BKGarry

You can bulk update consents under Students > Parents & Guardians > Parental Consents Slightly annoyingly you cannot do all of your different consents at once (we have a like 9 or 10 different type of photo consents) but it at least allows you to bulk deal with that one consent

Sorry to hear that, but at least you seem to have enjoyed it.

We once used SIMS Options online, never again there, and there was several years of attempts on that. We now use the Options part of Timetabler, the TOOLS web version works very well for students to select their Options, very very simple to use, and It does all the Option block building and manipulation you want. If you are using Timetabler as your timetabling package, I would say it is completely worth it.

I did, because Office 97 was what was installed on my school's PCs when I was a student.

I am going to sound like I am trying to teach you to suck eggs, but have you checked they haven't switched to PC Only on the Windows+P menu you get for duplicate/extend. We have had quite few cases recently where staff members plugging in laptops to older TVs that are HDMI only defaulting to PC Screen only.

We use this - https://plagiarismcheck.org/ Was quite cheap, support is good and teachers seem to be able to use with with Google classroom and office docs without any issues

Seriously, my Edugeek Account is only a year younger than you

If you can afford an AI Key, it is totally worth it, makes searching so much easier, I do believe some of the newer Unifi NVRs come with that functionality built in, but I brought it for our NVR Pro and it is really useful

Wow!, I sat my GCSEs then, and I am relatively young (or so I tell myself)

Building/Premises Cameras - Supplied and Controlled by the PFI company are Hikvision, our own CCTV to for our spaces are Unifi, which I have just hit capacity at 39 cameras, but 3 of those are the new 360 AI ones and they are really useful. Our Exams Officer/Cover Manager/Premises Manager (Yes that is all one person) much Prefers using the Unifi stuff to the Hikvision stuff.

Purchased this on Friday, in the Steam Sale, with the intent to play it over the weekend, but was then unwell

I have been looking into this myself, as our Dell UPS is really starting to not be reliable. There are now Lithium-Ion battery based UPS's which seem to require a lot less space, but I haven't gone into too much detail of everything, as it will be next financial year, and as such I have not looked that far into it.

I have to say my Synology seems to be rock solid, Backing up both Microsoft 365 data and Google Workspace. The only little annoyance is, because of the way Google Workspace's APIs work, restores there are in Microsoft Office File types not as a Google Doc/Sheet/Slides etc

So I do use LTO for onsite backups of things, once a week. There are daily backups to SSD on the DPM Server and those backup once a week to tape All LTO Tapes go into the very overengineered finance safe, but onsite servers are less and less, and onsite storage is really for the Macs and Student Windows Devices only (because trying to explain to photography that no you have to wait for your files to sync to onedrive was a bit too hard at this point in time). All Staff devices have redirection to OneDrive, with Office 365 and Google Workspace (as most general use student devices are chromebooks) are updated on a rolling task to a Synology box onsite. Never really worried about it being offsite, as the Finance safe is so thick that is it something stupid like 18 hours fire rated and then that is 2 building fire compartments away from the server room, and those building fire compartments are rather for 4 hours each. Never went for sending thing to the cloud for backup because, well you can't get more Air Gapped than an LTO8 tape that is not in the drive.

I was like Accelerated Reader needs windows?!?!?! I didn't even know there was a requirement for Augmented Reality, but we have an annoying level 3 course here that requires Microsoft Access to be used, so they still get windows for that monstrosity.