Rob_D

Personally I'd go for location filtering. Or just let them fall through to your catchall rule (which for us is pretty much the same as students). We switched to using Sophos webfilter for home devices as at the time the Smoothwall offering looked like it was just a chrome plugin.

So apparently the Ordering portal is going to reopen on Friday so I can see my allocation, but I can't get them until I get the email some time in November/December. Why not just not show me the allocation until I an buy them like last time??? https://get-help-with-tech.education.gov.uk/sign-in

Yeah, ordering from CCS used to mean about 8 phone calls per item. But since I wound up speaking to our rep's manager and suggested he was maybe a bit too talkative things have calmed down to about 1 phone call per order + the "I haven't heard from you in about 6 months" check-in. The problem our SBM has with amazon (we had a half hour meeting where they talked about it in great detail) is the business invoicing is apparently terrible. Even if you manage to get everything amazon fulfilled (the chance would be a fine thing), FO still apparently gets a separate invoice for each item, so an amazon order is way more work for the FO than from somewhere like CCS/softcat that does full quote>PO>invoice ordering.

After the meeting where we were told how much of a pain amazon orders are for finance, I stick to... CSS (our rep is very good at finding odd things like right angle staplers and Mindstorms extension cables) SoftCat (get them to set you up with an ECat account then you can put together orders on their online shop and save them as quotes to go to your FO. I think you can even set it up so you can submit the order on ECat and the FO gets prompted to authorize it) YPO Great for stationary and reprographics supplies, and recently discovered they do a reasonable line in "office IT" gear like USB cables, removable storage, ect.

Hi all, We've been using UEV profiles since back when they were in vouge. Until recently, they've been working pretty well for us. But now it's taking 10-20 minutes if the user hasn't logged onto that computer before (or we've run delprof since the last logged on). When we first set up UEV login was sub 2 minutes even on first logon. Are there any settings around new profile creation or login that might help speed things up? Does anyone have any advice about profiles and settings roaming that might help? (We moved from roaming profiles to UEV to improve logon times.) Ay help is greatly appreciated.

Does the Ring have the ability to blank out sections of the screen?

As it was explained to me, the covid (or whatever marker they're testing for) is bound to pigment in the transport medium or buffer solution, which then defuses down the test paper. The T line is a line of structures designed to bond to the covid/protean marker thus holding the both the protean and it's bonded pigment in place and creating the line. The C line just bonds to the pigment as a control line. So you shouldn't get the C line if you use tap water rather than the buffer solution (I think).

Huh. I thought we'd been doing twice weekly LFD tests since last March? We get all ours through the school, apparently they've got the new LFD kits that only need nose samples now.

So how are all the schools said they use replit dealing with exams? Or are the courses you use it for not exam based?

I hope no-one minds my reviving this old thread. How are the school's that use replit doing exams? When I floated this with the IT teachers the main question was about being able to do exams where the students can't have internet access.

If you use office 365 and wanted to have some fun, you should be able to power automate a teacher approval and then automatic SM post. But I'd stick with "the teacher has the account".

Hi all, We've been asked about using SDS sync to pull our after school clubs across from SIMS into Teams. But when we've asked our Microsoft support contractors about this they've said the SDS can only do classes and we'd have to set the clubs up as classes. Our SIMS manager is strongly against this as then we'd have to extend the school day on SIMS which could mess with the payroll (among other things). So, has anyone done anything similar in getting clubs, activities, non-teaching groups, etc. from SIMS into SDS and Teams? Thanks!

Does examwritepad support dictation? I assume no, but I've not really followed the feature updates for a while.

I could probably get into New World (played the beta for a bit), but don't want to risk my GPU.

One could argue that lockdowns had a "detrimental effect on society" (and lots of people have), but it was still pretty clearly worth doing. Banning unvaccinated people from key services (like public transport or shops) sounds like a terrible plan. Recreational things I could maybe get on board with, but then you get into a big debate about where to draw the line and what's "key". Also we'd need a vaccine passport system that worked reliably.

Given all the "beta" access, I wonder if anyone will still be playing by December?

We've used Simple Disable key in the past when we wanted to really lock down a student device.

Not in my experience. It turns out the screenshot in my above post is at 90% scaling (not sure why I did that) and while the content doesn't fully span the page the ratio of content:page width (on the BBC homepage) is the same on the 1920*1080 screen at work as on the 3200*1800 resolution display on my home laptop. I can see it potentially not scaling up enough on Ultrawide aspect ratios and looking ridiculous, but in my experience changing resolutions within the same aspect ratios isn't an issue.

Out of interest, what resolution is the screenshot at? BBC.co.uk looks like this on my 3200*1800 resolution screen:

You could turn it sideways.

When we first started rolling out widescreen monitors in the classrooms we a teacher complain that she didn't like the 16:9 screen size - something about having to turn to be able to see the edges of the screen. Years ago we had some really cool 16:10 Samsung "productivity" monitors.

At home I run dual 1440 27" displays. I've never had a problem with scaling on websites or any of the apps. (Most of the time I forget how much more space 1440 give me until I remote into a machine running 1080.) What with windows 10 snapping or 3rd party apps to enhance this for ultrawide displays, I don't see why you couldn't use an ultrawide like two normal widescreens. Although outside of gaming I don't see the advantage of ultrawide.

Then you have to wonder whether the twice week LFD tests are worth it.

Is that really necessary, if they're having regular (negative) LFD tests?

Teams phone system is probably worth checking out if you're using 365 for other things.