cooper549

The classrooms is going to get a replacement board with a doubt, you're right and its not worth the money to repair it at all. The last few boards I've bought from ViewSonic have been around £1300 to £1900 depending on the model and they do all the same stuff and they've been great so far. Even their management side whilst basic in some respects, is great in the fact its been a one off fee for each board. I only really asked on here because I'd rather know if there's anything we could do/change/replace to just give it its last lease of life before it ends up e-waste. And to be honest, I'll put up with it going dim on the wall every so often so I can replace my own antiquated whiteboard in the office. Heck, I'd even tear the thing apart and see if we could separate the substrate to have a bodged see through screen when it finally dies as its not going to end up anywhere else but the e-waste bin.

Hi, I've got an older Promethean AP6-70 screen I'm having some issues with, its randomly started turning off the backlight for no reason. We've factory reset the board and done some firmware updates as recommended after speaking with promethean support, but unfortunately they now want £2500 to replace the board. Which to me is a little pricey all things considered (I've been buying ViewSonic panels recently and they've been amazing in comparison and these are half the cost so the classroom will get one of these instead) But the funny thing with it is, the backlight will come back on if you press a button on the front, but not by physically tapping the screen We've tried different cables on different inputs too which made no difference, but we can almost time it to the minute that it seems to go out after 30 minutes. All the power save options have been turned off or reset to factory defaults too with no change to the behaviour We've done the old torch against the glass and confirmed it is only the backlight that seems to go off as we can still see videos or the mouse cursor moving when we do this. Has anyone else ever come across an issue like this with their promethean boards or perhaps any other screen and what was your experience or how did you resolve it. Thanks in advance!

That's a cost to replace the switches and new fibre links between cabinets. We've had someone out to look at the wifi and we've got good coverage across the school, the placement of AP's was well considered when it was installed, they all run back on gigabits links and even the setup of the unifi network was setup correctly with just a couple of tweaks to make. But unfortunately, after making the changes, it hasn't made much of difference. So our idea is to replace the switches with new ones with fibre between all the Cabs and have a good old sort out, most of the switches and such have very basic setup and nothing is too complicated but it was pretty much all done nearly 10+ years ago (much longer than I've been at the school) The Wi-Fi might respond much better once that's all sorted, but to be honest, I think ill move away from Unifi regardless, We've had too many AP's just randomly die for no reason, to the point I've had to upgrade firmware through the JTAG header on the AP themselves to revive them.

We are exactly the same, we are going through the process now of looking at replacing all the WIFI (currently running unifi AP's with no end of issues) and switches with a Meraki system throughout and are just waiting for pricing back. We were given an 'off the shelf' price of around £200,000 which obviously scared the life out of most of the finance department, but have since had some very favourable pricing at around just less than half of that. Because of our situation, I did ask if we invested ourselves would be able to claim back retrospectively and the answer was a definite no, so even if we were picked for the funding, I'm not exactly sure what we would spend it on now if we were to go ahead with the project this year.

I've managed to email an email that was mentioned in one of the earlier links to a spam thread. I got a response back pretty quickly telling me that the scheme has been expanded to run for the next 3 years as it was previously just a limited pilot. Schools should be receiving an email in the coming weeks around May and will be told if they qualify and also what year they will be able to apply for their funding. So you could potentially be told your eligible this year, but only allowed to apply for your funding in 2024.

Yeah, I figured as much, I'm just worried we've possibly missed it, or ignored it like others seem to have. Trying to go back and see if we have had anything in the past, but all I've turned up myself so far is companies sending marketing stuff about it.

Unfortunately, I have also been tasked with replacing our Wi-Fi and network, we bit the bullet and invested in the Meraki AP's ourselves but have only just been told about the connect the classroom process, one of the approved suppliers I spoke to though did they say where offering another round of this as there was apparently funding still left for the project so advised to try and get in touch and see if we could get approved. The only trouble is, like most, we don't seem to have any emails or contact details of this at all, and there doesn't seem to be much turned up on google either. Can anyone PM me some contact details so we can at least see what the crack is and if we're too late to the party? Thanks Edits: corrected a few spelling mistakes

Hi all, we seemed to have been tasked at looking into some science lab asset management software and wondered if anyone else ever been asked the same or if anyone could point me in the right direction. I have a little google and obviously there is one that comes up called Lab expert, however I'm aware this is just a Microsoft access db that each client shares and was wondering if there was anything else available as an alternative that's possibly web based and can be accessed on tablets and such. Thanks

In the end we couldn't get generic 125khz cards working. Apparently Paxton cards have a 'hidden' encoding to them which allows them to be read by the official desktop reader and the doors. You can get a devices which will clone cards and I believe they may even clone the hidden part too, but I haven't tested this myself and the ones that cloned cards like for like are almost useless as they just copied the card as a whole a believe and would make all cards have the same 'ID' number as it where. We did have a company that said they could clone cards and make them unique and cheaper than than the normal cards, but in the end they just sent us original Paxton ones for a discounted price, I think they thought I was an idiot (although they were still cheaper than the price we usually paid so win/win) In the end it's was far easier to wage a bidding war for our business between companies and having the cards get cheaper and cheaper than it is to invest the time into being able to clone unique Paxton cards effectively.

