richmackie

You know those Japanese soldiers who hid out in the jungle until the 70s, refusing the accept the war had ended? It's a bit like that but with 90s technology.

SLT are the problem, one headteacher specifically. He's passionately opposed to the idea of touchscreens, so I need to do an Inception on him so he thinks it's his idea. Just goes to show, you make good decisions and they tend to pay off in ways you didn't expect. Those schools that replaced all their projectors years ago will be feeling pretty smug right now.

Can anyone recommend a decent laser projector for a standard classroom? Obviously touchscreens are the way to go but due to extremely technophobic individuals all other options will need to be ruled out first.

So SIMS Connected is really just SIMS as we know it, but hosted by ESS? Lads, you've been working on this for 10 years and you haven't even changed the home page.

I know one headteacher who definitely sees that as a good thing...

I can confirm that in 2023 this still works.

It's not really moving towards cloud-based things in general that's the issue - though I think if ActivInspire was removed from the equation that would make a huge difference - the more I think about it and the more replies I read, the more I start to think it's the lack of a clear strategy that's the issue. I'm in favour of ditching Office 365 altogether and shifting to Google Workspace, linking J2E to Wonde which is doing SSO for Google and a few other things, and simplifying things massively. As yet I haven't managed to get anyone to understand how much better that would be, but that's my fault. But then again, the MAT the school may join in the next couple of years are favouring Office 365 so that could lead to a conflict further down the line.

You're very much preaching to the converted here. If I had my way, everyone would be using Google stuff by now but because they already have Office 365 and J2E, it's a bit much for them to take in.

Apologies if this has been posted before but I couldn't find it. Looking after a primary school with some very old (~10 years) teacher laptops. Pupils are all using Chromebooks now, so we got a few Chromebooks for staff to use. Trouble is, because they can't use ActivInspire on their Chromebooks they're still lugging around laptops in order to do lesson planning, which means not only do I still have to support all these laptops, but they're potentially saving work locally rather than OneDrive or Google Drive. Anyway, Classflow was my first thought and I think it looks great, but the teachers basically refuse to use it as it's not identical to ActivInspire. Jamboard has been all but ruled out for the same reason, as has J2Whiteboard. I did have a look at the Linux ActivInspire package but I quickly gave up as my Linux knowledge is very limited. In any case, they'd surely still have to transfer flipchart files back and forth, though it may encourage them to use Google Drive which would be no bad thing. Anyone else fought this particular battle?

Securly looks expensive though if the free offering for Chromebooks is still a thing (looks like it isn't but maybe it's just well hidden) that would obviously be worth exploring. Though that solves a different problem.

We don't have a dedicated firewall but we do have School Manager and Lightspeed MDM so I'll have a look at what I can do with those.

Sorry to resurrect an old thread but surely this is a really common issue? I understand Impero has the ability to monitor iPads - has anybody tried that?

An update for anyone who's interested - apparently it's to do with the level of inspection - we have a "deep" inspection in Netsweeper which is causing the issue. I'm told that can be reconfigured and it's being worked on as it's causing other issues with other schools, but no joy so far. gybe78 - I may be wrong about this but I think other schools have solved this with Smoothwall. Wonde tech support gave me some information which might be of use - PM me if you like - but I'm sure it's the level of inspection that's the issue. My problem is I'm not in control of Netsweeper so I can't see how it's set up or make changes.

I started looking into that but as it can't be installed on a DC, I really could do with setting up a dedicated print server. Seems a bit backwards to be adding more servers in the process of pushing more things into the cloud. And yes, I know I could use Linux of some sort but I doubt the company I work for would approve of that.

Well the plot thickens...I've done some testing with my network expert and we've narrowed the issue down to inspecting traffic to Google. Any other URLs the device needs to talk to have been added to the bypass list and the logs show it's talking to those without issue, but as soon as I try to log in it throws errors with Google. If we allow the device to talk to whatever it likes without inspection, it logs straight in. Now, surely all schools have SSL inspection these days? And traffic to google.com has to be inspected otherwise you'd have kids searching for all sorts. So if any schools are using Wonde SSO on Chromebooks, and there must be some, how did they get past this issue?