webby74

I totally missed this news! This make more sense now 🤦‍♂️ We already have a ban in place. Phone are not allowed to be seen anywhere on school ground. Students are allowed to bring them in to school. We are a secondary school, with a large catchment and a lot of students traveling on public and school transport. Head is amending policy to adapt to law I believe. We are looking into only dumb phones and or pouches. I did consider 2FA Keys for those who cannot work it out how to set it up. I know that it isn't specifically MFA for Students isn't a requirement at present, but we've had student accounts hacked and had a Cyber Attack last year (Luckily caught very early, but still)

Hi All Looking for some advice on this and how schools handle it. The Head has asked me what other schools do. This issue isn't really technical. We have started rolling out MFA for Students (M365), we have conditional access set up so they never need to authenticate when at school. We have sent instructions home to parents on how to set Authenticator App, the students have had lessons on it. However, we had a small number of students who have struggled to set this up at home. The easiest solution, is to bring their phones to IT and using a device connected to our secondary broadband, we assisted them in setting up. Each time this has happened it just a case of us reseting their authentication and setting it up again and guiding them through it. We've rolled it out to two year groups so far and getting a couple of requests per day. Now, the Head has announced recently that they are implementing a Mobile Phone Ban from Jan 2027, with the exact details still being finalised. Thus making it difficult to assist when they cannot bring their phone in. So my question is this. Have you rolled out MFA for Students? If so how do you support students who struggled to set it up? And if your school have or is going to ban phones how are you going to support users who are struggling? My thoughts are we try support remotely, resetting, offering guidance, but if all else fails the student gets permission to bring their phone in so we can resolve. All advice and guidance welcome.

The staff member who used to be responsible for Audio has left and it has fallen to IT to manage. We don't have experience in this area, but need to manage it. We have wireless Mics in the hall, a lapel/headset and a hand hold mic. However it can be temperamental. We had staff and visitors say that it cuts out. We've tried adjusting levels and gain but it doesn't completely resolve issues. I think it can be sometimes partly down to the user and technique. We had visitor recently who did some singing and it could not cope. We have some old stage drop mics that don't seemed to work great either. What I'm looking for is a supplier/installer who could come out and meet with IT and Performing Arts dept and discuss our needs and give advice.

Hi We just had our hall Audio Visual setup redone. It's all working well for visual, but we could do better for our Microphone setup. We have a Wireless Microphone setup that was donated to the school, but it not perfect and can be temperamental. Looking to add a better solution that would work for Assemblies, Visitors and school productions. Can anyone recommend a good installer? Based in Hampshire, south coast. Many thanks

Hi All We have just got an upgrade to our cashless system and use biometrics. The new update is much quicker in registering biometrics, and I have been asked to review the process for the new intake at the start of the new academic year. Can I ask... When do you do biometrics at the start of new academic year? How do you gather parental consent? Currently, we have an online method of parental consent and a form in Planners for parents to sign. We used to generate a PIN for all new Year 7s (as say we, I mean me, and it was a painfully time consuming thing) Then at the end of the Year 7s first week, when all the methods were collated we did all year 7s in one go. Often finding that we couldn't do everyone, as either the form wasn't signed in planners yet or parents haven't done it online. Meaning we are often mopping up the students who eventually get it signed for several weeks. Grateful for how you do..IT? Andrew

Hi All We have just purchased Parents Evening System from School Cloud. It is our first Parents Evening tonight in fact. Now we went for the Video option, for obvious reasons, but have now been told that all staff should disable/cover their camera due to "safeguarding" reasons. This comes from our DSL. Bit puzzled by this as it video conference with Teachers and Parents, not students. Anyone else doing this?

Yep we are. Cannot load specific pages with admin centre. Having to log off and back in again! I have got loads to do within Admin Centre too... Plus Teams Reports isn't loading data from yesterday either.

Yes, I watched her type it in myself. I have also just tried it on my Mac with her credentials and it works fine. So must be related to her mac??

Hi All Got a weird one here. I have a Governor who is using Teams for meetings and can't seem use the Mac App. I have remote in and she get a prompt when it opens to enter her email address (but not her password) then gets a screen that says "Your not on teams yet, but you can set it up for your Organisation" and a sign in button. If she clicks on this she gets routed to the website app. Now she has got a license, she can log into Teams via the web with no problem. She can also log into the phone app with no problems. It is just the mac app that the issue. I have reinstalled the app a couple of times along with deleting the relevant .plist file. Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks for the responses. We have sent out letter asking for consent for media usage, but before GDPR we have always had issue with getting a response. In the past it has always been opt out. So if we don't hear its ok. So technically we do have consent, but GDPR states we can no longer can do that.

Hi All Our Year 11 Head of year has created a fun little music video showing Year 11s and Staff which was shown at their Leavers assembly at the end last month. Everyone was told about it and were made aware of why they were being filmed and what it was for. Now that it has been shown a majority of pupils would like to have a copy. Normally we would share it on Facebook, or maybe give out a copy. Now though with GDPR we are thinking that we can't just share it as we may have done previously. The video was done over a month ago, and was purely for the assembly. My thought is that now if we do share it on Social media it will be in the public domain, and possibly we need to get consent to do so. And potentially not be able to share it not everyone consents to it being shared. Would like to get others view on this?

Ours are fresh installs from an image. Also happening on some newly imaged and some that were imaged ages ago. Just had some brand new Dells, Windows Pro preinstalled, and it happened on a couple of these whilst installing software.

Hi All We've had quite a few staff members complaining that their Windows 10 laptops are going to the lock screen randomly while they are working. They can be typing away or clicking the mouse and the computer will go to it's lock screen. Not pressing WIN + L or anything else to trigger it. They log back in and carry on. Initially when it first started to happen I thought it was user error, but more and more are mentioning to us, and we have now experienced this ourselves, while we've been working on laptops for unrelated support issues. It's happening to different brands of laptops, and also no lock screen group policy is set. Settings for laptop are set for lock screens due to inactivity, but this is happen while it is clearly being used. Any ideas? Andrew

We migrated this week too. Several calls that took well over an hour before someone answered. I understand from reading this thread that they are very busy, but for us the total lack of communication on progress has been terrible. A simple email to explain this would of helped! We had major issues over the past few weeks (on 2.3) with parents online balances not updating with purchases. Parents complaining about their children going without food, because their money had run out and parents were unaware. Our finance team were inundated with calls and emails. The solution was to upgrade, and so far it does seem to be running well and no complaints.

Hi Everyone Is there anyone in Hampshire using Hosted SIMS. We are considering moving to it here. Be interested in anyones experience with it, but been asked by SMT to find a school 'nearby' who are using it. Many thanks