CalmBlueOcean

Pretty much most of it falls on me in our small-ish secondary. When I first started, it was the domain of the Estates Manager to manage both building access and CCTV. Slowly but surely it began to get taken up by IT, for 'reasons' (mainly that Estates didn't want the responsibility and SLT were more than happy to shift it to IT). So now, I run and maintain the building access (Net2), only calling in Paxton when there are physical door issues we can't resolve. As for CCTV, it's a very odd situation of not getting to choose the supplier or make of cameras (Estates do that), but then I have to do the daily running of it - check the camera angles regularly, install and configure it, maintain it. Estates literally just contact the contractors/installers on my behalf if there is an issue I can't resolve.

Stating the damn obvious, but just call them and ask - they've always been really quick and efficient in sorting out most of the issues I've faced with it. I'm sure they would have a quick answer, either way. Unless you prefer the personal challenge of sorting it, of course![TABLE=width: 217] [TR] [TD]01273 811011.[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE]

Good call on the projector cage. We have one in one of our halls for that exact reason and it's served us well.

Anybody know a way to get Chromeboxes to auto shutdown? Had it on our PCs for years through Impero, but Chromeboxes are immune to its charms...

We only have ever have a small handful of students using laptops in exam halls. We disable the wireless card, have a local Exam account that gets logged in by us, all with the same password. Notepad file is opened for them, they are told to save it on the desktop or Documents area. Office is blocked using security permissions. When finished, we put the files onto USB stick, print them off and hand them back to the exams officer or invigilator. Will look into this ExamWritePad though!

There are two of us in IT support, and we share the portering of the trolleys we have between us. There are 9 trolleys in total, most of which are fixed to a department, but 2 or 3, or sometimes even 4 get moved to other areas. Generally there is no expectation of teachers to move their own, but occasionally I will ask them to if they are only moving them a short distance and we are busy with something else. In terms of looking after the trolleys and ensuring Chromebooks go back in correctly... well we don't rely on the teachers! They let the students just chuck them back in the trolleys any old how, not even plugged in. We go round and tidy these as much as we can, but it's a constant battle. I won't even tell you how many Chromebooks have gone walkies from different trolleys over the years. It doesn't help that they take it upon themselves to grab handfuls of Chromebooks from trolleys to use whenever they like, somewhere else on the school site.

I think the distinction between Chromebook and laptop is important, especially when you extensively use both types of devices in your environment. Yes, they're both technically laptops, but someone will often refer to wanting to borrow a laptop when all they really want is a Chromebook (and it's often easier to rustle one up!). And of course, I'm sure we've all got users who refer to their monitor as their computer...

Top man - that seems to have done it! I'd never thought of looking in there. Does seem to be throwing up some spurious detections already, where there is no one there, but I can play around with that. Thanks so much for the quick reply/answer!

I'm wondering if users of Dahua NVR, working with Dahua and Hikvision cameras might be able to help me. I've been landed with the oversight and day to day management of the CCTV system at our school, but unfortunately that didn't extend as far as being able to decide which supplier to use, which system we would purchase, or indeed where the cameras would actually go. Hey-ho, never mind! So the issue I've got is that I was told by the installers to use Smart PSS in order to view and playback all our cameras, including the older Hikvision cameras. For quite a while I had an issue with Hikvision cameras renaming themselves back to "IPC" every time I renamed them, but we seem to have got over that issue, albeit I'm not exactly sure how we managed it. Anyway, I think that's sorted. My problem is I don't seem to get any option to just see times of motion when I review playback footage. The only recordings I have are all "General". If I deselect that from the Record type to look at, I see nothing. I've gone into the Dahua NVR directly and set up Motion Detection on a few test cameras, as this wasn't selected on any of them by the installers. I ensure they are enabled, that "Record Channel" is enabled. It doesn't make any difference - I get no footage to review in Playback. Here's the strange bit for me - I do get motion detection alerts via email... but only on when I have set the Motion Detection directly on the camera (Dahua or Hikvision), rather than through the Dahua NVR. How can that be, when playback shows no areas of Motion Detection in Smart PSS, or indeed in the Dahua NVR's web front-end? I don't find the Hikvision cameras play nicely at all through Smart PSS. If you review general recording footage on anything above 1x speed, it is very jumpy and jerky, and takes time to settle down again once you switch back to 1x. Again, is that normal, and maybe to expected as I'm not using iVMS anymore for them? Thanks.

I'd say it just gets better and better as the seasons carry on. Looks like their budget increased season on season, as the production values seem to get bigger and better, lending more realism to the battle scenes, Kattegat and beyond.

