woody

Just making everyone aware who might be interested in a Kickstarter for a new board game based on retro computers. It's called Computer Junkyard and looks like it will be amazing. Check it out 😀 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/computerjunkyardgame/computer-junkyard-game I've pledged for the basic boardgame, but there are add-ons you can go for as well. They will deliver to the UK for about £15.

Hi everyone. We are using the Onedrive Sync client and redirecting documents to Onedrive via GPO. Generally we haven't seen any issues with reports. The tempSimsRpt folder is created as normal and people are editing / creating reports with macros etc. The only issue I have come up against is when outputting to a Form Report (RTF). If I try to edit an existing template on a report, or create a new one from scratch, word opens and then I get an error pop up from Microsoft Word as follows: "Error 52: Bad file name or number" Has anybody seen this? Our support partner (not Capita) has taken an initial look but doesn't have an answer as of yet. There is nothing on the Capita knowledge base apart from a community post, which is where I found the link to this thread. It may or may not be related to Onedrive but that sounds like the most likely culprit. This is what Microsoft have to say about the error. https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/964585/error-52-bad-filename-or-number

Correct, there is no way to set a policy using groups. I had to do it with powershell. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/skype/grant-csteamsmessagingpolicy?view=skype-ps

Oh yes, not the best typo is it? I meant to say 'now' as in it has taken effect over the weekend! Thanks for spotting that one!

UPDATE: The changes I made to the Global policy has not taken effect over the weekend. So at least it works as it should. Now to create a policy for staff and manually add staff accounts to it!

Hi all I had Teams settings nicely configured for staff and students here: Office 365 Admin Center > Settings > Services and Add-ins > Microsoft Teams > Settings by user/license type. Here you could select license type such as 'Education - Faculty' and 'Education - Student' and then turn off things such as private chat. Now when you go here, you are told that 'Messaging settings have moved to the new Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business admin center.' Ok so I head over to that and start investigating. It appears that now you set up policies for messaging settings and that there are already some policies created in there, including Faculty and Student ones which appear to be a migration of the original settings I set up. The problem is, these policies are not applied to any of the staff or students! All the users are set to get the Global policies which in my tenancy by default where a lot more open. I tested logging onto Teams as a student and I could private message, call, the whole shebang! Thankfully although students can access teams, we are not using it in anger so now to frantically change the default global policies. However, I have made a change pretty much turning everything off in the global policy but this hasn't applied as of yet (2 hours later) on my own Teams account. What am I missing? Thank you MS for doing the migration and not retaining very important settings in Teams particularly for Students!

For anyone who has Sophos UTM9 as their web filter, you can vote for the option to allow based on referrer header here (please do so!): https://ideas.sophos.com/forums/17359-sg-utm/suggestions/18539521-allow-web-filtering-exceptions-to-use-the-referrer

We currently use Spiceworks on-prem, but need to move to a cloud based solution which will also do assets and provision users from Azure AD. Problem is, Spiceworks hosted solution does neither and still doesn't have a lot of the features the on-prem version has! Shame but then it is free. Looks like we will have to either make a case to go to a paid product, or compromise on features.

Creating users in bulk from a CSV out of SIMS is a good opportunity to get into Powershell. We started basic and now we have a script that is very customised to our needs and pretty much does everything, including groups, home drives, office365 and licensing etc. Probably not a lot of time now before term but it is something that could be worked on over the course of the year for next time. Plus once you get to grips with Powershell, you can do a lot of other cool stuff too!

Not necessarily - as Katy said above, you can hard-wire a connection from each door controller to the fire alarm which will release the mag lock independent of the Net2 software.

Ok, thanks for putting me right on that one!

Looks like we will be going for 4 65" interactive screens to refit a performing arts block that was flooded. As mentioned much earlier in the thread, I am still looking at moving the touch to the teacher device with wireless projection to the screen, but at the moment a decent 'commercial' 75" screen or even a 65" 4k is not that much cheaper than a 65" 4k touch with the 5 year warranty as well. Plus the touch ones tend to have a freeze on the remote, something we would need if we were cloning the display of the teacher device. I'm looking at the M-Touch which is I believe a budget version of the Clevertouch and is coming in just under £1500 ex VAT. Has anybody got experience of these, or could anybody recommend an alternative in that price bracket?

