mjk

I've really got myself in a bind which I hope you good people will help me get out of! Some bright spark (that'll be me then!) decided they could offer home content filtering for parents. The content filter works a bit too well for students home connections and now they are complaining it's too restrictive! We set up filters based upon Keystage. ie - all KS3 get a pretty standard set of filters: no social networks, no porn, no games. ie - the usual school stuff. We used the same polices for home as at school as a starting point but I'm struggling to reach a sensible solution. Some parents are happy to let their kids play FB all night, some are not. What I'd like to do is give some kids FB after 6pm/weekends and some not. How can I go about this ? on an individual basis?

I would also warn that the heat generated from dust/dried out thermal paste will adversely affect the battery too.

half our staff have it installed. don't think they are paying anything!

Take care here. It is likely that the old cable is 62.5/125 micron. It will be written on the cable. You need to match them, or you will get light loss at the join. You probably need the multimode.

Is there any way of doing it the other way around; ie signing into windows, using Google as the authentication source and missing out AD?

yes I see what you mean. I don't think you can block filetypes - but like you say, why would you need to?

Works here too. When people run out of space we just say upload to Google apps - it's unlimited. Currently using about 1.7TB in GAFE and that doesn't count Google apps files. You can monitor, control and change it if you want :-)

Unlimited storage, free Office apps and free educational software any use to you ? https://www.google.com/edu/

Very interested, although still in contract with smoohwall. I note "faster on 100Mbs + networks" and would have thought the opposite was true as lightspeed/smoothwall are proxy/cache servers which presumably save bandwidth. Does iboss cache content too?

I think you need to either delete users on logoff ( user > data > erase all local user info on sign out) Or use guest mode/public session kiosk.

We have an issue with using follow me type printers on exam accounts. We don't have printers in every room, just dotted around the school. So the upshot is that students can't print in exams and we get the exam department to pull off all the files and print in one go. If the kids save their work that is.

We did use wordpad, but a couple of years back we had some issues with nervous students logging out without saving. It caused some major headaches rescuing the work and we decided that we needed an autosave feature. Abiword fitted the bill.

We use abiword because it is easy to install without a spell-checker. It also autosaves which is important for exams.

I think it is more important to have routing setup on the edge switches if you have 1Gb desktop but only 1 or 2Gb backbone uplinks. This would mean that routing is done nearer to the desktop machines and will save bandwidth on traffic flowing to and from the core switch (to make the decision about where to route). It also makes problemshooting more easy if you have areas of the network 'cordoned off' from the core. Of course; if everyone wanted to use the 1GB desktop at the same time (when imaging for example) you would still bottleneck it!

I think people often overlook perpetual licenses, especially in light of budget cuts and the possibility of long release cycles.

yes we do it exactly the same.

I think it depends if you use the OEM licenses. Assuming you don't you'd be looking at ( Windows (£35) + Office (£35) + CALS (£2) ) X 700 + SQL (£750 ish) = £51k or about £10k per year on a 5yr upgrade.

Is O365 still dependant upon an EES subscription ? This might be a problem if it is.

Special school ? I don't think you want an EES subscription, you would be better off with a volume license and buy perpetual licenses.

Sometimes ours go offline, but it is/was a papercut issue and restarting the print spooler fixes it. Sounds like you are printing directly.

Citrix (ICA/HDX) licensing is per concurrent connection so it might be worth looking at the numbers. If you've got serious buget problems then depreciating the app is still an option even if the teachers have to rewrite schemes of work. There are alternatives they could use and if the TCO of running that course is too high then management need to make the call.

Have you thought about a Citrix/RDP type connection?

The web version of Scratch runs on Chromebook.

for 2: have a look at https://getkahoot.com/ needs BYOD so may not be what you are looking for if your school bans phones. Teachers here rave about it. As above, Google forms is good for this too. for 3: I've only tried a couple of visualisers and all were generic cameras that chromebooks just worked with. there are a lot of interesting apps that your teachers might like https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/chrome/education/webstore/app-packs.html#high

It doesn't help when your budget gets cut ! but lots of software is subscription based now.