markofealing

We don't have SIMS Activities, but it's the obvious option. Whether SIMS Activities manages Peri teachers as well as MSM I've not idea.

Has anyone had any experience with Music School Management software, in particular CJM Software Our music department is interested in it, I've got some concerns as it is built on FileMaker Pro (which I thought had died years ago), requires a server (it's client/ server) and is supposed to sync with SIMS although I suspect this may just be a CSV file import from SIMS as they are not a SIMS partner. Any feedback is welcome.

Had our 85" Vividtouch screen replaced by Avocor last week. Pleased this nightmare is now over. Hopefully, they will be contacting all of their Vividtouch customers to explain the change.

So the engineer never turned up last week to swap out our faulty Vividtouch screen and we have been told that Steljes are unable to send out the engineer because they can not pay then the £300 call out fee as they have no money. We have been in touch with a 3rd party repair company who repair Vividtouch screens and they can not get the parts because Steljes hold the spares and I guess spares are an asset controlled by the administrator. They have now passed out details on to the administrator as we are now creditor (low down the list). For anyone in a similar position the administrator is Corporate Turnaround and Corporate Restructuring | AlixPartners. The Steljes website is down and has been for a while and tech support has a person manning the phones although this seems to be random Personally, I don't see anyone buying the company, and it looks like the company will be sold for its remaining assets to pay the creditors off. Schools are the biggest looser with Vividtouch customers left high and dry until such time they can purchase the spares. I assume nobody knows the company who made the Vividtouch screens for Steljes?

Just spoken to Steljes technical support, they are still answering the phones. The warranty and support situation on their product is as follows: 1. They are not sending any engineers out for calls reported since the company went into administration. Presumably they are just providing telephone support. 2. If you have a call logged with them before they went into administration, then for now at least, the engineer will still attend site as agreed. We have an engineer out on Tuesday to replace a faulty £6K 1yr old Vividtouch screen so here's hoping that they do come out to replace it. It was booked four weeks ago. I will keep you posted as to what happens.

They ran out of cash UK distributor Steljes goes titsup ? The Register. They were a terrible company to deal with, had no regard for the needs of the UK education market and were a monopoly created by SMART. Whilst Steljes did provide onsite support for SMART boards they would only give you 60 minutes notice as to when the engineer would arrive meaning you would have to either close the whole classroom for the day or pay then £100 for a preferred time slot. Apparently their re-seller account mangers were also rubbish and lacked product knowledge, especially when it came to the recent SMART licence changes. In the end we had to escalate the issue tot he SMART country manager for the UK to get a quote as Steljes were unable to help! Like everyone else here I feel sorry for the competent staff at Steljes who tried very hard to do a good job but lost their jobs as a result of the company being run by incompetent managers who just cared about making a large profit out of UK Education and not about providing a quality service. Hopefully, the good staff will quickly get jobs, as for the rest of them...... My only concern now is about support for non-SMART products i.e Steljes Vividtouch interactive panels with 5yr warranty. If they are rescued, I hope the buyer will honor all existing warranties!

I'm just repeating what their support told us on the phone a couple of about 3 weeks ago when ISSI was not picked up by Securus! As you can't see the keywords and they refuse to publish a list (I know because I asked them for one) other than trying to enter each term one as you suggest, compared to Impero it's a pain.

Interestingly, we would rather have the false positives as long ass we are not swamped. It's all about control. With Impero (which we are testing against Securus) you can filter so that the false positives are reduced to a reasonable level. Better still unlike Securus you know the keywords being searched on. For example for Terrorism, Securus do not use ISIS in their keyword list and they do not publish the list so you can view the keywords used. You also have to get them to upload your own keyword list! In Impero you have access to the keywords and manage them yourself

They are supposed to show up under New Captures along with everything else, if not check Capture Reports > View All captures. No idea about Engine Sensitivity, when we click Help we get a Not Found error!

HBPS - I got the impression that https://www.esafeeducation.co.uk/ was expensive. SLT check the alerts and make a decision whether to act or not, as they know most of the pupils (the naughty ones at least) I very much doubt that they would be happy for a 3rd party to do it on their behalf because they won't have the local knowledge to be able to make an informed decision.

We are on the same as you 7.4.27 build 5065. Have image analyser active with a sensitivity of 2 We have just tested it and it failed to detect a image containing two topless women which filled 90% of the image (if you get my drift). We warned SLT before we did the test as they get the alerts! So we are not very impressed.

Sagima, you are assuming we don't do this already! The issue is like anything else in life, you can teach people the difference between right and wrong but there will still be a minority who decide not to listen. The purpose of tools like keyword and image monitors are to catch those minority people (in a school environment this includes staff). Technology is being used to support teachers to make sure that those who do not listen to what is taught in the classroom, are identified and get 'extra tuition'. If they continue to ignore the advice, the school takes them down the disciplinary route which will eventually result in them being expelled, unless they change their ways!

