MMPS

The built in app from Avantis was called 'ebook reader', they replaced that with another app called 'book reader', which has exactly the same icon. I noticed the old ebook reader app stopped working, so i remove the 'ebook reader' app from all the learnpad categories and replace it with the 'book reader' app. The default apps were already set to use book reader.

Microsoft Office mobile has Word, Excel and Powerpoint apps, but there doesn't seem to be any version of Publisher for Android tablets. I've looked on the Play store and can't seem to find any alternatives either. I've tried Google docs, WPS office, Polaris Office and several others, and they all seem to have variants of the 3 office apps, but nothing like Microsoft Publisher. I'm not looking for anything advanced, just something that students can create cards, posters and leaflets from a template. I've found a few good apps for ios like Publisher Master and Publisher Star. Can anyone recommend any similar App for Android tablets?

We have some staff who are obsessed with all things shiny and Apple, so they pushed the ICT co-ordinator to purchase iPads instead of expanding the Learnpads, despite my concerns about the lack of monitoring on iPads. If it works as well as the Learnpads, it would be an acceptable compromise, despite the extra cost. That said, with the introduction of shared iPads, it wouldn't surprise me if they changed their volume purchasing program from per device licensing to per user licensing.

Even though it says the requirements are iPad (3rd generation) or later, the shared iPad feature only works on iPad Pro, iPad Air 2 or iPad mini 4. From the looks of it, you must be enrolled in the Apple school manager program https://school.apple.com, which is replacing the device enrolment and volume purchasing program for schools. But it looks like its still in beta and only accepting enrolment from US schools at the moment (if anyone knows differently, please let us know) I haven't tried it with the existing device enrolment program yet, due to the slight technical hitch of having our iPads stolen last week

We experienced the same thing on our laptops, using Win 10 Pro build 10586. So I don't think this is related to Applocker or the Win 10 Edu release. I'm using classic shell as a temporary fix until this is resolved, and so far had no issues. Unfortunately, without full screen mode, classic shell isn't an option for our tablets, so they'll have to stick with 8.1 for now.

Does anyone know if these will be made available for schools to purchase? We're a primary school and I'm looking at Codebug or crumble controllers for our coding club (and maybe some upper ks2 lessons) I think the built in sensors and microbit website based on TouchDevelop would make these a better option.

For what you want, the iPod touch is probably your best option, its portability over even a 7 inch tablet makes it better for recording audio and video (we use them in foundation stage for evidence collection). However if you want something to run tablet apps too, I agree with gyg93, the HP slate 7 is probably best for what you want. Or if you want to stick with windows, try the Dell Venue 8 pro.

I've had the same conversations. We have Dell Vostro all-in-one desktops in the classrooms, and because the teachers profiles are quite large, they can take around a minute to log in. A teacher told me we should have got iMacs instead and boasted that the school where her fiancé is the ICT co-coordinator has imacs in the classroom and they boot in half the time. I asked if her fiancé's school has a tablet for every upper ks2 child, a set of laptops for every yeargroup and a wifi network that can handle them all being used at once. Interestingly they didn't have anything close to that, probably because they thought their budget was better spent on ever so slightly faster classroom PC's.

Our Learnpads take around 15 seconds, but they are older models, the newer models are probably much faster. We also have Surface RT tablets which boot to the login screen in around 5 seconds. But these are not joined to the domain. Which is fine if they are one-to-one tablets assigned to a each child like ours (all our year 5 and 6 children have a surface RT tablet each), but for shared tablets they need roaming profiles, network shares etc. Which drastically increase boot time. Boasting about how fast his MacBook boots at home is a completely pointless argument, I stuck an SSD and 8GB ram module into my old Dell netbook and installed Windows 8.1 on it and got it to boot to desktop in under 10 seconds. Once you include the download of a roaming profile, application of group policies, mapping of network shares and printers etc. the actual boot time of the machine itself is negligible.

if the policy isn't defined, then the default is that anyone with local admin rights on that PC can remotely shutdown. If you tick the box to define the policy, it will overwrite the defaults, and if there are no users selected, you are effectively denying everyone the right to remotely shutdown. Also, is anything suspicious showing up in task manager that may indicate a power saving software running in the background that is shutting them down?

