BFCIT

Similar position here Rob, I had consistent admin access a week or so ago and advertised that our team would make bookings for staff in the short term...then it stopped working for us too, egg on face moment! I'm holding off until I can be 100% sure its working reliably.

Does anybody have a copy of the SLA for TES/Room Booking System that they would be happy to share? Thanks

Exceptionally unstable for me, one minute I can get onto Room Booking as Admin, next minute I am receiving connection errors. Really poor and last thing we all need at the start of term!

Just as an alternative to restricting opening the browser, we make the proxy details tab within browsers inaccessible and add in a bogus proxy via GPO to stop the internet working, works well for us. If its an ICT on screen exam we help staff use Net Support Tutor built in tools to disable the internet.

Net Support here, moved away from Impero due to issues. Net Support is fab and support is top notch.

Hi there, did you manage to resolve this fault? We have a handful of these in circulation for staff at school and some are now presenting the exact same issue you describe.

Thank you everybody for your responses, put my mind at ease :-)

Hi all, In a bit of a predicament, our papercut license expires shortly, this will be before our new print project is awarded to the winning tender which includes a new papercut contract too. I am struggling to contact our authorised papercut reseller, no replies to emails and nobody picking up the phone. I'm hoping to get an extension on the license, but I'm curious to learn what happens when the papercut license expires. We have PaperCut MF, 7 devices with the embedded papercut license (two reprographics printers) and 5 (satellite MFD's situated around site). All users setup on papercut with printing credit tied to their AD account. Papercut manages all printing to non-embedded standard classroom printers too. I suppose I am asking what happens in a worst case scenario if I am unable to extend the license, does printing all together stop working on papercut? Do we lose the ability to login as an administrator etc? Thank you.

Same issue occurring here, only affecting two computers so far, seems to happen for us with Google Chrome.

Hi all, Curious to learn how you manage email signatures for your school. We are looking to apply some consistency and I have explored Exclaimer so far, costs are quite significant though, so I wondered whether you are using an alternative system or have a set policy that all staff adhere to?

Hi All, Our music department are looking for some Chromebooks which have both a front and rear facing camera. Do you have any particular models you would recommend, I do not want something cheap and ideally it will last a few years in the department. Budget scope for two devices is around the £800 mark so hoping this should give us something with decent internal specifications too. Thanks

We use Google and Microsoft email systems and have defined as per our data retention policy, 365 days retention. Any email that is considered important staff know to assign a 'never delete' policy which keeps it in their inbox indefinitely or they set this retention tag to a folder and move critical items into here. Safeguarding etc is primarily on CPOMS and copies of critical emails are often submitted on here too. In my view, like most things it is the initial roll out/buy in that is the most difficult aspect, it requires your users to take complete ownership of their mailbox, delete what they no longer require and evaluate what really is critical, I think we gave staff around 3 months notice before we went live with the retention rule. Long email retention policies create a nightmare from a data protection perspective, a SAR requesting copies of all emails with the individuals name in could run into the 1000s and the redaction process thereafter is nasty - for this reason alone I'd recommend a lower retention period. In terms of staff/student email accounts we delete staff accounts 3 months after they have left unless they were a member of senior management which we keep for a year, student accounts are deleted a month after they are officially off roll. Staff and student leavers are routinely notified that this is the process and they are urged to make copies of their critical data to their own respective devices/cloud services.

Hi all, We are doing a tidy up of our sever room and we have the following available. These are free to collect from a Lancashire based School, message me for more details: 4 x HP Color LaserJet CP3505n 1 x Samsung iPOLIS Network Video Recorder SRN-1670D 1 x Samsung Digital Video Recorder SRD-1652D All items working but in used condition.

issue here too!

Thank you everybody, armed with this new knowledge, its looking like I will be doing a hybrid approach, in that for the majority of consistent machines we will re-image and take the opportunity to replace PCs or upgrade with SSD's and the more problematic machines with complex bespoke software, install the feature upgrade manually and hope for the best. Appreciate all of your replies.