Just wanted to add and bump this thread as I am currently going through this. The DNAME method didn't work, although it does go through to YouTube and load, it then tells me I'm offline and wont load any videos. the check content restrictions page refuses to load at all. We also have an XG firewall and both safe search and YouTube restricted modes were turned off (We completely blocked YouTube for pupils previously, and it was only teachers using it to embed videos in to PP) When also pinging the domain restrict.youtube.com, I have had it return numerous different IP addresses and I don't think I have seen the one mentioned in the document, so I'm wondering if anything has changed slightly also as This doesn't appear to be as simple as most people make out for me. I also want to add that when performing the check on our DC's, it appears to work all checks return the strict result as expected, just any other computer on the network doesn't.

In the teams admin centre, Under 'Teams Apps' > 'Setup Policies' Create a new policy for your staff and then add the insight app to the list. I found I had to move it up the list in order for it to show all the time as it was hidden under files at first. Save your policy and add to staff members as required, annoyingly you can't assign it to a group like meeting policies, but you could PowerShell it to multiple users if needed once its setup. The last little caveat is that it doesn't appear to show all the classes for us and I'm yet to figure out why, as we have some faculty leaders who are owners of quiet a few teams, yet only a handful are showing (I counted 14, so its not like a hard limit of 10). So I'm not sure if they have to add it to the team first in order for it to show in this list, more searching/testing is required. Alternatively, I believe you can just add it to the org default, but depending on if you have app policies in place, the tab could show for students. However, I don't believe it gives them any information as they are not owners of any teams, although I probably wouldn't recommend this way, its just a very quick and dirty way to get it to appear.

This all sounds pretty promising, and looks like something I might start having a look at myself, having never used graph at all to be honest so it'll be a nice time to learn something new. One thing I also found which is tucked away in the teams settings which I have looked at before and forgotten about, but in the teams admin centre, you can pin the insights app to the side bar for everyone. This then gives an list view of a teachers classes including basic stats on engagement and activity, No sooner had I done this, and most staff are now surprisingly far more involved and just want this as it's now at their fingertips somewhat instantly rather than a report we generate which we seem to have to wait 2 days for the data to be fully available in the admin centre. This just goes to show that, what some people say they want and what they actually need is very, very different.

We had looked at the insight app you can add to each team, which does provide what we want. But relies on teaching staff to feed back the data which most won't do. Nor do SLT want to give them any additional work in providing this feedback, despite this possibly being the only method of doing so. It would be brilliant if they could provide a more detailed dashboard that essentially provides the Insight tab in the admin centre for the whole school, which can be filtered and such as necessary to provide the reports as needed, but they seem to insist on giving it to the lowest level of user and not the ones who seemingly get asked for the information. Again, I know some reports are available in the security and compliance centre, but these also don't seem to differentiate whether a user is just logged into a mobile app or whether they are actively engaging in teams.

Hi all, With all the recent announcements about student home learning and such, I have been tasked with finding a way to track student engagement with online learning and such. We use Microsoft O365 and Teams as the main platforms. Simply, we would like an accurate report of those who have not logged in within a defined date period. previously we have made this report ourselves from the reports in the admin dashboard and logs within the azure dashboard, as we have found them to be somewhat unreliable as students have appeared on them occasionally, who have been engaging with teachers. A while back I had seen something potentially along the lines of advanced reporting for this type of thing, but can no longer find the original link or article I read about this, but I do remember it was more specifically aimed at those who have E5/A5 licenses within Office365, and I don't want to go down this line and spend a ton of money on licenses that might not give me what I need. Has anyone else been asked for this type of information, as its coming from our deputy head as a method of safeguarding to ensure kids are logging in and continuing to engage rather than just being left aside and not being noticed. Thanks Adam

You don't need to pay to use SIMS ID to sync to SDS, It was a free license when we used it, unless they have started charging. If you already have SIMS ID you can check in the settings there should be some options for office 365 and groups available. Our problem was with SIMS ID and the way it seemed to interpret domains for its part in the SDS sync, It never seemed to match for multiple domains/subdomains. For example, The staff a domain was along the lines of '[email protected]' but the students were '[email protected]' and for some reason SIMS ID treated these separately despite them stating on their documentation and support if you use the top 'domain.com' it should match any sub-domains. But because this never worked for us, we had to self-onboard each time for each domain when we needed to sync. I can't imagine everyone has this issue as it it seem very niche, but it was quite problematic for us, and the only thing I honestly think that would've fixed our issue was starting from scratch, but we had never used SIMS ID before, so we were a brand new installation to begin with and it happened right from start.