Ephelyon

I think there will be several people on this forum who can help you. We're currently going through our own tablet woes so I may be able to offer some assistance; if not, there are others who have already rolled out such setups who can offer better assistance. Do you have a wireless infrastructure that can support this? Hint: you cannot answer this question until you know exactly how these devices will be used in lessons to support learning, so it might be possible to attend Curriculum Group meetings (or whatever) to ascertain just how big of a challenge you face. It might feel insurmountable right now, but sometimes schools buy in these things without planning for their use properly in advance, which might be poor management but it does at least give you some extra time to set up the resources needed. Having an MDM is a distinct advantage and I'm aware of schools that rush into it similarly but without even some form of MDM solution to cover the basics. In a sense you've dodged a bullet there; it could be worse. One way to regulate mobile devices is to enforce a setup in which they can only get on RDP (or ICA, if you're rich enough) sessions to an existing remote access server. Decent client apps are available for this at a minimal cost (if you set up a single school Apple ID and link all devices to this but WITHOUT storing the password), whereby you could aim to provide a similar experience to a bookable ICT suite, but at less money and without having to move kids around the building. This also makes the Head look good if you can support an initiative like that (whether or not they thought of it). Can you find out through which supplier the devices were ordered? Some will set them up in advance to your specification at no additional cost provided enough of a bulk order has been placed. Always on the PM if you need anything.

LP+ uses SharePoint as its back-end - and does it well I think - but isn't free. Learning Possibilities

Haha... no capitals though! As it happens we're only a few miles from the school where one of them went.

Yes - Sunday silliness is A Good Thing™! =]

Sounds like a market somebody needs to penetrate a little more... Sorry, I'm in a silly mood this morning! =]

Why hello there, Mr Schmidt...

I think what the author of the above is saying is that they can live without fear from one direction... but something else to fear might then come from another direction. Such is life though, to an extent.

Can't say we've noticed anything on the latest version. What will you be moving to?

We use MatchWare Mediator as it's DiDA-certified (with exportable e-portfolios and the like) and quite cheap - only £600/year for 3 years for us.

Apart from Unify, I'm not aware of any RM Community Connect-style offering for cloud-hosted IaaS. It sounds like you'd have to go vanilla if you don't want to be paying for a new RM server. Where did this audit come from, by the way?

I'd recommend a Foundation Degree (cheaper) with a sandwich placement at a school if you can wangle it. Still here five years later (good God!) as the NM...

If the school is happy to continually cycle through new boy after new boy after new boy at the same pay grade, then yes. But I agree that it does look like a nice school and the fact that the NM is allowed/expected to give strategic input is valuable considering that many of us do that anyway, but don't get the recognition for it. Shows some flexibility on the part of the Leadership Team. Le EDIT: It's also worth noting that, as this seems to be a state-maintained community school, pay for associate staff roles is determined through Local Authority job evaluation which means it's (largely, though not totally) out of their hands. I still think that's a problem, but the issue does not lie with the school itself.

*Silently agrees*

They need to be members of the Remote Desktop Users group.

^ That. IMMENSE relief if you SysPrep, test deployment and it cocks up to be able to go "... aaaand BACK TO BEFORE!" xD

The capture image can only see volumes that you have Sysprepped first.

I think all concerned need to bear in mind the changing landscape of this sector over the past couple of decades. It's gone from a scenario in which pretty much all "staff" (barring e.g. caretaker, secretary, cook etc.) were in fact teachers, to a scenario where in some schools the number of associate staff is actually greater than the number of service delivery staff. In short, the sector has "gone multidisciplinary" much in the manner of the healthcare sector before it. The good thing about that is that there are examples of lessons to be learnt that are already extant; the task is then to gently nudge decision-makers towards these. Some progress in certain areas has already begun to be made, with PricewaterhouseCooper's 2007 report recommending changes to school leadership structures and the ASCL's report of 2011 endorsing that position... though of course in most places we are yet to see it!

^ This. But the subtle distinctions between these golf courses are often only known to the pros. How could we communicate the difference in playing field to people who have a single goal in mind (to which the playing field seems largely irrelevant)?

I use DiskCryptor for full-disk encryption as it's free and I can script it as part of the auto-build process for laptops. BitLocker is used for staff USB stick encryption, customised to make it the "deny write to non-encrypted removable storage" GPO setting per-user rather than per-computer (though some AutoIt devilry).

Been chatting with @vikpaw about this and I thought I'd share the script I was talking about, for people with SOLUS trouble: @echo off echo Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")> CheckVer.vbs echo Wscript.Echo objFSO.GetFileVersion(wscript.arguments(0))>> CheckVer.vbs for /f %%i in ('cscript /nologo CheckVer.vbs \\[simsserver]\SIMSRoot$\SIMS\Setups\SIMSApplicationSetup.exe') do set LatestVer=%%i del CheckVer.vbs find "%LatestVer%" "C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS .net\SIMSLoad.ini" && goto :eof start /w \\[simsserver]\SIMSRoot$\SIMS\Setups\SIMSInfrastructureSetup.exe {QuietMode} [sIMSDotNetDirectory]="C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS .net" start /w \\[simsserver]\SIMSRoot$\SIMS\Setups\SIMSApplicationSetup.exe {QuietMode} [sIMSDotNetDirectory]="C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS .net" start /w \\[simsserver]\SIMSRoot$\SIMS\Setups\SIMSManualSetup.exe {QuietMode} [sIMSDotNetDirectory]="C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS .net" start /w \\[simsserver]\SIMSRoot$\SIMS\Setups\SIMSAMPARKSetup.exe {QuietMode} [sIMSDotNetDirectory]="C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS .net" This is pretty basic one, but if you want to show progress on startup so people don't wonder why it's taking so long, make sure to deploy PSExec to all your workstations and then replace "start /w" with "psexec -accepteula -is \\%ComputerName% psexec -isx cmd /c". Remember this is running as SYSTEM because it's a startup script, which is able to access the SIMSRoot$ share on our network but I don't know if that's an "oddity" or not. Either way there are Local Security Policy settings to enable that if it's not the case for you.

I'm aware of one local school doing that, though we don't do it here.

I use a startup script to check the version of Pulsar.exe, and if it's below the right version, run SIMSInfrastructureSetup.exe, -ApplicationSetup, -ManualSetup.exe and -AMPARKSetup.exe straight from the server as SYSTEM. That sorts the lot out and I just change the version string in the batch file when I've upgraded on the server.

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We're using points for prizes here too, using the Rule-Based Behaviours feature.

It does depend on how you've "compiled" it, but I find this tends to work well and doesn't generate complaints from the anti-virus: F2KO Software | Bat To Exe Converter