Rob_D

+1 for ManageEngine. We've been using it for years now and it works great.

Has any one seen "The Power" on amazon? If so, is it worth bothering with? The premise sounds pretty interesting and the trailers look cool, but it sounds like it could get awfully preachy.

And perhaps they're going for earlier rather than later so as not cause disruption with trying to get younger kids to sleep. Someone should really be advertising that these notifications can be disabled at the system level for these situations. Turning the phone off in advance is all well and good for the advertised test, but isn't really a long term solution as you won't know when a real emergency ping is coming through. Where as the emergency warning notifications can be disabled permanently on the second phone without effecting anything else, and they still get the warnings on their primary/known-about device.

Technically Gladiator did it first (I think).

All "USB-C" really is is the connector type - kind of like RJ45. And think of all the nonsense you can run along a Cat5e cable if you put the right kit on the ends.

I thought we still had 2 episodes to go? And still hoping we get to see the Enterprise F on screen.

It looks like anyone without photo ID can apply for a Voter Authority Certificate from the council. (or I suppose, apply to vote by post) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-65066200 It does feel like this hasn't been publicised nearly enough.

Would people go to that much trouble for a potato quality laptop? (Thinking of the DfE provided ones.) I think it's more likely they've forgotten they have it, especially when you factor in requests like this: "Parent: My darling child would like a school laptop to help with their homework as they don't have one at home. Tech: You were issued one last year, which we can see you're not using." I would love to go student 1:1, but the plans never get off the ground for one reason or another, and the staff just keep asking for more shared use devices.

Wait you get to use swords and fight people? Maybe this football thing is more fun than I've been led to believe...

We've always had very light touch filtering on the visitor wifi, and don't require a certificate installed. Students would never be allowed on and everything is VLANed off, so there's less requirement for filtering.

But we don't issue students with a school pen. Although looking at that, perhaps we should... and then make exceptions for students who need the funky shaped pens to write with.

We let kids use their "personal equipment" in exams all the time, it's not like everyone is issued a standard, slightly used biro on the way into a hand-written exam (heck, the number of kids we have bringing soft toys in as "good luck charms"). Assuming it fits within regulations why not extend that to computer equipment? (In this specific case, the macros would make it a non-starter for me.)

Depends on the style. The Keyboard the OP is talking about only has non-clicky options (MX red or MX speed) so they shouldn't be much louder than a normal keyboard.

Is that the tracking one or the one you need for the covid pass? Or did they eventually get around to merging them?

Not so much a risk, but getting 2 copies of each message would be an annoyance.

So you've all managed to avoid a situation where students will rock up a couple at a time through the day asking to borrow a laptop for a single lesson?

Hi all, A question for schools that still have a central repository of laptops/tablets that students can use/borrow. We have a set of 30 laptops and 30 iPads in our Library which are available for students to use through the day, either in the Library or taken back to their classroom. As we're just about to roll out a new set of laptops, we're investigating the best way to manage this. So how do you guys do it? What system do you use to sign out devices for student use? Do you have any restrictions (like they can only be used in the library or a teachers has to come get it or something)? Do you even let students borrow devices piecemeal or can they only be loaned as a class set? Who is responsible for checking the devices are still in once piece? (our last set of library laptops fell victim to a spate of keys being ripped out) Thanks for all your feedback!

All the coms app's I've used have had the select which parents get what done within the app so I assumed they'd have to read that data from the MIS, but if Wonde could do that for you it would be way neater and safer (other extractors are available). I'd argue you might want parent names/titles and maybe even student names so that coms can be addressed. Like "Hello [ParentName], Please be aware [studentName] has detention today."

Am I right in thinking this is a bulk communications app like parentmail or schoolcomms? To pull from the MIS into the coms app, the main things would be the parental responsibility, Priority 1,2,etc flags and access related court orders. To use BBC's Happy Valley as an example. Grandmother and aunt have parental responsibility, with Granny as P1 Aunt as P2, Aunt's partner is a registered contact without parental responsibility (maybe P3 or P4), and Father is forbidden contact. And different schools will have different requirements as to who can and can't get messages relating to the child. As to writeback into the MIS: An option to have communications be added to the students "communications log" in the MIS would be cool, but it would have to be able to be set for just specific messages (so the log doesn't fill up with newsletters and reminders). The other thing that comes to mind that I haven't seen mentioned is making sure whatever platform you're using to send the messages can handle the volume of coms (especially larger) schools can send out and do it without getting them flagged/blocked as spam. For example we're a 1500 student school and we average about 12,000 emails a week through our coms platform, with peaks of over 20,000. Multiply that by half a dozen schools and that's a not-insignificant amount of traffic. We/our coms company seem to spend a lot of time dealing with parents who aren't getting emails. So I'd be looking for rock solid delivery (on top all the DP/GDPR stuff others have mentioned).

While the answer to your question is technically yes. Different people will have different ideas about how "serious" they think is now. Public perception seems very much that "the pandemic" ended about a year or so back. At this point, is there an argument for it be categorised a globally endemic? (Can something even be globally endemic? Pendemic?)

Don't you need either P1 or A3 licenses to do conditional access?

We have a team of (I think 5 now) cover supervisors, but still wind up needing supply during really busy periods like the end of the autumn term (November before last we topped out at about 30 teachers off at once), and we still use supply for longer term cover. We have individual supply accounts with an automatic process to lock the short term supplies at the end of each day. Although most of the cover accounts are for longer term these days so have the auto lock disabled.

Turns out this was an issue with the Aruba servers that's now been resolved.

Hi all, We're using Aruba510 series access points managed by Aruba central. and recently (first reported this morning), the guest access portal won let people log in. If the login details are correct, it just says "Login error. Please retry." If the login details are incorrect or the account's expired then we get wrong password or account expired/not active type messages. Which suggests it's getting as far as authenticating the accounts, but then failing to actually log people onto the wifi. We've not made any recent settings changes, and it was working okay last week. The problem presents with both newly created accounts and older ones that have previously worked fine. Anyone got any ideas? Thanks!

One of our techs has booked a connect meeting so I'll find out from him.