If it's happening on multiple PC's at the same time, it does look like someone is running the remote shutdown dialog box and select multiple computers at once. The problem is, disabling the cmd prompt isn't enough to stop someone running the remote shutdown command. Try finding the group policy Computer Configuration | Windows Settings | Security Settings | Local Policies | User Rights Assignment "Force shutdown from a remote system" and remove rights from everyone (even Admins), this will disable the ability to remotely shut down the PC. If this doesn't work, at least you will know that it is being shutdown locally from the machine rather than over the network.

We just got these Windows Pro 2-in-1 tablet - Prowise for £199 each with a keyboard dock. The quality seems good so far, as does the battery life, I haven't had a chance to fully test them yet. If you want to look at Android tablets, LearnPad - Simple Classroom Tablet Solutions are the best by far in my opinion. Again their 10 inch models are £199 each. The best thing about them is the LearnPad software, which is excellent for managing devices, deploying Apps and monitoring their use in the classroom (you'll need to pay an extra £500 for the ClassConnect license to be able to remotely view and control them). They also have their own store which allows you to purchase site licenses for apps as well as individual licences, and also allows you to pay via a school purchase order and receive an invoice for them, something that we've always had a problem with google play and Apple store. In terms of productive apps, you can find good quality free Apps on Windows store. Zoetrope is a simple, free animation App. ArcSoft Showbiz or Movie Edit touch 2 are decent video editing apps. Crayola Photo Mix & Match and Adobe Photoshop Express are good for photo editing (though they have in-app purchases, which can be disabled by group policy). And of course you can't exclude the advantage of having a full version of MS Office on windows tablets. There are some good educational apps on the windows store, like the iTooch maths and English apps, but not as many as there are on Android and IOS. But we have online subscriptions for all sorts of things, Education City, PurpleMash etc. They all work fine on windows tablets. I don't see the point installing an app for something like practicing times tables when we have online resources like SumDog that does the job so much better. The majority of educational apps on iPads are no different than what you would find on flash games sites a few years ago.

It looks like mirroring360 supports streaming your tablet to the smartboard PC, but not from your smartboard to the tablet. From your description, I believe you want to stream your board onto all the tablets at once. For this, you can try DisplayNote lecture capture and screen mirroring | DisplayNote in Education It's not cheap, but they offer a free trial so you can see if it does what you want before purchasing.

What I'm thinking is that when you enable airplay mirroring, a direct p2p network is being created with the Apple TV, bypassing your wifi network altogether. I know that since IOS8 this is the default connection method for Airplay. I would just make sure that the Apple TV is definitely connected to your network (maybe try using Ethernet instead of Wifi) and that the Apple TV has internet access, including any proxy settings (maybe when airplay mirroring is enabled, the Apple TV is being used as a router by the iPad) You can also try enabling "Conference Room Display" in the Apple TV's Airplay settings. This might force Airplay to stream through the network rather than using an ad-hoc connection.

Thanks. The problems I've heard weren't specifically with the LearnPad Tectus chargers but with wireless charging in general. Using magnets to hold them in place seems like a pretty obvious solution to the problem. We're definitely getting wireless charging for our existing learnpads.

It shouldn't affect the internet at all. Both the iPad and the Apple TV should be connected to your wifi network, so even with screen mirroring enabled, the ipad is still connected to your wifi and should still be able to access the internet. Check that your iPad is connected to your wifi on the same network as the Apple TV and not connecting directly to the Apple TV, because this would be an isolated ad-hoc network.

