Rob_D

Do you need a paid-for edu account for this? I've not seen any sort of domain management console on the free versions.

The sort that was probably 2 guys operating out of a garden shed back in March and didn't expect to gain world acclaim\infamy so quickly. We tried to push people to Teams rather than Zoom (especially after all the hacking/Zoombombing came out in the news) but between the head refusing to move away from Zoom, the constant rebuttal of "but XYZ use it, so it must be fine" and staff using it anyway, I've given up fighting that battle and let them get on with it. Sorry, that got a touch more ranty than I was expecting.

We tried pushing Teams at the start but got some really hard push-back, mostly regarding not being able to see everyone, and now there's a pretty common conception among the staff that Teams is unstable with larger (whole class) groups. Now I'm worried the first I'll know that Zoom has turned the limit back on is when the head gets kicked out of a meeting half way through.

Teachers here have really gotten into Zoom, but now the lock-down is starting to be lifted I'm wondering how long until they put 40 limit back on free (education) accounts. Has anyone heard anything about Zoom putting things "back to normal"? I can't see anything about a potential timescale on their website. I just hope we get plenty of notice to ween the staff back off Zoom. Thanks!

Good news, everyone! They've reduced the alert level down to 3. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53106673 If we can only now start the "gradual relaxation of restrictions", what have wee been doing up until now?

I recon you could get up to 8 AAA on 1B (there aren't many games breaking the 100gb install... yet). And I remember seeing an article somewhere about how SSDs allow for game installs to be smaller as devs drop in a lot of duplicate files to keep assets for the same level/area in the same drive sector. I still agree 1tb doesn't feel like much these days. I was wondering if the diskless box would have more storage maybe?

I've often found different display outputs give different colour balances and just put it down to better outputs supporting better colour reproduction (in my case it was DVI and DP). Also the Dell Ultrasharps only support SRGB via the display-port (at least the older ones I've used did). It could be something like that. Best option for fixing it is probably just to mess with the colour balance either in the graphics control or on the monitor. If you haven't already, double check that both the monitors have the same colour settings and one isn't set to cinema or echo mode or something.

We received 2 laptops last Friday, but according to our LGA contact it's a different "branch" of the scheme because they haven't been able to order anything for schools yet.

We use different username/email formatting for staff and students. Students have year of entry,first initial surname (eg [email protected]) and staff just use their initials and year of start (eg [email protected]) This makes them easy enough to sort and address separately. We also maintain an "All Students" group, which helps grab all the students for some processes (but I don't think it would help for powershell).

We removed (on unplugged in the case of IDesk fixed PCs) 2/3 of the PCs so the student workstations are 2m apart.

Patch 25863 installed fine for us last night. I've not seen 25829 show up at all in Solus.

If you set up the meeting in the scheduler (calendar) tab you can set up the meeting one one Team/channel, once it's set up you'll get an invite link this link can be posted into a chat channel in the other team. When we've tried this members of both teams are able to join the meeting and the staff seem happy enough with it.

Snowpiercer looks kind of cool so far - really like the transition from animation to live action at the start. Has anyone tried Space Force on Netflix?

Surely to be safe under GDPR I should call the people I've been in contact with to get permission to pass their contact information to the contact trace team (so the the CT team can call them and warn them I might be infected)?

I was told that the announcement today would inform SLT as to when the school would be expected to reopen. I think they're updating the 'R number' today and all the advice kind-of forwards from there (as long as it's still below 1 we carry on with the plans to open to some students).

I had a talk about this with the Business Manager yesterday, and if we want we'll can get masks and gloves, although the rooms should be socially distanced enough that we shouldn't need the mask. Were also issuing the techs with portable keyboard/touchpad units so they don't have to touch the teacher/student's keyboard. Is anyone else looking at getting thermal cameras. Were getting one installed in reception this week.

It seems to depend on the time of day here. A couple of weeks ago I went to our local Sainsbury's at about 9:30 Saturday morning and walked right in. Last Saturday was there after 11:00 and and the queue went half around the car-park (although it probably only took 10-15 minutes to get in). At least around here, food shopping seems to be getting back something like normal. Heck, we even managed to nab some Waitrose delivery slots.

Clapping has never looked/sounded particularly well attended in our street, but the next road over that started super enthusiastically has died down quite a bit the last couple of weeks and I can't help but feel we're a rainy Thursday away from it dying out all together around here. Is the BBC still showing it live?

What about getting some cheap netbooks and setting them up to face the front of the class?

As long as you sign your domain up as a school https://zoom.us/docs/en-us/school-verification.html and make sure all your staff use their work emails, the K12 Policy is pretty good (https://zoom.us/docs/en-us/childrens-privacy.html) and now the waiting room is on by default Zoom-bombing should be pretty much impossible. Which deals with most of the issues I heard about. AFAIK, if you buy the Edu licencing then you get an admin console where you can provision users, but this isn't available for the free version and the best way is to get the staff to sign up but make sure they use their work emails and when asked select teaching/school account. As for installing, we've got it running as a remote app from a network share without any issues. Don't get me wrong, I would rather the school use the Teams that we spent all of Easter setting up. But the head started using Zoom with all the staff and announced to the parents we would be using it (or that we already were) so I didn't really have a choice and the above mitigates most of my concerns. It's just irritating that the IT department got end-run and all my concerns were met with "but all the other schools are using it".

Isn't staying alert on the motorway generally a good idea anyway? Edit: Beaten to it, I really should refresh the page before I reply an hour later.

AFAIK sch.uk domains are resevered for the LA/Government distribution so you can only get .LA-name.sch.uk which should be available through your LA.

Have you tried the Video options in the meeting scheduler. It looks like there's the option to only enable video for the Host.

https://www.hsj.co.uk/technology-and-innovation/exclusive-wobbly-contact-tracing-app-failed-nhs-clinical-safety-and-cyber-security-tests/7027564.article Hard pass from me if even half of what's been reported is true.

Pretty sure the guidelines say you (or someone you live with) has to have symptoms before you can be tested. At the moment you can't "just check".