If I were going for 65" then it would be worth having a look at the M-Touch which is a no frills version of the Clever touch. They are considerably cheaper: https://www.avpartsmaster.co.uk/p-68794-m-touch-65-interactive-touch-screen.aspx?gclid=Cj0KCQjwm6HaBRCbARIsAFDNK-g2P2c-Zm6ZdBt1JdZGRz1-lSXZk9bn3CeESMBRKywIzh7oUHjFn5IaAn5sEALw_wcB#fo_c=1083&fo_k=124414ec1daadd27558de0221fba64eb&fo_s=gplauk But you would want to trial one first I think. I don't have any experience with them.

This isn't going to help, but I really think Parentpay (or anyone else) shouldn't be using the UPN as the UID now. There is no need as every MIS will have alternative identifiers that could be used which will not count as personally identifiable information in the real world. Equally, some service providers who sync from SIMS use the Admin number which is useless if you have MATs using a single service as there will be duplicates. I think for SIMS users, the 3rd party field, External_Id is a much better option nowadays. I'm sure other MIS providers will have something similar.

The point is, we don't have interactive screens, we have interactive boards, and they are coming to the end of their life - particularly the 10 year old ones where we cannot buy new pens. In the other Academy, the projectors as well as staff laptops are needing to be replaced soon although the boards probably have a few years left in them. So we have a decision to make. Either way, we will need to provide training, but I feel bringing the interactivity to the teacher device rather than the board offers better value for money over time (for us), fits in with the strategy for where we want to go, and has less of a training need since the jump from using Office -> using Office with a pen requires much less of a learning curve.

It is a combination of many things - laziness / old habits, perceived barriers both technical and operational, lack of time to develop skills, confidence. This opinion is the result of speaking to staff and understanding their current practice. I'm sure a lot of other schools have been there in the past if not present. There have been attempts to train and encourage staff but the climate has never been right (other problems higher up the list to deal with) and historically it has not been a priority of management either. That is changing rapidly though and the Principals at both my Academies are looking to focus more on classroom technology. The issue is, the money isn't there and so we are looking at ways to dip our toes in whilst preparing the climate for change. For instance, one way we could prepare with little up front cost would be to put the MS wireless adaptors in every room with the current set up. Then, we not only test the reliability of the connectivity but also get staff used to connecting in a different way with their current laptop. If it is reliable (here's hoping) then the next step of moving to an interactive device (surface or equivalent) will be much easier. Of course, if you already have a large uptake of staff using interactivity at the front of the classroom, then it makes sense to stick with that and upgrade the front of the room periodically.

We currently have 10 year old promethean IWBs and recently bought projectors in one of my Academies, and 7 year old promethean IWBs with projectors the same age in the other. We also have a long standing strategy of providing laptops to teachers rather than fixed PCs in each classroom. Despite several attempts at training and encouragement to use interactivity, only about 15% of staff actually bother with the pen. For everyone else, it's just projecting a powerpoint onto the board. My thinking on this is why replace them all with an interactive panel if staff will not use them interactively. Sure - more probably will use them because of the potential wow factor but even if 50% use them interactively, 50% wastage on a £1500 - £2500 panel is not acceptable. We don't want to go down the road of only putting them in rooms where they will get used because staff do move round, and the Academies are currently growing, meaning not all staff will have the luxury of their own classroom all the time. Therefore, we are looking into a Surface Pro or equivalent device plus a Microsoft wireless adapter when we come round to renewing staff laptops. Whilst costing double, when you offset this against the cost of an interactive panel, it's not that bad. And then when the projectors are EOL, we will replace them with cheaper 65-70" Tvs. With MS Ink, it is much less of a barrier to interactivity so hopefully more will use the pen, and even if they don't they still have a high quality laptop that is getting used albeit not to its full potential. Just need to work in the costs of accidental damage insurance as will certainly be required. We would only supply teaching staff with the surface, but other staff with a stansdard laptop running windows 10 can just as easily connect to the projector / TV using the MS adapter - something we are testing now to make sure it is reliable.

