DavR

I would consider creating a public shared folder in Google Drive or OneDrive for the teacher to put their lesson content in, and then just shared the link to that as a webclip. That would probably require re-visiting the prohibition on Safari though. What's the reasoning on that? Isn't web browsing half the point of iPads....

Feem might be an option - https://feem.io/ - it's a user actioned way of moving files between iPads and desktops, as long as they're on the same network segment. We use if mainly for student's sending files to their teacher at end of lesson, but could also be used for teachers to send a payload to students (haven't tried using it to do one-to-many before though).

+1, we had this linking to Google Forms from an Excel spreadsheet. If we saved the spreadsheet as a PDF, the problem went away. I thought this was something to do with the fact the link was generated by formulae in the spreadsheet, but interesting to see others having this problem.

All of the above, really. It would interfere with maintenance tasks that run overnight, backups, updates, etc. Equipment is not designed to be continually switched on and off, every shutdown and startup is a risk of failure. Perhaps to placate your site manager, you could offer a scheduled shutdown of all desktop computers overnight, if this is something that isn't happening already. We used to use Shutdownertron for this, way back when, but also you could push out a scheduled task of shutdown /s at 7pm daily by group policy.

I can only speak for my setup (Meraki), but having Shared iPad configured shouldn't be a pre-req to deploy apps to devices. Unless you have apps assigned to the user, rather than the device? We have no logins or Shared iPad config. Our Meraki is linked to our VPP for apps (or Apple School Manager as they're calling it these days), and these are deployed per-device using VPP device assignment for the licensing. I'm not sure what the Lightspeed equivalent is, but I expect it should be able to do similar.

I can't speak for @Koldov, but ours have no logon at all, nada, just open up the iPad and start using it. All storage is local, unless you choose to upload your files somewhere.

I rolled the MSI out to all of our workstations yesterday, it just works. None of this tedious mucking about with appx and Windows Store.

Sorry, that was my typo. I meant the Share iPad configuration, rather than Apple Classroom. I was getting my "Apple products I looked at that won't work" mixed up

If you aren't using individual logins with Shared iPad, then I would say there's no point having it on there. IIRC, when using Shared iPad, each user is only allocated 1-2GB storage on the device. We have all of ours as standalone devices. If they need to save the work they're doing, it needs to be manually uploaded to Google Drive, or file transferred to our Windows devices using Feem. I appreciate that solution won't work for everyone though!

We keep most of ours electronically, but just in our file structure - Personnel Folder | Staff Records | (Team) | (Staff Name). You could go more complex than that, but we haven't felt the need to. You could also look at your existing MIS, most of these will have personnel functions under the staff aspect.

I don't think using non-IBM drives should be an issue, as long as you match the specs (size, speed, etc) as closely as possible. Unless there is some IBM specific reason why not. For safety, I would change out the drives one at a time, allowing the array to rebuild before moving to the next one.

Sounds like two different systems to me. I remember Capita One when I worked at an LA for a while, this was reporting student info to your local authority. It never quite worked in my time, so I guess people are giving up and trialling this new thing. We had the request from Wonde about sharing our Attendance data, this is giving the DfE direct access to the Attendance data in your MIS, so they could have a top level view of attendance nationally. I don't object, as such, but also am not choosing to volunteer.... I wonder if Data Protection Impact Assessments come into play here, for either new product. These are bodies you already have a data sharing relationship with, but the mechanism is changing.

Weird that it only happens on some, any common factors in which ones exhibit the fault? I tend to roll out the Chrome browser on our devices, as an alternative for when Safari is mucking about.

I don't suppose anyone who has this MSI might be willing to share...? It's not on our VLSC, and when I asked VLSC support to add it, they said that it was only available by default to Enterprise Agreement customers, OVS customers needed to request it via their reseller. Naturally, my reseller has never heard of it, and doesn't have it on his list of products, paid or otherwise, to add to our agreement. And so it continues, round and round in circles. We've just had some new iPads in school, and they're starting to chuck out HEIC images we can't read (I've set the cameras to most compatible now, but it's going to keep coming up), so it's pushing me to look at this again. EDIT - I have a copy for testing now. Fingers crossed!

I must admit, I'd be inclined to whack ChromeOS on the Windows devices these days, rather than the other way round.

Same here with 9th Gen iPads and the cases we got. Put it in the case, it turns brightness down to zero. As it's a one time only thing (not using Shared iPad), I've been happy to just go into Settings and whack the brightness back up again, but interested to hear others experiences.

Can't see the MSI in our VLSC yet Will definitely save this info for use in my next image though.

I get your analogy, but Apples and oranges, the two aren't directly comparable. There are people on this forum giving those pens away for free, and for many people, Promethean are marketing a working alternative at a fraction of the price.

This might be the salient point. When you say "ActivInspire does not show in the task bar" do you mean that the ActivManager icon doesn't show in system tray? Because if the ActivManager program isn't running, then the additional Promethean features (ie, pens etc) may not work. Which would make sense if you say that regular finger touch works, because that works at the OS level regardless of whether ActivManager isn't running. You can try manually launching ActivMgr.exe and see if this resolves your problem - https://support.prometheanworld.com/s/article/1071?language=en_US

Nice result for you Especially as most 2nd Gen Activboards (AB2) can use these replacement models after a firmware upgrade now - https://askelite.co.uk/collections/featured-products/products/promethean-activarena-pen-set-araac2penset

For what it's worth, the original purchase price for these was about £10 if you bought them in packs of ten, so I think your man on eBay is trying his luck a bit at £50 each.

Teachers. Every blummin time! Glad to hear you worked it out.

If they want front and rear facing cameras, I'm not sure it's a Chromebook you're looking for, that's more tablet territory. Howsabout a 2-in-1 with a 360 degree hinge, that starts as a regular clamshell, but folds over to operate in tablet mode? That should give you both camera aspects. We bought Dell Chromebook 3189 for this a few years ago, the current model is the 3100 I think - https://www.dell.com/ae/business/p/chromebook-11-3100-2-in-1-laptop/pd. That's the entry level, if you've got money to spend, there's maybe more and better in the upper end of the range. We have the Lenovo 300e that does 2-in-1 also, but the amount of failures we've had, and the price of parts, I'd be loathe to recommend Lenovo to anyone right now. @dhicks beat me to it - our opinions differ on Lenovo, but we can agree that Chrome management license and extended warranty are both good ideas!

In spite of the way legislation is going, there does seem to be a move of late to make laptops LESS repairable, rather than more. I've seen a few now where to replace the keyboard, you essentially need to replace the entire top half of the shell. Some might argue this is a consequence of things getting more compact, but I just think it's easier for to manufacture them that way, rather than repairable. I've found Dell to still be quite good in regards to replaceability when it comes to keyboards, and also, to be pretty reasonable price wise. I've replaced Latitude 3380 laptop and 3389 Chromebook keyboards within the last year at about £20 a go.

We've had dozens of Lenovo 300E keyboards behave like this, usually a block of keys in one area of the keyboard no longer respond, or, one key jams downnnnnnnnnn. It's a hardware fault, we had to send each one away for in-warranty repair. I'm really hoping that the majority of the duff ones fail before the warranty is up, because spare parts on these Lenovos are really pricey. If in doubt, plug in a wired keyboard via USB. If all the keys work fine with the wired keyboard, then it's the built-in one that's died.