woody

We currently use the 1k cards but you have aroused my curiosity. After a quick google, the Ultralights appear cheaper for a start, but will they work with existing readers? I can imagine that perhaps the greater reading distance (up to 10cm) may cause one or two issues at the refectory. Would be interested in other replies to this.

Hi yes it is a windows 7 laptop. I am on that site tomorrow so I'll go over what you have said and report back Thanks

Yes, but this isn't the scenario that the OP is talking about. This is 3 separate schools on paper but in reality, they are all mixed together. So can Progresso mix students and staff from the individual schools together and handle the timetable for that? Can it report on those classes of mixed students for attendance and assessment, behaviour etc. And at the same time unpick all that data to tie it back together for the individual establishments when it comes to the Census and other necessary reporting?

Hi Recently we got some ABV378PRO boards installed. Audio gets to the board in two ways: via USB with the Activdriver, and also through HDMI: Sound is carried via HDMI to the projector, and then there is a jack to jack cable 3.5mm from the audio out on the projector which goes into one of the inputs on the side of the Activboard. The problem is, when both cables are plugged in together, we get a loud hum from the speakers. It is worse on some boards than others. Remove either cable (usb from the laptop, or 3.5mm jack from the side board) and the hum stops. My question is, is it possible to disable audio through the activdriver so that it isn't sent to the board? We don't need this because we have HDMI. And we want to keep the HDMI in case someone wants to use a different HDMI device with audio. At the moment, it means that we pull the 3.5mm jack out and only plug it in when we need HDMI from another source. Any help / advice would be appreciated.

To get back to the question in point. We ran for 3 years with two separate Academies who shared a 6th form. We tried Partnership X (it was in it's early days) but it just didn't work at the time but we were trying to 'fudge' it as Phil Neal says. We then added students from each site as guests at the other site and duplicated the timetable. After creating a script that gave an option which SIMS to load and map the correct drive, teachers then had to fill in two registers for each class! But it still wasn't ideal and it won't help for reporting across students from both sites. But we were able to sort out the Census. In the end, Management realised that the best way to sort this was to move all 6th form into one of the Academies - although there were more reasons behind this than just getting the MIS to work. To be honest unless there is a magical product out there that I don't know about, you will not get anything that will give you the best of both worlds: Reporting and Census for the individual DFES entities and reporting / single registration across students who are mixing together from different establishments. This isn't because it is technically possible, it's because very few establishments work like this and so there's no business model for someone to write the software. Waiting for someone to prove me wrong!

Hi Steven. So what is performance like? I'm concerned that having several hundred students accessing it at login might affect speed - is Insight installed on your SIMS server? (presuming you have SIMS here)

Very interesting? What medium did you use to install 8.1 Pro? Do you think you could get it to work with an imaging solution to streamline rollout to a lot of devices?

Hi we are looking at getting Insight and I've had a search through posts but can't find anything on allowing students to access Insight on a whole school basis. This is what we would like to do: SSO with AD. Send all students to their Insight page at login. Display to them on the front page their attendance, behaviour key stats, assessment targets with progress, messages, cashless catering balance (AMI Easytrace), print balance (Pcounter), library books due (Oliver), and any assignments set. Now I know we won't get all of this out of the box, particularly for the 3rd party integrations, but you can see what we are trying to achieve - giving students data that is of interest to them. My question is: Is anybody also working towards this / achieved this to some degree? If so, what are your thoughts, are you happy with it? Am I looking in the wrong direction with Insight - is there some fantastic product out there that I am missing? I know Insight started off as a Parental info solution and we will want to use it for that also, but we are really keen to use it with students. Thanks

Both will do the majority of what you need and both work well. Compare the features. Compare the costs. (AB Tutor has historically been much better priced but I haven't compared recently.) Weight it all up.

Presumably if you have an MS EES license, you can re-install 8.1 Ent on these?

I think in this scenario, I would be tempted to send a letter home explaining the do's and dont's and consequences of any attempted hacking etc. But also put the login credentials on there. Then have a statement that says they are agreeing to abide by the rules when they log onto the system. You can also have the AUP or whatever as a link on the login page. When you sign up for online banking, you don't have to send a signed AUP or equivalent document back to the bank before they send out your password. They just have a terms and conditions that they push in front of your nose when you sign up.

We currently use TMG with Websense. If Sophos was to be a complete replacement for this setup, it would need to have good web filtering that matches the functionality of the main players (Websense, Smoothwall, Bloxx etc) Does it do: HTTPS inspection? Anonymous proxy detection? Quotas? Force safe search? Location specific filtering? If it did all of this (or most of it) then it would definitely be worth a look depending on cost of course.

