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.

Last week or so we've seen it now about 4 days of issues. Usually back up within a short time but it is a bit worrying. Before that though.. reliability had greatly improved since the Microsoft problem. The performance issues were gone. Generally reliability was there...... maybe me thinking about it.... jinxed things. I'll always add big companies worth billions go down, last 2 years have seen some of the biggest providers cloudflare prime example. I'll always add that note when things like Bromcom suffer... but I just hope what ever the issue is.. they get it permanently resolved.

There has been quite a few techie jobs popping up in the SE plus IT Director jobs. I'm not seeing many NM types though. Thing is, if you find something good.. would you leave it? Unlikely. And in education there is only one position available which generally is the IT Director ones (MATs). My location is awful. All the better jobs in the last 2 years which I could easily apply for are 45+ mins away at least. Towards London area where I used to live. At the moment I can't really sacrifice driving for 2 hours or so because of my daughter but once she is capable of walking to her school it will change.

I simply said if we get hacked like another local school did and a few others around our area.. I'm making it clear it is not my fault. All I can do is pre-warn the above and we either try to do something about it.. or we completely accept the risk. And when bereaches occur.. what's the possibility we're back in action within 3 working days? Low. This came after about 18 months of working on a disaster plan which basically said.. if we're hit bad.. everything stops working. No servers. No network. No broadband. You'll have to use your 3G/4G devices to get anything if you're lucky because our mobile coverage is terrible in our area. The discussion of our school closing popped up because we couldn't even safeguard/attendance registers. How do we track which of our students are here and contact parents? We use en-mass message system instead of phoning them all. Now do it without IT which includes our phones.. everything.. even cashless catering stops.. reception sign in.. boiler management.. all this before you get to classrooms which would be shutdown. Luckily the SBM works hard on the budget and managed to get some ££. We just spent a large amount of money replacing a good portion.

Good game but massive fan of Imperium Galactica 2. Aged pretty well minus the cutscenes. Do as you want really, go at the pace you want, just annoying that no matter how you nice you play it.. it's really hard to get everyone to play along nicely... so I end up being a war lord and defeating them all. The one game I would love to see an updated version. Preferred the space battles too compared to Stellaris + the cutscenes were nice.

They didn't ask us either, instead they went via Safeguarding (DSL) and she had to answer everything regarding the internet filtering. We had to spend some time together for her to understand everything. I can't speak for a Primary but we've had multiple Ofsted visits and experts evaluate us (after failing 1st time quite badly) and it was the DSL having to answer them. Boils down to making sure the DSL understands it all and how it safeguards the kids.

We use Orbital. Which I not long found out they have grown to international.

Not sure if anyone here had a recent Ofsted, but one thing they did question heavily was our filtering system and procedures through the safe guarding lead. I belive this was updated 2-3 years ago within Ofsted. Did a webinar Friday and it suggest the next thing they will likely question is cyber security and everthing else isn't 'end of the world' if you don't meet it by 2030.

Yes it can be frustrating but clubs are managed by volunteers. We've started doing a lot of clubs in the last 9 or so months. Staff constantly being asked if they want to do it. They push out the information and advertise to the kids. Numbers need to be good, otherwise it's deemed pointless. Requires that person to keep running it - the tricky part. What if they leave? What if their circumstances change? School clubs are voluntary. Ask the school and you'll probably get an honest answer.

Same, 1st time I heard about the standards years ago is thanks to this place and that is a fear. Ofsted or some kind of audit turns up and says do you do XYZ. Course things may change.. but I'd rather be proactive Vs reactive.

Looks like the webinars have started to appear and we've signed up to this. It is free. https://www.eventbrite.com/x/dfe-plan-technology-and-digital-standards-webinar-tickets-1973119411274