Have a look at the Prowise Windows 2-in-1 tablet. We got a price of £199 each for them with the keyboard, which I thought was very cheap given their specs and quality. They have everything you need for a school tablet (Windows 8.1 Pro, front and rear camera, good battery, 3 year warranty etc.). I'm looking at them to top up our existing Surface RT tablets, I'd love to get more Surface tablets but the Surface 3 costs far too much. The proconnect software that comes with them is good too, and it works on any device. We started using it for quizzes instead of the ActiVote student response devices.

The USB charging ports on the learnpad devices are very flimsy, as jmak mentioned above. We had the USB port break on one device within a few months, mainly due to us re-using an existing laptop trolley which meant the tablets were standing vertically in the trolley, there was too much movement inside the trolley. I think looking at the wireless trolleys will solve this problem for us. I've heard about issues with wireless chargers, if the device isn't centred correctly they wont charge, has anyone else experienced this? Personally, I don't think security of the trolley is an issue. If someone is going to break into the school to steal the tablets, a slightly stronger door on the cabinet is still not going to stop them. We have very secure metal Lapsafe trolleys for out netbooks, I'm sure they would not only delay a thief by an extra 10 minutes or so. One piece of advice with the learnpad software is make sure staff are not just trained in the use of the classconnect software, but in creating lessons and adding resources too. I found after weeks of use that most of the teachers had completely ignored all the training and they began complaining about the lack of apps, because the devices were on the default "general" lesson, completely unaware that there were dozens of pre-made lessons with resources for all their curriculum topics.

That's understandable, LearnPads are more of a self contained, complete solution. When we looked at tablet options they were designed to compliment our existing netbooks rather than replace them, so integration with our existing system was not essential. Our brief was that the netbooks were under used because teachers thought getting them out and logged in was too time consuming for everyday lessons, so they became a tool specifically for ICT lessons. The goal of the tablets were to have something that's always on and readily available to access educational games, web searches and online resources like education city, while the netbooks were still available for your general Word/PowerPoint/animation work (no matter how much tablet supporters try to tell you that they can be as good as a laptop for "productive" work, it's simply not true. So if that's the case for your requirement then hybrids, or at least a Bluetooth keyboard is essential.) Our assistant head initially went out, without any consultation whatsoever, and purchased 10 iPads with her budget. They didn't fulfil the criteria at all, and as such after some initial buzz have become 'novelty' items that rarely get any use.

If you are going down the Android route, have a look at LearnPad tablets. The devices themselves are nothing special, about on par with most mid range android tablets. But the LearnPad software that comes with them is fantastic, it includes a custom UI designed for children, and online device management and monitoring software that allows you to view and remotely control the devices from a web browser. The accessories for them, like wireless charging trolleys and Bluetooth keyboard covers, are pretty good too.

I just deployed 60 Toshiba encores and had the same problem. I assumed it was a proxy issue too and after fiddling with our proxy for a bit i eventually gave up and just went into recovery and did a system refresh. Surprisingly they worked fine afterwards. Still not sure what the problem was, but of the 60 there were 4 of them with this problem, and they all worked fine after the refresh. And i know what you mean about the Encore feeling clunky. But i would hardly use them as the benchmark for Windows 8 tablets, they are essentially netbook replacements, cheapness being the only design criteria. We have some Lenovo Thinkpad tablets and some Surface Pro's, and the performance and build quality of them is far superior to the Encore, as you would expect given the price difference, but by far the best tablets I've used in terms of performance, build quality and value is the Surface RT, which i would take over an iPad any day.

Hi Sheridan. high disk use from the system process on bootup would usually be caused by the page file. Try manually configuring your virtual memory settings rather than allowing it to automatically manage the page file. I've not come across this problem on Win 8 yet, but it was a common fault on Win 7. Failing that, have you tried a full clean boot just to rule out 3rd party drivers and startup processes. How to perform a clean boot in Windows

gaz350b, if you look in internet options on desktop IE, under the programs tab there is a setting to choose which version of IE to use, You can set it to always use the desktop version or always use the metro version.