mjk

Keeps the Chromebooks and get rid of the senior leaders would be good advice here.

and second hand at that.

You'd be looking at around £500 per license to use the promethean software without one of their boards, or pay the £500-£700 fee for the privilege of using their board. Of course, they've locked you in nicely to make it difficult to change. We moved to 65" screens without any problems as 65" is a good price point at the moment and hardly noticable against 70"

So let me get this straight; the fine is 120k but it's only £96k if they pay quickly. But this was for releasing data on 20,000 students and staff - which is about £6 per person, or £4.8 with the discount. So for a large school of 2000 pupils and staff we'd be looking at about 12k or less than 10k with the discount, and that's for a full data breach. Seems like a gamble the school would take.

for colleges it's great because you get an .ac.uk email address that makes you look like an academic.

@DalekSec watch that video if you want to see some of the hardware scams that apple get upto

I think if you are going to bash apple you should improve your arguments, although I agree they are vastly overpriced. Macs are not difficult to manage or maintain if you know what you are doing, and macos is really quite compatible with other *nix operating systems (which is pretty much everything that is not windows). A better argument against Apple is that they routinely screw their customers. Their hardware design is terrible, and they repeat their design mistakes into other products. They intend that their machines are unfixable and build in obsolescence directly into their machines. The problem is that the hardware is poor quality, not that they are difficult to manage. If you want to learn more about apple hardware this guy is worth watching:

We have 1:1 Chromebooks and heavily use Classroom. I believe our science dep use kerboodle effectively.

Before you rush off to management, don't forget to take into account the amount of money you will save in power. Macbooks have LED's under their keys, so they can be operated without the lights on - they will save the planet !

I wouldn't go near promethean these days. They are so overpriced. As stated above BenQ, iiyama , samsung are all better value.

..... and all the disks,cpu and memory are soldered to the motherboards so you won't ever have to do a hardware upgrade !

lol. We all want to provide the best service. Sometimes we just have to accept the best technical solution isn't the best political solution.

I'll bite. It's a good idea because students and parents KNOW macbooks are expensive and fragile. Prospective parents, wandering around the school, will be directed to said macbooks. They will be overwhelmed that the school has the kind of resources to provide such expensive kit. They will perceive that if the school can afford this kind of kit, and the techs to manage it, then imagine how well resourced the teachers are in other areas! The result is that more students will come to the school ( @4000 per student per year ! ) and your budget will grow by at least 10% per year. How did I do ?

just saw this: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/644845/Cloud-services-software-31.pdf

THere are plenty around that are already filled in: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3f6ReLrNvlgV0NES2VCazQtOVk/view If find a blank template, or decide to create one from an existing - please share with us!

It's good that windows is catching up, but I suspect they will still be a few years behind the curve. Do you still need to deal with windows version updates , drivers, patches and stuff? I literally do nothing at all about that sort of thing with chromebooks and google takes care of all of it. editL: Also I wanted to add that the cost is going to be higher for the windows device. Take the new Lenovo 300e: The Chrome version is 4GB/32GB eMMC on ARM, yet the windows 300e is 8GB/128GB SSD on pentium - its bound to come in at a higher cost for similar functionality and the same basic machine. I don't think windows have got there just yet. Maybe in a few years time. https://hothardware.com/news/lenovo-100e-300e-500e-thinkpad-11e-mil-spec-windows-laptops-chromebooks-education

Google file stream is unlimited free storage.

Just for reference; the 4GB Dell 3189 is about £240 ex and I believe the Lenovo e300 is around £270 They don't have the stylus or backwards facing camera like the 5120 or Lenovo e500 which are more expensive (around £310 ea)

I understand that you're not keen on this but it is worth more consideration because your teachers already have experience with touch screen tablet applications and many of these will run on Chromebooks - so don't think of it as a third stream of device, rather than a natural extension of your ipads; your retraining costs will be lower, your teachers will be happier and you will do better for your students. Also consider that there are very few schools that run 1:1 with windows and there is a reason for this: it's horrifically costly to do and the advantages are minimal compared the the cost and effort you'd need to put into setting it all up. If students get a problem with their chromebook, they re-image it themselves - you don't have to fix software issues. Getting windows into this state with 1700 machines is going to be a LOT harder than it was with ipads. I certainly wouldn't move my 1800 chromebooks to windows unless I had at least one more technician on our payroll and even then the machines would be locked down to within an inch of their lives meaning they wouldn't be any more useful than a chromebook, just a lot more expensive.

It is fairly easy to test this because TLS will fail before a 550 error so just email [email protected] and see if you get a TLS failure or a 550.

I would have thought so, schools email all sorts of companies/other schools and not all of them have techs on hand to setup this type of thing. It's easy with Google/365 but many would have setup and onsite exchange 5yrs ago and misconfigured it. You can choose to just send TLS to specific domains - like your local authority, certain other schools etc which is a half way house.

To be fair; there are quite a few things that are not being done on ipads - like programming python, taking examinations - which Chromebooks handle just fine. Sure you CAN buy an extra keyboard but in reality I could see teachers getting frustrated with them given a machine for half the price has a tablet mode and all the apps and does more.

We're a 1:1 chromebook school and wouldn't even consider going to anything else. The management of them is so simple and the range of apps is enormous if you consider they run android apps (and linux soon).

devices or support?

I think Linux/ZFS would be a pain for support due to the licensing. If you set on Linux then choose GlusterFS for a distributed filesystem. If your set on ZFS then choose BSD.