We use Securus but it only monitors for keywords, not images. Looking at their website, I see no mention about it scanning images.

Interesting, but it appears to only support IE9, we are now on IE11 and next summer will moved to Windows 10 (possibly Edge?!?) It's very old, the last Github commit was 6yrs ago. How do you set it up client side?

We also use Impero (fantastic product), but SLT want to ensure that nudity is not accessible especially after Google safe search changes earlier this year.

Are any schools using Nudity And Skin Tone Detection Software to scan content, especially content stored on USB storage devices but also on screen?

Take a look at Emby (formerly known as Media Browser), it's similar to Plex but it's open source and free. It's cross platform, is web based but also comes with free APPS (iOS and Android), can record live TV and is visually attractive. It also includes a metadata editor. You can create local logins and assign them permissions. https://emby.media/ Having looked at all the options out there, we are currently testing it to replace Windows Streaming Media Server. If money was no object then Planet eStream would be our second choice.

You need to shop around more, sounds like you are paying far too much for your toners!

We have found that our Laserlife printers (Kyocera) go through waste toner bottles very quickly, also the toner is not original (re-manufactured) and reliability has started to become an issue. Yes the engineers come out to fix the problems but in general terms these printers are turning out to be less reliable than our old HP lasers which need no maintenance other than a quick clean occasionally. As we are also paying premium prices for the toners (more expensive than original Kyocera!) I would look elsewhere. In particular LNL LNL Printers for Schools. We are currently trialing two of their Lexmarks, very impressed and they undercut all the online completion when replacing consumables. The waste toner bottle takes ages to fill up as well.

We purchased last summer six Vividtouch VTS-8510 touch screens after evaluating competitive models from other suppliers. The 85" panels are great, but we have had complaints from teachers that when drawing or writing on the screens there is quite a lag between the position of your finger and what is displayed on the screen. We have been in touch with Steljes tech support who are saying that the PC isn't power enough, in particular the GPU. However, the PCs are HP ProDesk 600s with Intel 4600 GPUs with an Intel Core i5-4590 CPU @ 3.30GHz and 8GB RAM purchased last summer. We are not running these displays in 4K resolution, just 1080p (1920x1080) so nothing taxing. Steljes tech support are claiming that we need to put in a dedicated graphics card to resolve the issue. However, we believe there is a processing issue on the Vividtouch boards which is causing a delay in sending the IR finger position back to the PC (via USB cable), hence the lag. The PCs CPU is running at 1 - 2% utilisation and normally if a PCs GPU can't handle the processing any additional processing is offloaded to the CPU. This isn't happening hence our conclusion that Steljes are wrong. To keep a level playing field we are testing in Paint, although SMART Notebook has exactly the same issue. Do any other schools have these Vividtouch screens and are you experiencing similar issues?

We have also noticed that the LightRaise projectors are terribly unreliable, currently we have two which are awaiting an engineer to come to site to replace, both are just over a year old. It has taken Steljes two weeks to source a replacement spare, by which time another had died! As for the onsite support, that's not great either you can not book a time slot for the engineer to visit unless you want to pay a fee of £100 per visit which means that you then have to make a classroom unavailable during the school day. Not many schools have the luxury of spare classrooms so totally unpractical. We have decided not to buy any more LightRaise projectors from SMART as there is nothing great about them at all i.e. too expensive, unreliable, replacement pens are very expensive (£90 each), they offer poor warranty 1500hrs on the lamp and 3yrs on the projector, provide useless warranty after sales service and are very difficult to support and complicated to setup. We will be moving to Epson EB-595wi touchscreen projectors ) EB-595Wi - Epson, which are available with SMART Notebook and tick all the boxes including a 3yr lamp and projector warranty. For anyone interested, SMART Notebook Advantage will no longer be available after 28th Feb, once again the goalposts have moved and you will now have to license SmartNotebook as part of the SMART Learning Suite, a change which SMART have kept very quiet about probably because they knew that if they announced it there would have been a riot at their BETT stand.

Before we start distributing the libraries to other computers we need to get one of them working properly. This time rather than take a teaches word, I've checked myself. On the Mac where all the additional content is loaded we got a pupil to login and open up their composition. All the samples are present on the right hand side, but when they click on one it greys out. We are running LogicPro 10.1.0, we have yet to apply the patch 10.1.1.

We are running Mavericks and have LogicPro X installed. We are getting complaints from the music department that when they load up a piece of work into LogicPro X not all the samples are loading. They appear to be there but when you click on they they grey out. It then asks to download missing samples but this requires Administrator access and has already been done with an administrators account. Any ideas as this is driving us nuts!

Which version of Office are you using it and how are you locking it down? Mark

At my school we are having some debate as to whether WordPad is the most appropriate software for use in public exams where spelling and grammar checkers are not permitted. The issue is that unlike Word it does not autosave work and we have had some instances where pupils work has mysteriously not been saved! What software does your school use? Wordpad Notepad Word 2010 Something else