I had completely forgot that I had already posted a question about this! We are still battling on with this issue, and the fact that nobody has replied shows that everybody hates VCing with a passion - just like me! However, I still need to get this thing up and running. Since the original post, I have put the system on a global IP. I can dial test systems on the internet and they confirm that everything works including being called from the other end. Our colleague can still dial in (now to the external IP) but we can't call him back. They have a Polycom Gatekeeper at their end and we are dialling their external IP which is set on a 1 to 1 NAT with the internal IP address of the unit on their network. Everytime we try to call, it is dropped immediately, as if it isn't even trying - and yet when we dial test systems on the WWW it works. Both puzzling and frustrating but it is likely my lack of knowledge with using these systems. If anybody is reading this and is able to help, I would be most grateful. Thanks Mark

We pay about £12k annually for our 1GB BT circuit. Two academies 2.5 miles apart.

Is it just SIMS you are concerned about? What about the rest of the network? Are you planning to have separate server farms? Domains? File storage? Cashless catering? Telephony? Library system? etc.

Depends on what level of motoring you want to achieve but Apple Remote desktop will allow you to view / lock / share / control student desktops. Netsupport also do a Mac version but it's not as fully featured or developed as the Windows version. I'm sure there are offerings from the others too.

Have you tried doing a disk repair in the utilities?

See the post above yours. The Asus Transformer is cheaper and will do just as good a job.

Definitely the FIRST thing to do is set up a Meraki account (free) and register the ipads in there. At least then you have some management and can change things later if need be. I am presuming they will want email on them so you will want to enforce a lock code to make them more secure.

Yes, you can install individual apps and add a shortcut to them from within Learnpad. But the whole point of learnpad for me was that it would act as your MDM making application deployment easy and centrally managed. Meaning you should be able to bring Apps from the Play store into Learnpad and distribute them from there within a profile. Using the shortcut way, you would still need to deploy the Apps to every tablet, meaning you either do it manually or get another MDM. I suppose you could use Meraki as a higher level MDM and use Learnpad for classroom management.

Hi took a look at learnpad on a Toshiba tablet about 6 months ago and I wasn't too impressed. I liked the concept and the model works best for class sets rather than 1 to 1 but I just didn't find it reliable enough. When scanning the codes, the new profile didn't always apply properly especially when having to download apps from Learnpad. I found it really difficult to get network drives to work. But the killer for me was just the limitation of Apps that was available in the Learnpad 'store'. Learnpad so say that you can ask the author's permission of an app found in the play store if you can use it on learnpad. So I asked two different authors for permission and didn't get a response so I was unable to use them through learnpad. So if you are looking into this, check that you are happy with the availability of Apps through learnpad.

Hi, we are looking at changing and I just wondered how you have got on with Nationwide since your last post. Thanks.

We have just got some of these. Out of interest, how do you secure the case so that the whole unit can't be taken off the back of the monitor? Or even the accessible side which also just slides off? This is a real concern for us.

Hi Our tech department want to buy 3d printers and hope to write this into their curriculum plan. They are interested in the Makerbots in particular but are open to other suggestions. The concern is related around running costs, and time to print - the two classic considerations when it comes to buying any machine like this. Makerbot say you can print 392 chess pieces with a 1kg roll (A Matter of Scales: How Much Can You Print with a Single 1kg Spool?)which doesn't sound too bad, but does anybody already run these and how are the DT department finding the costs? Also, it took 14 working days x 8 hours so about 112 hours to print 392 pieces. That is 3.5 pieces per hour, but then they had 6 chess pieces on the plate at a time, so I don't know if the time would be any different if you were only printing 1 on the plate at a time as might happen in a DT lesson. Either way, you are looking at 3 students getting a model printed per hour lesson. That means if a class of 30 has 1 hour lesson per week, it would take 10 lessons to get 1 model printed for each class. Then if there was a mistake and it needed to be re-printed..... DT are looking at buying 5 to increase the throughput but i was just wondering what other people's experience is of using them in relation to running costs and time limitations. Thanks Mark

Hi, does anyone have a VC unit using H323 that I can try a direct call to? (as in not through a gatekeeper) We have dusted off our Tandberg (now Cisco) c20 unit due to someone actually finding a good use for it. The unit is on Codec 6.0 and has been set up with NAT on our firewall to route through from the Global IP to the Local IP in both directions with no port blocking. Our colleague can dial in successfully from his polycom system, but we can't dial out to him. We can ping his global IP from the VC unit so it is getting out ok. We are dialling H323alias@global_ip. (Tandbergs use @ as apposed to ## on the polycom) So if anyone is able to let us attempt a call to them, this will allow us to narrow down if the issue is at our end, or that of our colleague's. Thanks Mark