Rob_D

Looks like the red warning's been extended to Friday for the South-East. What fun!

I Thought it was supposed to be HorseBatteryStaple?

We don't have Y13, but for similar (kids go out for dentist appointments, etc. and might or might not come back), they're registered as off-site when they leave and registered back in when they return. I think we could do this automagically through Sign In App, but don't because our situation doesn't have a high volume of students coming and going so the reception staff can just register them in Bromcom.

I think that at least part of the reason everyone's going so hard with the heat advice, etc. right now is that there's a definite perception that English people largely ignore weather warnings, and have an attitude of "IT'S SUNNY LETS GOOOOO!!!!" regardless of other factors, more-so when the heat starts this early in the year and this is the first time they've seen blue skies in 8 months (and historically most UK heatwaves haven't really been hot enough to require much adaptation of lifestyle, so that's fine). So when the temps are abnormally high the govt/media feel the need to push the safety messaging a bit harder to try and break through the noise. The same thing happens on the odd occasion we actually get snow in the south.

Here in West Sussex, we're doing half-days tomorrow and Thursday (for the kids, staff have to be in as normal). TBH I'd rather be in work where we have AC, and even without AC my office is west facing in our newer building so isn't too bad for most of the day. If I were at home I'd be in the bedroom office that probably doesn't see the south side of 20C over the summer at the best of times.

We're trying these now https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B097PZSQ7T?th=1 as the price of the 3M ones is almost the price of a new monitor and never fit right on our IIyama 24" monitors. We have the opposite problem, that they want them, but their desk/screen is pushed up against the wall so pretty much anyone in the room or looking through the window can still see their screen fine.

I don't think it's a limit on the phones themselves or even the Horizon system, but this does track with my experience of Horizon/Gamma. The phones come pre-attached to your "cloud PBX" and (apparently)even the reseller doesn't know the admin password to get in change the those settings. (At least that's what they said when I asked) We've been able to get new phones added, but we've only ever tried to get them direct through the reseller we had the phone system contract with, so I guess they just go to Gamma and get them to attach you a new one. Same problem in reverse at the end of the contract, we couldn't get in to detach the phones and factory resetting didn't seem to work.

As Downing st. is government owned property would that sort of class it as a council house? 😁

To be fair, all the rich people I know sent their kids to private school, so there may be a much simpler answer in "They can afford to so why wouldn't they?". Aren't independent schools still inspected by the ISI? https://www.isi.net/about/who-we-are/

Our website provider has come up with something that blurs the site media if the site isn't active (mouse browser in focus with mouse pointer over the content). https://www.hazlegrove.co.uk/ (not our website, the one the provider showed us).

The governemnt doc, does say that things like having a 16+ year old account and having a credit card attached to your account would be allowed for age verification. And they're still talking about using AI "age guessers" on photos/videos.

TBF there are probably a lot of people who would pay for that setup. But I very much doubt they'll be changing anything on yt just because the current UK govt dropped some legislation (that odds are the next govt will remove/change).

I'd have thought most people would be signed into a google account already (especially in schools where google workspace seems to be becoming pretty prevelant), but I wonder what percentage of youtube traffic is from non-signed-in users?

We just manually create the apple IDs for the 20 or so user who are issued with ipads/iphones.

There are other reasons for school to pull back their SM promo content, but then how do schools promote themselves?

I've been on-again off-again for the last year or so trying to make a better Zabbix console for monitoring ink and paper levels in our sharp copiers than just throwing up a Top Items widget. Anyone managed to do this? The main issue I keep coming up against is that the Sharp printer template we use uses a discovery item to create the paper tray items, so all the paper tray items get the same name. This means that the top hosts doesn't differentiate between the trays and just show the data for the "first one" in each column. Only options I see are making a dial (or similar) for each ink/paper level on each printer (7 dials * 28 printers - way more effort than it's worth), or trying to rewrite the printer template (probably beyond my skillset, and would end up being bespoke to this model/tray config so more work going forward to keep it up to date).

If I were you, I'd stick with your safeguarding system on the devices. I don't think it's over the top to run safeguarding monitoring software on school-owned home-use devices. Again, it's a school device so we have a duty of care to make sure the student using it is safe and a wider duty of care for the students whether they're in school at that moment or not. We use Securus, but it sounds like it's pretty much the same level of monitoring/logging as studentkeeper. For us, any captures or reports are treated the same for off and on-site devices, it's the same for staff who chose to come in over the weekend, just because they're aren't kids around doesn't change the expectations of staff using school equipment. All devices (both in school and at home) have a click through AUP on the login screen stating that all activity on the device is monitored and may be recorded.

Out of interest, what things have you done to reduce that "first logon time"?

Interesting idea. I get a bad gateway error on your link.

Their local storage is moved off our main file server to a nas (all 6mb of it), and the local accounts go in a dated OU to make the retention/deletion nice and easy.

For us: Student accounts are locked on their leaving date (if mid year). At the end of the academic year, the leaving cohort + all other leaver accounts are moved to archive and switched to A1 licenses. The following year all archived accounts are deleted. We use Barracuda backup which gives us the students free as long all our staff are licensed. (unless this has changed since our last renewal)

We use Veeam backing up to an on-site server and Wasabi cloud storage. It comes to about £3k per year for 25tb cloud storage and the veeam enterprise licenses.

Which is fine unless you're using phone pouches or lockers.

In a lot of departments we just use cameras. Its easy enough to have them as an exception to the USB storage block.

Each department/CA has their own Team/SharePoint site with preset folders for teaching resources (broken up by year group and shared with students) and staff only resources, within those folders we let them do what they want. Teachers in the department/CA have full access, other staff have read only access. For more centralised stuff, we try to do permissions at the library level rather than having folder permissions.