maark

Two problems we had with touchscreens: Could not run smart software properly and staff did not want to use the bundled software. You cannot freeze the image as with a projector - e.g. get an image to stay on the screen whilst then changing programs doing the register on your laptop - could not find a touch screen that did this though things may have changed.

why tablets and not a kindle or similar?

It is our job to make whatever is deemed best for the students and staff work. Just because ipads are a pain to setup we should not dismiss them. However, I am not convinced they are being bought for the right reasons. Staff have had quite a few on trial but have still not come back with good ideas or apps to use on them. A £150 chromebook will boot up just as quick as a £300 ipad and has a larger screen and keyboard to aid creation of documents which is what a lot of students spend their time doing. They also have 8 hour battery life. The cost implications of ipads are massive as they would only have a 3 year life-cycle at most due to ios changes and apple's restriction on what device can run the latest ios. It may be that we need different devices for different departments but the first thing should be to look at what improves teaching and learning.

There is a thread here http://www.edugeek.net/forums/news/136079-google-debuts-classroom-education-platform-teacher-student-communication.html I have a few staff starting to use it - we ditched Its Learning as a VLE and although this does not do everything that did it is pretty good. Pros - fairly simple to use, free, automatically creates classroom folders under your google drive. Has ability to do assignments. Cons - limited compared to a full VLE, not got it synced up to sims to allow easy adding of class groups - although you can give students a unique code for a class so they can register themselves.

Had a play with this and got one member of staff using it - seems fairly straightforward to use. I like the way it creates a classroom folder and a subfolder for each class in google drive for teacher and student.. We are using the class code to get students to enrol in a class as I have not got all classes synced from sims at the moment. Although you can only use announcements and assignments there is a lot of potential as you can attach and link to other resources. Is anybody else using it yet and what do you think?

We are just starting a trial with a mixture of acer, samsung and dell chromebooks -can't see a massive difference in build quality or speed. Dell seem to get better reviews. Will post again after students have used them for a bit.

We have been using it for two years here - for email and starting to use drive more. Trialling some chromebooks - you have to pay for a licence to control them but the features it gives you to control them from the console are good and work very well on the one I tried. Google support is very good - fast response and you can talk to techs in Ireland who are very helpful.

someone else probably has a link to the definitive licensing info but am sure that you can use material that has been broadcast free to air in schools for education purposes. On clickview exchange for example their are lots of films that have been shown on TV.

clickview 24-7 cloud - will allow you to pull off freeview programmes off 24 channels from the last 2 weeks.

+1 for adblocker on chrome - use ghostery as well

ipads are easier as a personal device - you give one to a student and let them run the apps they want, set it up how they want and sync their documents. A class set - you have to mess around with some sort of configuration utility - see loads of threads on edugeek about the issues. When the next student uses it do you set it to wipe or not? how do you keep the configurations if a student has changed them - students have to remember to logout of itunes etc. or the next student can access their work and alter it or delete it.

You need to decide whether you are looking for one to one scheme where every student has a device or class sets. Tablets such as ipads are easier with one to one rather than class sets. We are looking at chromebooks at the moment - cheaper than ipads and much easier to manage via google console. Very fast start up time and eight hour battery life.

coral's online only offer 7/1 on England qualifying so something strange there? 125/1 to win the cup :-)

If you have chromebooks then it makes sense to have google apps as it integrates. Google apps does what office 365 does but with better collaboration tools - you open and convert word documents, excel, powerpoints as well. We moved away from exchange and put staff on google apps for mail as well - they can still use outlook with the google sync tool.

thanks for replies - will check time sync and sql ram

we get support from LEA - they have been pretty good but this is about the fourth time I have had to raise a call with them about different issues - just wondered what sort of performance other schools get because it seems very slow to run.

I would be interested in whether other schools have this running satisfactorily. We have had so many problems with it: performance is very very slow even if you run a report for one student it can't find templates for a message for an individual report sometimes breaks and loses callback service and site ID requiring restarts of vpn services and applications pools/IIS We have a fairly new sims server running on hyper v which met recommended spec. We are going to replace truancy call with this but it does not seem up to the job? Any feedback appreciated.

Right click on Group policy objects in Group Policy management - New . You can then create policies for computers or users from scratch - under the details tab of the policy you can disable computer or user settings if not needed. to improve speed of processing. Once you have created a policy I would usually link it to an active directory organisational unit that is setup specifically for test users or test computers. Move a machine or user inside that container to test your policy. If ok then you can link it to your current AD containers by right clicking and Linking an Existing GPO. You can delete your GPOs that are currently linked to OUs - they will not be deleted entirely unless you delete them from the list of group Policy Objects but will not affect machines if they are not linked that OU.

Main issues with 2000 ipads i think would be upgrading wireless and internet connection - reckon you would need at least a 200MB connection. I have heard of one school who spent 200K on infrastructure alone. Also realistically they would only have a 3 year lifespan as Apple tend to bring out new IOS regularly and don't allow older devices to upgrade.

We use google drive and try and encourage them to use collaboration features. If students abuse it - sharing dodgy files, games etc. then that is a behaviour management issue - students will always find a way if they want to. They could email each other files using any personal webmail or ues dropbox or similar. We use impero to monitor students and smoothwall to filter internet but you cannot block everything - it is impossible.

Why do you want to do this?

Are you sure the hardware is identical - could be missing a driver somewhere. I use hyper v to make images then veeam free to make a copy of them before uploading to wds/mdt server and it works ok as long as drivers have been injected into wds server for relevant hardware.

thanks for reply russ - support did remote in but couldn't really find anything. I will check with mac tech to see how smoothwall proxy is applied to mac.

impero worknig fine on PCs - used to work on macs until we re-imaged them and had new setup with active directory. We did manual install on macs with sudo commands and you can view/monitor them in console but no policies apply. It does not register the Internet traffic from safari - on recent history you can see the windows and applications listed including safari but it always show websites as zero even though students have been on several websites. Impero remoted in but could not find a solution - they passed it on to mac developer. We are running latest version of impero and OSX 10.8.5 Wondering if anyone else has had the same issue?

We have been using it here for a couple of years with no real problems. Have found google support to be very good - they will reply very quickly to support calls and you can phone the support techs in Ireland. They have online tools you can upload logs to to troubleshoot things yourself as well. We use active directory sync - not got password sync going yet though. Staff can still use outlook if they want using google apps sync tool. Collaboration tools are very good though we don't use them as much as we should. For a VLE would take a bit of setting up - this company looks quite interesting realsmart: your learning portfolio though pricey will set it all up and incorporate it into a vle.