DrBeaker

Jeez - how old are those now? We junked the Epson X5-e's about July 2017 according to my notes and replaced with Epson EB-X27's. The quick corner feature on the X-11's was outstanding at the time!

Hence why we all love Edugeek! So many different opinions and views! I'm not saying my preferred solution works the best - I've seen better and I've seen worse. However it works for me and our school needs. Any other solutions would require IT resources and additional budget etc that we simply do not have available. I love the proper old style docking stations - if people used them, and treated them properly they worked great. Can't say I ever had any real issues. I would love to have a proper laptop with proper old-style "retro" - I shall call it! - docking station. The new USB-C style ones I'm not so keen on, I think it's just manufacturers being lazy and not bothering to update their standards. But I hear good things from others.

Some valid points. But again it's down to the school, available budget and available IT resources. What suits one person and school might not suit another. We can't afford new computers let alone laptops! In another school we spent over £500 on replacement laptop keyboards purely due to vandalism of the keyboards by students. Is that cost justified - as I can get maybe 2-3 refurbished baseunits for that price and some normal keyboards? In one school they brought brand new laptops and a trolley. The laptops sat in the trolley - never used! I know another where there's a stack of iPads sitting on a shelf - unused! So perhaps I am a little cynical of what the money gets spent on. We have remote access available here and teachers can use that if they want - no data issues there. At the end of the day this is taxpayers money - and it needs to be spent wisely and justified. Would the taxpayer be happy knowing their child in school has to use a crap computer at school, because the teacher wanted a shiny laptop, surface or iPad device and that's where the money was spent?

For each school, budget and area - they'll have their own unique needs. Ours have some kind of TVs, Interactive SMART Whiteboards/TVs in every single room so they can display content on that and wired network connections. Teachers get fairly well paid (compared to us support staff) so they can buy their own laptops if they really want one. If I as the IT Tech doesn't get one, neither do you Mr/Miss Teacher. For us it's simply a case of cost and with such a lack of IT resources and budget, no way are we going to start supporting laptops.

No. The classroom is a fixed location, so a PC is good enough for them in a classroom. PCs are the better options for me IMHO - easier to fix, swap out, maintain, upgrade, more powerful etc. What happens if a teacher is off sick? What if there's an issue with the dock and the teacher can't move the laptop between rooms? What happens if they just "forget" their laptop - am I supposed to provide one with little-no notice? All of this requires investment and backing to get this to work as intended. None of of these issues happen with a normal classroom PC. Can I up the laptop RAM to 16GB like I could for a desktop? Yes? Gonna cost how much £££? The TCO of laptops in schools is far higher from an IT management resource and budget perspective - so it's a no for me. Obviously we'll all have different opinions based on our own experiences and budget etc. Whilst I could justify them for some admin staff or some SLT or myself - for teacher classrooms. Nope. I would however to see if you can get them supplied @ICTDirect_Dave as things always change from a support staff point of view. Just to say I did have a laptop briefly in one role and used the docking station with 2x external monitors, keyboard, moue and speakers - never failed me once.

I had to look at a classroom issue a few years ago when the plug had been PAT-tested only the month before. During the work I had to remove the plug from the wall socket, only for the plastic to be that britttle from age that it fell apart in my hands when trying to remove the plug from the socket. Yet it had been PAT-tested the month before. What a joke. Hence why PAT-testing has such a bad rep.

Reading above you stated the projector is 7-years old? That's a generation of main school students plus 2! I'd say you've had fair use out of the projector at this point. At one school I audited the entire projectors and identified which ones had problems. Eventually we got it agreed after a certain amount of years we'd just replace it, it was far easier that way. We had some 7-year old computers start to blow up - no-one wanted to come in and fix them even if they were paid to replace the damaged components! Bear in mind - you're not talking about a car here, you're talking about a device that has an average lifespan of 3-5 years.

Epson EB-X11 - brilliant, cheap and reliable projectors. Installed god knows how many of them at one school. That's what made me choose Epson as my preferred brand. But yeah if it wasn't the lamp or a dodgy cable, it sounds like a fault with the projector itself. Due to how old those ones are now it's probably better to just replace the thing. We got probably 5-6x years of service out of them and I think that's pretty fair.

One school they had a bungalow but was empty for ages and was apparently going to be sold off or used for storage. One school had a house onsite but was used for offices and estates team and a meeting room. One now has nothing onsite.

How many guest VMs have you got though on those hosts? How about your resiliency and load balancing? I'm more of an ESX/ESXi person to be honest - how you do deal with the equivalent of vMotion on your Hyper-V hosts? I do keep hearing how SANs are a thing of the past now and some have gone for a mixture of a file-server and cloud storage instead of the cost and issues with SANs.

