woody

We have Star Lesson for that sort of thing although there doesn't appear to be a live 'in-ear' feedback. Lessons can be recorded or observed live. Its a bit clunky in areas but gets the job done and is cheaper than competitors. Still expect to pay £manythousand (in your own words). I think if you can make the skype thing work that would be best - but expect to have to set it up yourself each time someone wants to use it!

I've been taking a look at teams and a big problem is going to be duplication of work for teachers. Yes, SDS will create the classes and memberships, but after that, It's all down to the teacher. Under each team (class), I imagine the teacher would create a separate 'Channel' for each topic or course, whatever you want to call it. The problem is, these channels can't be copied into other Teams. Therefore, if you teach 3 year 8 classes, you have to create the Channels separately for each one, even if they are identical. If you have assignments, these can't be copied between Teams and channels so you have to create them all again. This is basic VLE type stuff and most teachers won't want to bother with the hassle. Businesses who want to use Teams are asking for the same functionality already, and according to Microsoft, it won't be easy for them to achieve it because of the underlying structure. Instead, they are asking customers to suggest workarounds!!! Microsoft Suggestions - Move channels into other teams

Thanks for replies so far. I have tried turning the report around starting with a staff focus and then attaching classes but you get the same problem: it only shows the main classes by default, so if you share a class, only the teacher set as 'Main' in NT6 for that class appears in the report against the class. Adding Lessons works and shows all lessons timetabled for a teacher whether main or not, but of course that puts an entry for the same class multiple times depending on how many lessons that class is taught through the week. So you end up with a duplicate problem. I have seen the Ruler SDS and have also been introduced to EduBoard who offer a free sync tool. Don't know about Salamander but at the moment we are trying to save money. Hopefully these companies have already worked out the problem. However, I prefer to go vanilla on this and understand what is going on under the hood. What happens if these companies fold or they abandon their sync tools or start to charge for them? Also, is their sync tool doing anything else in the background? What is in it for them? What IDs are they using for class, student and teacher and could these cause duplication issues if more than 1 school are under the same tenancy as is my case? All questions to be considered. I know Microsoft are looking at integration with SIMS here in the UK so I would rather hold out for that. In the meantime, I think I will attach 'Lessons' to my report and deal with the duplicates using Powershell. That should give me what I want.

Hi I currently have a report which outputs a csv showing classes and external ID for the teacher linked to each class for the purpose of MS SDS. It goes as follows: Data Area: Class Data Fields: for supervisors of each class: External Id of the teacher, Class ID. (Supervisors has no filter and 'Display first record only' is ticked.) Filter Classes where: Academic year is 2016 and Class name is not null Sort order: ID, Class name Default Output: Text Ok, the issue is, some classes have more than one teacher assigned, ie one teacher teaches 1 lesson, different teacher teaches second lesson. Therefore, I would want two lines in the csv, the 1st showing the Class ID and 1st teacher and 2nd showing the Class ID and 2nd teacher. If I untick 'Display first record only', not only do I get a separate line for the second teacher (what I want) but I also get two entries against every class for the same teacher (based on the 'Main' field containing an entry for both true and false for each teacher). I also get historical teachers who have taught that class during the current academic year. It started out seeming such a simple thing to achieve but I can't get my head around it, so any suggestions or pointers would be welcome. Many thanks Mark

Thanks @pcstru for picking up on this. I guess I can get ahead of myself sometimes! I will revisit this in light of the DPA.

Ok thanks to @nickbro who has helped me hit the ground rolling with this. This may also help @MYK-IT who has asked on another post about how you can match up SIMS records with AD / Azure accounts. I have been looking at how to automate as much as possible of this routine task. Interestingly, Bryan at MS who has been taking me through the initial SDS sync said they are looking at a sync tool for SIMS. No ETA on that though. How I have done it. We were already manually entering school email address into SIMS for both staff and students so that means you can create reports similar to Nickbro's above but with the email address in there. If this is the same as UPNs in AD / Azure then your laughing. However, this is prone to human error so we decided to do it the other way round. Carry on reading.... We decided to use the 3rd party field 'External Id' in SIMS as the unique ID across the board. We find that Adno is not unique enough, especially when you have more than one Academy syncing into the same o365 tenancy like us, and UPN is only for students not staff. 'External Id' is consistent for students and staff, even supply staff who are in Manage Classroom staff but do not have a personnel record. External Id also gets around guest pupils with no Adno. It is very long and extremely unlikely to be duplicated across several SIMS databases. If you did come across this then you are very unlucky! So getting back to my earlier comment about doing things the other way round, instead of pulling reports from SIMS for the student.csv and teacher.csv, we decided to write the 'External Id' from SIMS into extensionAttribute1 on the AD account. (Whist we were at it, we also decided to put the UPN and Adno in there for students, and the Staff code in there for staff but this isn’t necessary for the point in hand). For this to work, it means that there is a manual job to be done when a new user appears in SIMS, to get the 'External Id' and add that to the attribute in AD. However, not too much of a problem and we could even write it into our user creation powershell script as a switch allowing us to paste it in. Now that you have the External ID in there, you have a match between SIMS and AD. Editing Nickbro's powershell above, it isn't too difficult to create the csv files. The only ones needed to pull directly from SIMS using CommandReporter is the StudentEnrollment and TeacherRoster ones. At this point in time, I am getting an error when trying to upload the csv files into SDS as follows: "StudentEnrollment.csv : Referenced data in one or more rows are not found in source. Field - ID" and "TeacherRoster.csv : Referenced data in one or more rows are not found in source. Field - ID". I will email Bryan @ MS and tell him what's happening. Hopefully the above gives you an idea of how we are matching things up. Any questions, feel free to ask. Thanks

We are looking into the Unifi Video stuff. How many cameras do you have running on the NVR? Have you had any issues with them? Are you planning to scale? If so do you think you would buy multiple NVRs and do these link up? Sorry for all the questions!

