mthomas08

Our iPads for students are 1:1 tied and have Lighspeed filtering and Smoothwal monitoring for safeguarding. They tie to the individual. I tried to get Lighstpeed working with the Shared setup but later found it wasn't supposed to work.

Wow.. you got it bad... and it really does bring some bad memories... Silly question but what MDM and filtering do you use? We have iPads but only about 30 of them. I've got Mosyle and the profile setup as 1:1 which allows Lightspeed filtering and Smoothwall Monitor. Most of the default apps are disabled. They can't install apps etc. Took me a few times to build the system to the way I have it now and touch wood.. it should work a treat.

You guys are bringing up some bad memories and reminding me why we shut down the scheme. It can work but.. the can of worms are just not worth it for us. I'm also glad our daughter's school doesn't have such a scheme.

Having done a device scheme where parents pay for them, which means the school doesn't own them.. that right there is problem number 1. Should you install school licensed software on devices not owned by the school. Should you image them and tie them down as a non school owned device. What about repairs. Who supports it. What are you trying to actually accomplish. What about malware risks etc. How do you 'force' parents to sign up. What about those refusing to sign up. What about those damaged beyond repair and parents can't afford another device. Insurance. Warranty This was nothing but a nightmare for us, not helped at the lack of support from leadership and the idea was supposed to scrap IT suites.. which they didn't want to lose. If I go back far enough I will find a massive long post about it all here on EduGeek... well before the pandemic. Like most things, it has to be done properly.. effectively.. team work.. leadership involved.. teachers involved.. everyone doing their part. And considering the costs involved.. to parents.. not sure how it can be justified.. jury is still out on the benefits of 1:1 learning.

Yes + other reasons. Let's be clear. We all know why. We can mix words. We can have opinions but we all know why a Royal child will go to a VERY prestigious private school. One of the many reasons why state schools have their budgets squeezed.

I do not miss SIMs. Even when Bromcom goes down.. and when it does.. it really goes down. I do not miss SIMs. The hours.. days.. weeks.. I put in to trying to fix the memory crashes.. the slow performance.. oh god did I try everything. -did a rebuild -migrated to a new VM -upgraded specs -PC upgrades -endless amount of recording logs etc -long list of patches and many of them were performance related -long list of things within SIMs to improve performance In the end, nothing changed.

Probably because people like me 1. Updates during holidays (unless urgent). 2. Patches done from home in the evening (unless urgent). I can't sit here and say Sims was more reliable than Bromcom.. when taking my hours in to account.. people like me helped make SIMs reliable. Plus we didn't have internet nor M365 Azure reliance to factor..... Just don't mention the times during the holidays it went down.. a patch didn't fix it.. then needed another patch... and another.. I think the max number was 6 or 7 in the end to fix it once.

Yeah its down down down..

If things carried on like this week after week, I would agree. I am wondering if attendance is related - SIMs quite often crashed for years during early morning attendance. I still wouldn't want to repeat everything I did trying to resolve it...

I'd rather not. I can think of a lot of things I'd rather have back.. This level of problems is not a good look for Bromcom.. but I do not want SIMs back. has anyone managed to get a response as to why Bromcom reliability is poor for the last week or so?

Pros and cons. Previously with SIMs I had rebuilt the system 3 times over a few years (upgrading/updating/new server etc) plus in the hope to fix a memory issue which had been around for 7 or so years which took them 3-4 years to finally admit there was an issue. I had to update/patch regularly at home outside of normal hours - or go through this kind of thing 'downtime'. Every major update especially the summer ones would cause massive problems which I wouldn't know about till staff tried to do certain tasks. SIMs would quite often release an update to fix a broken update which didn't fix a previous broken update. Once this it had about 5 updates to fix the original update. I'm not defending Bromcom here but the sheer hours I spent dealing with SIMs issues.. I'd say the reliability was abnout the same. Just not me sitting here spending hours and hours fixing it.

Does seem to be performance related.. I had hoped the weekend would allow them to permanently fix it. Wonder whats causing this, signing up a bunch more schools and squeezing the resources - especially due to increasing costs. Attempt to somehow rely on AI and cut back staffing numbers?

Have to agree. Most of the issues we've suffered over the years are performance related and their end - not something they've denied. That MS issue was a legit problem, also caused us a minor on one of our systems - we managed to resolve it pretty quickly.

High.. very high.

Apparently the issue may occur again tomorrow morning. They've suggested we use the teacher app or paper registers.