How about something like this? https://www.ebuyer.com/822829-samsung-galaxy-tab-a-32gb-wifi-black-sm-t580nzkebtu

We toyed with the Nexus 7 when it was out. It was good (I still have one I brought myself and use it at home) but the screen was slightly too small. We brought a load for teachers and some when they were on offer for £160 but that was a few years after release, down from what was a £400+ tablet. So you're going to be hard-pressed to find one for that price range nowadays. We ended up using our personal phones for a while which I never agreed with anyway and I stopped using it for that afterwards.

So does providing the best on-site facilities, best tea and coffee, best working conditions, best office etc for staff - retains the best staff. I understand the point you've made but surely possibly part of our jobs (probably the most diffuclt part) is telling these people NO and this is why xxx and that's how it works in the real world Mr Student, Mr Teacher etc. Did you get that i7, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD PC with dual graphics cards you asked for in IT Support as it's best... No. Did you cry and whinge and moan about it like staff do? I'd imagine not.

Can you take the classroom PC home so it will "work at home". I don't think so. I'm sure pretty much most of us at School/College/Uni had access to software that was only available on the computers onsite and had to deal with that. How come the new generation are so babied they can't cope?

I hadn't heard this until your post! Damm.

If you've got the time and inclination Xibo is good. It's free. I enjoyed using it for the most part, it was reliable but it's not particularly intuitive. Our admin teams struggled with it. I got some pretty impressive stuff to work on it by just playing around with it however. In one role we just used old PCs that were no longer fit for production use. If one failed, I had loads of them spare anyway. I was particularly chuffed when I'd set it up, tweaked various settings etc and as a result got one of those old PCs to over a year of uptime - whereas a colleague had replaced a working PC with a firestick solution that crashed at least twice a week. Comparing his solution to mine - I just set it and forget it. It did make me chuckle when his constantly crashed and my response was "well, mine's fine" . That was all to prove a point anyway to be honest. But as it's not really a mission-critical service for me now in another role, it's on the back burner for me.

Verbose logon - for the love of god and everything else. I always enable verbose logon! I've had a lifetime of the stuck on "Please wait" and "Welcome" screen messages to last a lifetime!

I must be getting tired now. I misread that as "teachers heads"

True but when I've worked with people who didn't know what AD stood for or what 3.5" or 5.25" drive bays were, you get a bit worried about their IT skillset. Never mind them trying anything even remotely outside of that skill, to be able to apply or transfer their skills to! What irks me is even if you've proved yourself to be able to do the job - they refuse to acknowledge the extra work or pay you anything extra for that role. Yet they'll hire someone else in an admin role or SLT role without question. To me it says a lot about how they value you.

What sort of cables and in what locations? The cable ties are cheap compared to the velcro - but again depends on your use case? Surely in a school generally it's only going to be you, your team (if you've got anybody else) or the caretakers moving cables that are cable-tied? I put forward a project the once with full info, pros/cons etc and costs to tidy all the cables. It wasn't seen as "important", got rejected and to this day they're still in the same mess they were in when I first came across the mess.

This is where I disagree completely with any of this being within the scope of IT and the IT support team. AV and Event stuff is a separate role, requiring a whole boatload of separate skill-sets. The biggest irk is the salary level and AV techs get more for those skills. What does a normal IT Tech know about audio e.g. reverb, timing delays, music cues. What does he know about Lighting systems - DMX control, pans, pars, chases, scenes, gobos etc. What does he know about stage management etc - front of house, dry hire, wet hire etc. What does he know about Management - controlling, managing and communicating with the team. You know how I know this - I taught myself, with my own resources! This is a pet peeve and a major reason why I left one place as they weren't willing to pay any more for the extra responsibility (which is IS!) of doing all this in addition to the IT roles and responsibilities I already had. e.g. one time I was essentially asked to run a set list - I'm not a DJ nor had any training as one, asked to move equipment from music and setup mics as "the music teacher didn't know how". I'd suggest you're in the wrong job then as a teacher and leads me to question what on earth you're actually teaching the music students.

Out of interest would you let us know in a few months/Easter/summer how this went using the "low-tech" solution compared to something else? More to prove a point than anything. But a testimony from another school would be useful. Thanks

Devastating for staff and students. Hence the importance of why lone working and Health and Safety needs to be taken seriously. My sympathies to the school and his family.

How else does it know when it's been a good UPS? Good little UPS protecting the servers from that power outage! There's a good UPS!

I was always told never to upgrade, to do a fresh install whether that's Windows client or Windows server. We're an RM school so in conjunction with RM and SIPs education we sorted out the new server hardware, server OS and migration to the new SIMs server from 2008 R2 to server 2016. Yes it was a right ball:censored: getting all the exporters running as not everyone uses the same standard - some use Groupcall, some use their own app to "sync" data, some install services on the server. I've got everything except one 3rd party service moved across now - and that's down to them not being able to do it - not me. This was from the new server going in back in December last year.