down. We've never really gone for enforcing rules around it, so YMMV under a different school culture. Having AIO PCs has simplified things a lot, where we used to have monitors being turned off to save power, with the actual computers behind them being left on. Panel locking monitor OSD controls is a good idea though. If your students are anything like ours, they love to ramp up the brightness level and fiddle with contrast/colours so that the power usage is way higher than it necessarily needs to be. The Dell panel locks have been defeated here, though, so I still find myself restoring factory defaults quite often. Just one of the reasons why I like having AIOs.

Perhaps some kind of DNS-based verification could take place to prove ownership?

I think it instructs Office to hand URL opening duties straight over to the system (so to the default browser), rather than it attempting to handle it itself and upsetting sites by looking too much like crummy old IE.

One view posited in the BBC doc was that all of Musk's businesses were part of the plan to colonise Mars: rocketry, solar power, large scale battery storage, electric vehicles, tunnel construction. Makes sense, but I'm wondering where Twitter fits in to that. I guess Mars will need data centres and Internet engineering.

I would recommend not force installing and instead just making it an optional install for the users who want it. Add the extension to Admin > Devices > Chrome > Apps & extensions > Users & browsers > OU, set it to Allow install and enable to option to include in the Chrome Web Store collection. When users go to the Chrome Web Store, they'll see and option near the top of the lefthand menu called "For School Name" which will list any extensions that you've opted to include in the collection. Also worth setting the global allow/block mode to one of the "Block all" options if you haven't already. Admin > Devices > Chrome > Apps & extensions > Users & browsers > OU > Additional settings > Allow/block mode. Then you'll want to set the equivalent in Group Policy (Computer Configuration > Policies > Admministrative Templates > Google > Google Chrome > Extensions > "Block external extensions from being installed" and "Configure extension installation allow list").

I don't know that we do anything like that. If we do, it'll be the site team doing it. Off the top of my head, moving that info from Access to a Google Sheets file with an AppSheet front end might have some legs. You could then just circulate a standard email to everyone with a link to the AppSheet app, which will then take care of who sees what records. AppSheet is basically the Google version of Access.

I guess you just read it in English, only louder and slower.