mjk

Where 'the right time' means six years too late after Google have taken 60% of the education marketshare. I can't see us going back to microsoft soon.

Not wanting to apple bash, but the problem with ipads is that they don't come with keyboards which makes work processing really difficult. Chromebooks on the other hand are ideal for this, but also have touchscreen tablet interfaces and can run Android apps. thus chromebooks give you all of the advantages of the ipad along with the advantages of a laptop, but without the complexity of windows and for less money.

For price I like the BenQ https://www.avpartsmaster.co.uk/c-349-benq-interactive.aspx

We've got some of the new Dell model Chromebooks and they are fantastic!

I've had apps rejected too if they violate copyright​. So it might be because an automated app recognised "office 365" and rejected that. In my case i opened a support case and they let it through. Mind you with office 365 they will probably tell you to stick it!

"ActivInspire is not going away. You can use it as long as you like." @toast4tea Just because the app doesn't self destruct doesn't make the statement accurate. As soon as support is withdrawn it is effectively useless; any security vulnerabilities will be exploited, the file formats are a dead end and it probably won't install on future operating systems.

Also must say that the "share to Classroom" app is well worth installing.

Google said we can create as many accounts as we like. They cited some of the large US universities that have tens of thousands of accounts free of charge.

We mostly let the teachers direct the apps but we do have some pre-installed ones such as: Screencastify Read and Write for Google Vernier graphical analysis (for science data collection / analysis) picAXE blockly (for programming micro-controllers in tech lessons) geogebra (maths graphing) overdrive (library system which our local authority uses) We also 'roll our own' apps ( eg moodle and student management systems ) , which are essentially links which we put in the taskbar. https://developer.chrome.com/apps/first_app

I spoke to Google about this at BETT. Their recommendation was to setup an 'alumni' domain which is separate from the rest of the college. You can then give them accounts for life and disassociate them from your primary domain. I've not actually got around to this yet so would be interested to hear anyone else who has implemented it.

I see. I don't really store any data at home so our requirements are quite different. What I do is replicate the school system in the cloud using Google compute engine. If I need to fire up some file server or web servers it's really simple - but I only keep them running for a short amount of time to check configurations etc so it doesn't really cost anything.

https://realtimeboard.com

yes. The DfE guidlines on this are here: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/608686/Cloud-services-software-dept-advice_26.pdf Promethean have not self certified so it is up to the school or LA to do this. LOL at using a 15 yr old circuit board as a giant dongle whilst buying some cheaper interactive displays.

You are going to have to start monitoring your traffic to Google. Once you've eliminated any spurious rewrites start fire up tcpdump on the smoothwall box or ask smoothwall for help

for ActivInspire it was about £500 for each machine that is not connected to an ActivBoard. Not sure about the subscription but its bound to be annual rather than perpetual.

I think this says that you can EITHER plug into an ActiveBoard OR pay for a subscription service. This looks similar to the license costs for ActivInspire which also needs a license for non promethean boards.

I know of academy chains that prohibit the use of proprietary file formats like this. Indeed BECTA tried very hard to ban them but nobody paid any attention.

what are the upsides of using lgflmail? Gmail is a pretty damn good email system.

you can buy extra rdp connections from capita if you need, but we are planning on using a 3rd party app if we decide to go with it.

iSAMS pricing is tiered rather than per pupil, so a large school can get every single module for less than the basic SIMS costs. For smaller schools it doesn't work out so well. I couldn't agree more with the list of requirements ! I often find that SLT don't seem to be able to supply such things!

necrothread :-)

We had a look at iSAMS and were impressed.

Do none of you just spin up virtual machines in the cloud ? It's certainly my favourite way of working if I'm doing dev work between home and school.

HTTPS inspection turned on? I'm pretty sure that would trigger a "your connection is not private" alert.

I think it was a browser re-write url and not on smoothwall - It was a hack that wasn't recommended by Google So yes it was specific to our environment. We also asked Smoothwall to login and help diagnose the problem - they did find tens of thousands of hits from the hola ( what happens is that if you block hola the app then sends out a request to google to see if there is internet access, it then tries hola again which is blocked so it tries google again ad infinitum. ) We blocked the hola_get on our wifi but it was only when we removed the url rewrite the problem went away.