Nimon

Very much in a similar boat. Ranger has been a godsend for an undertrained solo tech and the lack of a like-for-like replacement is sad.

I can see this is looking to be a bit painful Ranger did a great job of allowing my minimal level of training to go a long way and also speed up a lot of stuff which was handy because there's just me on site. I can see a 'recommend me some books' thread coming up at this rate...

Wasn't entirely sure which was the best sub forum to stick this in but here goes... To set the scene - I am the sole ICT Tech in a fairly large Welsh secondary school with about 500 workstations (between 4 and 10 year old hardware) running 32bit Windows 7. I have never had formal microsoft training and pretty much everything I know comes from guesswork, google and forums like this. We have for many years been using Ranger Suite and I've been very happy with it. Sadly though, with 64b being required for pretty much everything and the looming end of Windows 7, it has to go and frankly, I am not looking forward to it. So, here's my plea for aid... is there something out there that can do for Windows 10 what Ranger did for Windows 7 and does not cost the earth. Our IT budget is not fabulous and a fair chunk of that is going to have to go on hardware replacement as more and more of our kit reaches a point when it needs sending to the digital glue factory. Yeah, I want the moon on a stick for thruppence ha'penny... ========================================= Things about Ranger I REALLY will miss: TL:DR = Ranger pretty much allowed the Group Policy / Reg Hacks you needed to do to be done through a basic GUI on the fly. No editing GPOs and testing. If a kid could fiddle with it, Ranger could pretty much lock that down. A GUI / drag and drop based way to do start menus and desktop based on Group membership Limit user concurrent logons Title Check on program windows "Hardcore"? I don't think so -log and close- "Ranger React Tasks" : If X happens on Y computer and/or Z user logon THEN do 'THIS' e.g. Shut down all machines at 1830 Limit drives Turn off R-click Turn the ability to lock a workstation off and on based on group membership (Yes for staff, no for kids) Disable things like task manager, command prompt, control panel. Set actual programs that users aren't allowed to run based on group. Searchable log of who did what and when on which PC. Periodic screenshots for pupils on the 'naughty list'. =============================================================== We do also currently use Lanschool for classroom monitoring at the teacher PC level and that works very nicely. A one-stop-shop option for the above and classroom monitoring might be an option if it really did tick all the boxes. Thanks EduGeek. N

In an ideal world wherein I could rely on the teacher in charge to make sure their laptops are all plugged in at the end of period four, we could get away with a 4-5 hour battery life... Meanwhile... in 'actual teacher world'...

What's the additional cost for the 9 cell battery out of interest?

Some definite food for thought here. I stupidly forgot to put "Windows 7" on the criteria list as we're sticking with this for the time being until our servers catch up

Not at this stage. I think we're sticking with vanilla windows setups for now, although it's definitely a potential project for the future.

Ideally. But frankly if there is a decent warranty system in place then I'd argue the case for second hand.

My school needs to buy some laptops to put into classrooms for pupils use where there isn't space for a PC at present. The main criteria are : Battery life - Whole school day on a single overnight charge (Not necessarily being used every lesson but possible somedays) Cost - As inexpensive as possible. We're not that wedded to size and frankly 'Good enough to do Office 2013 and Chrome' should do performance wise - 4 Gb RAM would be a plus. The device to beat is the Vostro 15 series at ~£380+vat Anyone got any ideas?

1 TB of home accessible storage over which schools have no oversight without resetting someone's password and having a look?

So, has anyone addressed the elephant in the room that is giving every kid in wales access to One Drive? Or am I alone in seeing a potential problem with that?

The issue I've been cited is that this software is coming out of the librarian's own budget and therefore anything that goes on that isn't going on books. I think all they need is a pretty basic tracking system for books, although I'll go over and quiz them on what they're willing to compromise on or actually NEE

Anyone got any figures for this Oliver thing? I hate calling these places up and getting called by salesmen for weeks afterward Thanks for the help.

Our school is seriously considering giving Eclipse the heave-ho (the ongoing cost and alleged upgrade cost has caused some wincing higher up). (Apologies if this is the wrong forum to stick this) So, what options are there for a (basic?) Library Management System? Ideally a single upfront cost rather than subscription but I think they're willing to entertain anything reasonable. Thanks.

Do you happen to know what the ballpark cost of that would be? I'm poking about their site now but I don't fancy asking for a quote right away and spend the next decade fending off a sales person Thanks for the steer though, it does look suitable (price dependent)

I'm in a similar position to the OP - The school has a very creaky asset management spreadsheet updated by hand. I'd quite like to drag it out of the 1980's and maybe use RFID tags (so the little darlings can't deface a QR/Barcode). Another consideration is our school is very leery of subscription and would prefer a "buy once, only pay more for updates" approach.

It might be worth checking your filters if you use Websense. I just looked at mine and despite my having blocked it manually some time back, it had reset itself back as an 'educational resource' site since I last looked. Handy. The access logs show some of our staff all over it like a rash, so there's a carefully worded email going out in a minute.

Dear LEA/Chairman of the board of governors, The Head would like me to unblock a website run by a convicted Paedophile. Is that alright?

SMT agreed that is was a very valuable resource for teaching I know I'm a stroppy git, but I'd definitely require that order to be in writing, on actual paper with an actual signature at the bottom of it before I complied, by way of covering my metaphorical hindquarters. Asking for stuff in legally admissible format seems to focus the mind of the person doing the asking on occasion.

Well, there're areas in Wales where Cymraeg's still the primary language of a lot of people. The Welsh Assembly Government and Local Government are committed to a bilingual (and sometimes Welsh first) agenda so if you're in the public sector or dealing with Welsh public sector/educational bodies, you're going to run into Welsh a lot. Less so in London, unless you're doing business over the other side of Offa's Dyke. As a language it's hanging on by its' fingernails but there's still plenty of people who think in it and raise their kids in it.

By and large, fluent Welsh speakers with good IT skills have their feet well under the table in County Council IT departments. It's where a lot of IT Techs from schools migrate to.

Websense has it listed as "educational materials" - Which I've amended on mine into "Questionable" tout-suite

I've got a pile of oldish PC's lying around : PIV's, 512Meg RAM and 80gig HDD's that are a bit long in the tooth for most purposes and definitely won't take Windows 7 when we finally roll it out. What I would like to know is whether or not it's possible to set them up as Linux workstations and allow users to have access to their home drives on the Windows 2003 server, internet access etc? Has anyone ever managed to make this work?

Edu-IT has it right, that's the book. Bit rubbish of me to get the title wrong, given that it's sat all of five poxy feet from my face. I'll get me coat...

Apologies if my search-fu has missed a solution to this. Our school is moving ahead with Moodle and (as the ICT Tech) I have had a copy of "Teaching with moodle" dropped on my desk along with a few printouts of a powerpoint presentation. In at the proverbial deep end. I have managed to work out how to turn the messaging system off (it took our 11-18 year olds all of 30 seconds to spot it and start doing what you would expect). However, I can't seem to find any way to view logs of who said what to whom. If we do end up using any aspect of the messaging system, that's going to be required (child protection, antibullying yada yada). What am I missing? Similarly, as we do not have school email accounts for our pupils, I have been asked if there is a way that a teacher running a course can send messages TO her pupils and have them reply to her and ONLY to her?