​Hi I have just learned that a member of staff has gone through the process of applying for a collective passport for a school trip in Paris. I was made aware of this because the Principal's PA was asked by the passport office to verify the application, and she questioned it because they were asking her to send student information in a word document over email. Instead, she securely shared the document as a onedrive link which required verification at the recipient end, but they rejected this and asked for the word document attached to an email again. The information in the application form which was asked to be re-sent for verification includes Student names, DOBs, Town and country of birth, and current town of residence. Obviously this is personally identifiable data which will come under GDPR and the DPA 1998. You can see the application process and get to the application form here: https://www.gov.uk/collective-group-passports/how-to-apply What is going on here???? Just thought I would put this out there and see if anyone had come across it before? Thanks

+1 for Tasc Insight. I wouldn't say it is one of the more well laid out or pretty apps, but the data it pulls through is good and the ability to publish from a student's linked documents such as xml reports etc is fantastic for us. We also use the parents evening add on as well which works through the app. The back end is a bit hokey but it gets the job done.

Or is your picture on the bottom of it?

https://unitedlearning.current-vacancies.com/Jobs/Advert/1160598?cid=1567&rsid=0&js=0&LinkType=1&FromSearch=False

As an update, you can copy folders / files on the File tab under any Channel to another Channel within the same Team, or another Team you have access to whether this be within your tenancy or if you are guest on another tenancy.

If a student moves group, will they will be removed from one team and added to another? Yes How does this affect any work they have done in OneNote? The work stays in the team and they loose access to it. Is the data transferred? No, it stays where it is. Can the data be transferred? At the moment, files could be saved locally by the user and then re-saved in the new team if necessary - other content I'm not so sure. Does it disappear? The teams continue to exist until they are removed manually (by powershell for instance). Since a team must have one owner, then at the moment even if a teacher is removed from a class at the end of the year for example, they would remain as owner of the team and therefore would keep access to it. However, they would soon build up a lot of historical teams at that rate! Also you get a lot of errors against the SDS profile for all these teams where the csv files no longer contain an entry linking a teacher to a class but it can't remove the last owner. What about at the end of each academic year? Student loses access. Last teacher connected to the team retains access. Lots of errors against a profile in SDS! I am not sure what happens with Onenote and class notebook within these teams. Basically, Microsoft are stuck to some degree because they are limited by the logic under the hood with Teams and O365 groups. What we need is need an archiving solution and also the ability to easily transfer content between teams (the channels). For instance, perhaps a teacher could set up there own Team 'templates', which could then be used to copy content from the template into the class teams set up by SDS. At the end of an Academic year (or if a teacher moves mid year), the old teams should archived with a way for the teacher to get access to them. Another scenario I am currently grappling with is when classes rotate around teachers during the year on a carousel in the timetable. I'm sure staff would want to retain access to the Teams for each class they have taught that year, as well as be able to transfer work contained in channels from one team to the other. Until this happens, the workload imposed upon teachers in manually copying content somewhere local, them uploading it back into another team will mean only a few will truly embrace it. Either that or teachers use it to only enhance lessons with content that is not essential to the outcomes of the students and is unique to each class - ie Chat. Assignments is another area I haven't fully investigated here - that's next on my list. If anyone has any comments / advancements / corrections on the above, I would love to hear what they are and that my current conclusions where incorrect - that there was a better way to do things!

Just a quick question Zag - how did you populate the sub calendars with timetables. I don't think that is done by SDS is it? Thanks

Hi Greg thanks for that. I am trying to find that thread on the capita forums but getting nowhere. Would you be able to post a link? Many thanks