We moved from Ruckus (x50 APs) to Aruba (x80 APs) just over a year ago. I was really happy with the Ruckus, but this was a Trust-wide upgrade that I had no say in. The Aruba... OK, but we do get the odd connection issue with clients, more often Chromebooks (rather than Windows clients). Worst thing is our VOIP wireless phones have almost become uselsss for roaming. No one has been able to give me a definitive reason, but it seems to be related to handover between APs not quite doing the necessary, hence phone sticks on a distant AP and then loses connection.

I wonder how it works for nurseries closing down. We find out tomorrow from our daughter's, apparently. If I, as a Network Manager count as a key-worker, will I be expected to come in and send my daughter to nursery everyday (with those fees continuing I presume?). Potentially I can save a bit of money if I look after her at home instead! (mum is a key-worker in the NHS)

I wondered this as well, jmak. I can't see them closing MOT test centres. If we're looking at long term closures of 12 weeks (??), that's roughly one in four cars that will be unable to be driven once normality returns. Unless they put special provision in place to relax the law on that of course.

As per my earlier security concerns, I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of this unfortunately. "The looting phase" as my Principal referred to it earlier!

These messages about the number of staff off are darkly amusing to me - that's roughly our percentage off on a regular good day, before most of us had ever heard of Coronavirus!

We send out monthly automated reports to head of departments, as well as providing a manually calculated monthly breakdown to our Finance department. We run two reports - one for individuals (staff only, as students are tightly restricted anyway), one for departments (listed as 'Accounts' in Papercut), of which all individuals are assigned to one or more (if they work across multiple subjects, they get the Account choice selection when printing or copying). Mind you, as stated, the two reports never match up to the exact amount, for a variety of reasons. It's always out by a bit, but not enough to be a problem to our Finance department. They control who gets what budget, and deal with departments directly if they are spending too much.

I said about this in another thread, with us getting through a shocking amount of keyboards and mice this year - on average almost one replacement mouse per active desktop since January! I've given up in the worst ICT suite now, which is not tied to any department and used for all sorts of lessons. Trying the 'frugal' approach mentioned above. I haven't replaced anything since the start of this half-term when it was fully working. Probably about 10 working machines out of 30 now. No one has said anything... yet. I might get it in the neck from the Principal soon though, even though I've warned about the situation multiple times. Throw money at it seems to be the general attitude.

Maybe it doesn't take the most time, but the most frustrating thing is the petty vandalism. It's become far worse than it ever was, as most ICT suites no longer have a permanent 'in residence' teacher who looks after the room. So they get left unlocked, unsupervised at break times etc. Since January, we've got through over 200 mice replacements. Considering we only have around 250 desktops, nearly one per machine in 6 months! Also over 100 keyboard replacements, though that is often just missing keys (with a few keyboards snapped clean in two). Still, I then have to remove the keyboard and bring it back to the office in order to cobble a working keyboard together, so it's a pain. And yes, we are seriously considering deploying CCTV into these classrooms. Though mhaddock's comments on SLT not doing anything when even presented with this kind of evidence is alarming...

We just installed a handful of non-interactive displays. SMART 2075 (75" funnily enough!). About £1400 including bracket. We'll see how we go over the next year or so with these. Haven't really got the money to be rolling them out school-wide though probably, even if we'd want to. Just for key areas for now. Nice and large enough to be seen clearly from the back of the class. In-built speakers are a bit boxy though. I think that's just because they're effectively mounted facing the wall, so you're hearing the sound reflected off the wall behind.

Laptops for us. It works generally OK, though there is some occasional damage to the headphone port from all the plugging and unplugging of the audio cable. VGA/HDMI port doesn't seem to have that issue. I must admit I would like the consistency of a desktop approach, where it's reliable one day to the next, as different laptops from different staff can sometimes have connectivity issues with the projector. With budgets though, it would take us several years to get desktops introduced into all classrooms.

Ditto here on the NT310 units from Stone with their ill-fitting screws and weak plastic. Seems like a far more common issue than they would have had you believe! I suspect country wide that exact issue must have lost them a lot of business. We moved over to Toshiba and Lenovo instead. No complaints on that front.

Hi Adrian. Have you got any links for the 75" non-touch model? You mention toughened glass being important - do you know if the SMART Board 2075 mentioned earlier has this? Thanks!

Agreed on Lenovo longevity and reliability - still got some student laptops going strong that are over 10 years old (R61). Due mainly to the build quality which is SOLID. Don't think they're built as stoutly these days (saves on weight), but I've just bought some V110 units (lower spec than OP suggested). Sufficient for our teacher needs. Around £350.

I've just got a reasonable looking quote on some of these M73 units. I'm comparing them against quotes from Viglen and Stone (both of whom I already use) and they're coming out almost identical on price. Trouble is I have no experience of Lenovo's desktop range. Stacking up against similar USFF models, who is 'best' - Stone, Viglen, or Lenovo? Saying that, I'll probably have to go for Stone most likely, as uniformity across the fleet is something we're probably heading for.