Hi Hoping for some advice, we use Win 10 Edu 1803 currently, we are looking to move to Win 10 20H2 in line with the end-of-life cycle. We have 700+ devices in school which we imaged to Win10 back in 2018 using MDT. I am currently under the impression that we need to re-image all of our devices in order to get each device successfully upgraded to 20H2. Would this be a correct assumption or can we manually do the upgrade on each machine, to save time with the post installation tasks, adding printers, bespoke software etc. I appreciate we would then need to service our existing MDT images and get them upgraded. Thanks

Hi all, Just wanted to see if any of you are using Google Meet to carry out parents evening and how you go about doing it? The way we are considering running with it is that each student has a unique meeting link, eg creation of 180 unique meeting urls. The teachers then jumps in and out of these sessions. We have found during testing that for this to work a) the parent needs to be signed in to their child's google account to be able to access the meet, or conversely b) the child must be present during the parents evening and the child's device which has their school google account attached must be used to join the meeting. I have concerns regarding data protection for option A as such access by parents, depending on the device they use, may in fact give the parent access to the childs school gmail, google classroom, google drive files and the ability to join school hosted meets in the future, if such account is not removed straight after the parents evening. It would be interesting to see if any of you have managed this in a different way. Thanks.

We had 15 students taking part in the BMAT yesterday. Of the 15, three of those were hit with an issue, where section 1 and 2 of the exam loaded fine, section 3 would not load. Strangely it worked perfectly fine for the other 13. Technical support telephone took 45 minutes for them to answer, support we received was very poor. We didn't want to close/refresh the page as the instructions stated this action will auto-submit the test. We were eventually told to cold shutdown the machines and re-login and attempt again. Once we finally managed to get through to somebody to get this advice, the students had 2 minutes to complete section 3. Glad it was not just my site with issues!

Hi all, In March I was asked to explore the use of Zoom in school. I explored the product, discovered many reported security flaws and put forward an argument to utilise our existing G Suite for Education provision (Google Meet), suggesting Zoom was unsafe. I have recently received another request to investigate Zoom as an alternative to Google Meet. Some teaching staff are keen to use Zoom for its more classroom focussed features which are still lacking from Google Meet (albeit potentially in development). Please can you let me know whether you have allowed the use of zoom in your organisation? Are you using the fully pledge education version? Approx costs? - we are a school of approximately 1500 students, 130 staff. How you are using it safely and how are students accountable for their actions in meetings? Are there adequate audit controls for safeguarding/accountability. Do students get a zoom login etc with the Zoom for Education platform? Are there any noticeable benefits over Google Meet? Alternatively if you are still in a position where you have banned or discouraged Zoom use, please could you elaborate why this is the case? Are there any recent articles you could share with me to suggest reasons why e.g. ongoing security/privacy concerns with zoom even after their apparent security review. Thanks...

We also have this issue, in particular effecting hotmail.com accounts, hotmail.co.uk appears to work fine, email not in spam/junk folders, invitation simply not arriving. I've resorted to asking the office to request a non hotmail.com email address from parents.

IMO in a classroom scenario projectors are a thing of the past. TCO reduction with a television screen touch or non-touch, higher quality image, more reliable and less ongoing maintenance, plus plenty that come with a 5 year warranty.

Hello all, After a bit of GDPR advice. We are keen to press forward with the addition of guardian email address to our Google Classroom provision. What concerns me is what lawful bases other schools are using to input parents email address information onto the google classroom platform in the first place. Have you argued public task? Have you gone out to parents and asked for consent to add them as a guardian? Can or should we change our data protection policy/privacy notice to state the use of parents contact details for educational platforms? Thanks

Hi Paul, Thanks for your brilliant advice. On this basis do I only need to actually turn 'hangouts chat' for our staff users and disable it for students? Would the above still work? Thank you

Hi all, With the current 'Coronavirus' situation, as a school we are investigating the potential use of Google Hangouts/Meet to remotely deliver lessons to students should the need arise. We currently use Google Classroom and classes are set up manually by our teaching staff. I have activated hangouts for the entire school, and this has provided me with a 'chat' icon in the waffle. Excuse my ignorance as this is not something I have much experience with, when I open Google Chat, and attempt to "add people and bots", I have to manually select students. On trying to search for an existing class it does not appear in the list. Does this mean that our teaching staff would essentially need to re-create their classes and add all of the students into each class in the Google Chat section? From Google chat can we effectively deliver a lesson via webcam to 30+ students at a time? Any advice greatly received. Thanks

Just to add we have the same issue here with our Clevertouch panels, no success no matter what we have tried. Common denominator is always Powerpoint 2016. Clevertouch does not draw random lines on inbuilt android or Cleverlynx/CleverMaths software.