We have had this a number of times - we just re-download the Full release in the update library again (even though it says downloaded) and it springs back into action again. Curious!

We have had the same problems with Parents not understanding the change. I too use it as a parent - I am really ticked off with the change. I think they should rename 'My Account' to 'Their Account'! All I have ever wanted from Parent pay is the ability to set up automatic payments and a responsive site that works on my phone. The first they are still promising to do but haven't delivered yet. The latter, twice they have promised to make the site responsive! The first time, it was just the log in page that sizes correctly, then it went to the old site which didn't resize. Then with the new My Account, all of that is responsive until you get to the card payment page, where it again goes to the old site and all of a sudden everything is tiny on my phone! And why oh why do they still not have an IOS / Android App? GRRRrrrrrrr.

We use Starlesson here. One of the earlier players in the market, and their overall product is perhaps not as polished as you would expect, but it works well and their licensing cost is reasonable. They even gave us a deal allowing the two Academies I look after to share the system. I do think their HD camera is expensive, but having said that it's not any more expensive that others we looked at.

We got 5 of these with a multi charger but you can buy individually. They are meant for primary as you can tell from how they look but we wanted something that would be straight forward, no bells and whistles and our MFL teacher loves them! https://www.primaryict.co.uk/tts-easi-speak-mp3-microphone-usb-sound-voice-recorder-yellow_ettmicy-el00455_2013.htm

This is lifted from the datasheet on the Aruba 3810M: 'supports up to a 10-member ring or chain and 5-member fully meshed stacks'. I think the 2920s do have a limit of 4.

I didn't suggest filtering it, I suggested passing it to whoever deals with e-safety at your school

This is one to pass to your e-safety officer so that they can provide advice, warning to students. Parents warned after claims paedophiles are using smartphone app to target children - Manchester Evening News The site is very open and is easy to join with false credentials, with no need for email verification. Scary! [Edit] It is actually an App but you can register via the website as well.

We have looked at this. It fell down for us because we wanted teachers to be able to do everything they needed to in the same place. For instance, an obvious thing for us was to be able to take your class register in MINT class. But it currently has no write back to SIMS. I think they said they were looking at it but no timescale. However, the bits it already has are done well enough. We currently use PARS Connect and I was pleasantly surprised to see that they now have a seating plan layout showing students and their data in a similar way to MINT Class. As we were already licensed for it, it was an obvious solution. All teachers have now set up their seating plans and they can also take their registers from here, as well as add merits/demerits and comment on behaviour. All this get's written back into SIMS in real time. Some areas are not as slick, but it gets the job done. [Edit] I forgot to say. Pricing is for us somewhere between £1,500 and £2,000 per annum for about 800 students. If you use the whole package, then its well worth it. But I wouldn't say it was worth it if you were only going to use the seating plan bit on its own.

I use a Draytek but the UI is not very friendly especially for non technical parents. I haven't subscribed to their filtering service but use the URL whitelisting etc. The Home Halo looks good though for something to recommend to family / friends who want an easy method of control.

Thanks Jinnantonnixx I did see the split option and wondered how to use it. That did it!

Hi have tried hard with this one but can't seem to get the correct syntax for what I want to do: I have several folders with bmp files and part of the filename is the SIMS admin no. Here is an example of a few files from one of the folders: 002538-523D942422.bmp 002551-C1F480B471.bmp 002555-AC48B2A4C7.bmp So I want to end up with the following: 002538.bmp 002551.bmp 002555.bmp I have found this which starts to put me in the right direction: gci *.txt | rename-item -newname { [string]($_.name).substring(1) } I know the above will remove the first character or I can increase the .substring(1) with a higher number to remove more characters from the start. But I want to KEEP the characters at the start and I also want to keep the .bmp at the end. I just can't find examples of variations I can use on the substring. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks Mark

Well I am trying 'Download them all' for Firefox as suggested by Arthur. Getting around 700Kb - 1Mb at the moment. Much better although not exactly maxing out. Should be able to get Exchange installed before home time so that's good.

Oh Man! Working through our migration to Office365 and about to install Exchange 2013 into our Exchange 2010 environment. Come to download the ISO from the MS VLSC and it is going at about 200Kbps in IE. Chrome starts fast but then terminates after 10 seconds. Firefox starts fast for the first 30 seconds and then steadily goes down hill until it reaches 200Kbps like IE. These are all through selecting to download through the browser. Trying to use the MS Download Manager but that just doesn't work and it re-directs to download through the browser anyway. Wishing we had set it off earlier now but with 100mb fibre, you get out of the habit of doing that! Is this the experience of everyone else? If so why are we being throttled so severely when we are paying for the service through our licensing??? So frustrating!

Out of interest, what is the Patch number?

Great feedback. How are you finding the battery life?

Yeah, I don't particularly think it is the round face on the 360 I like so much as that the screen appears edge to edge. My wife says she would prefer the square ones on me but I think it would be so much better if you could reduce the size of the bezel to make it smaller and sit better on the wrist, or if it has to be big, then maximise the panel size to make full use of the estate available. I suppose I am describing a future model yet to be released.

Thanks hardtailstar. I think I will wait for the moto 360. I suppose I could buy the LG or the sammy and then sell it when the moto 360 comes out if it gets good reviews...

What made you go for the LG G over the Samsung Gear Live? Also can you give us a quick list of goods and bads so far...