Primus

Similar here - AQA recently emailed exams officers asking for their domain/address to be whitelisted - it's very very frustrating.

AQA have had their DMARC set to none for well over a year now.

NCSC Mail Check is a brilliant resource.

Sorry - hopefully it didn't come across as too harsh! With threads like this - /forums/general-chat/238015-school-cyber-attacks-up-55-year-year.html - we're doing ourselves no favours if we try to be "too helpful" by keeping old and unsupported devices running. We all have our battles with finance, we're not there yet with Windows 11 and we'll be right down to the wire on it - I am fully prepared to remove PCs that aren't Windows 11 compatible after the cut off date or simply convert them to ChromeOS Flex (we have so many Chrome licences still from the DfE scheme - not sure how as they were issued 1:1 for devices but we do!) - they won't be left running Windows 10. This is the risk you take when you do things like run a device beyond EOL or run Windows 11 on unsupported hardware - you come in one day and everything is broken. Obviously prices have gone up, but we're not seeing a doubling in the price of Chromebooks - they're still the cheapest device that actually works by far and there's bargains to be had - XMA recently had hundreds of the Dell 3110 Chromebooks for just £100 each - they don't go EOL until June 2031!

We've taken the view that since DfE supplied filtering on the Covid devices this was an indication of their expectation. We provide Chromebooks that are restricted to school accounts and are therefore filtered and monitored. We deprovision devices from our Google tenant when LAC students leave as the device is retained by them. I'd definitely be speaking to the secondary school they're going to - you want them to have a device that works when they get there - given how late in the day it is now I'd even suggest waiting and letting the secondary school get it for them - in our case they'd get a brand new Chromebook with Smoothwall filtering and monitoring included for the 5 (or 7) years they're with us. It's worth remembering that LAC students can be some of the most vulnerable - handing them an unfiltered/unmonitored device might not be wise.

How do you mean?

I'm really surprised so many members are running devices that haven't had an OS update in years - are you also running Windows 7? - - - Updated - - - Would you not just expect Google to point you to their EOL policy?

Are you saying the previously shared steps now no longer work?

They’ve sent an email this evening to exams officers. It’s total nonsense as the accessibility software won’t do what they say it will.

Even though it's a potential breach of the Equality Act as it disadvantages people with a disability?

Just on the version of Windows - confusingly Education Pro is actually a lower version than Education. Education = Enterprise Education Pro = Pro.

Has anyone managed to speak to AQA?

We're seeing some issues with Google services this morning - I think a lot of it is on the authentication side but I might be wrong.

Just to follow this up - in the worst case scenario it wouldn't be SLT's call - a failure of a lockdown process/system could lead to serious injury or worse with all the external scrutiny that that would bring.

If you can afford it, Lumio (Smart's online version of Notebook) works pretty well.

Thanks - PM sent!

We're still not - we opened a ticket and were asked to ensure we had a backup before applying it but it still isn't appearing.

Are releases staggered as we're still showing Leeds-68 as the latest version?

NCSC say the issue is with them and not Google. I have suggested they stop notifying everyone every thirty minutes until they fix their known issue.

NCSC need to seriously tone it down - by all means let me know but repeatedly spamming the life out of me is going to lead to me completely unsubcribing.

Don't forget that Z440 isn't Windows 11 compatible - it is old now so you'd not just be replacing it to give yourself the shiny things!

We've seen similar happen this week and had to turn off the content modification actions for staff to fix it.

Do the NAS options keep Google file formats in their native original format as I'm pretty sure the Synology Google backup converts everything to MS Office files and can break content in more complicated documents?

If you already have NetSupport School it supports Chromebooks and can use Google Classroom to populate the classes even if the devices roam.

The forum is heavily weighted to discussion relating to implementing tech in schools...