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?

There were some other URLs we had to add to the do not decrypt list - which I think is the same as do not inspect - but because it's one list for a large number of schools I'm not sure adding anything to do with Google will be allowed. Wonde don't seem to document this which seems odd.

I haven't seen this topic anywhere else but if someone's already posted the same question I apologise. I look after a primary school who, after many years, decided to ditch their ICT suite full of 8 year old Windows 7 PCs and buy a load of Chromebooks. We had a look at Wonde SSO and we made a joint decision to implement it so that young kids don't have to remember usernames and passwords, and one login will not only get them into the Chromebook and G Suite, but also other web-based products they use. When we came to set up SSO, the Wonde logon doesn't work when connected to the school network; as soon as I try to log on it comes up with a network error as if it isn't connected to anything. It does work when tethered to a phone. The school have Updata broadband which comes with Netsweeper filtering. All devices have to have an SSL certificate installed for inspection - which I think must be pretty standard in schools these days. Not sure about any other broadband providers but I know RM works in a similar way. Looking at the logs in Netsweeper, the device is trying to talk to google.com on port 443 and throwing an encryption error. Usually when that happens we have the website in question added to a do not decrypt list but we wouldn't want to do that for Google. Anyway, doing some digging I find that if I log into the Chromebook another way, then go to edu.wonde.com, I can sign in without issue. Also, if I use guest mode on a Chromebook the SSL certificate isn't available and I have to install it if I want to use any SSL websites. All of which makes me think that the Chromebooks aren't using the SSL certificate during the login process. My theory is that I need to specify this in the admin console under Single Sign-on client certificates and so far I just haven't got the right syntax. I'm hoping, based on the popularity of Wonde, Updata and Netsweeper (so they claim anyway) that someone else has had the same problem and fixed it. If anyone can help, thanks in advance.

I'm moving one of my primary schools to G Suite right now. Not entirely as staff still need Windows PCs to use SIMS, but the ICT suite is being replaced with Chromebooks and I'm currently moving one of the shared folders to a Google shared drive. Has anybody found an efficient way to upload pupil documents to their individual Google drives?

It is not. If the website is to be believed though, it looks like it does a lot for the money.

Edulink One looks pretty awesome. Can't believe I'd never heard of that before.

Your system does look very impressive. We did used to have something written in-house but it's gone now and I've been asked if I can bring it back. SIMS integration is a deal-breaker for me but if your system ever offers that I'll be interested.

If you're after something free and basic but functional and easy to use, have a look at Teamup (http://www.teamup.com). It's free for up to 8 calendars. I've set it up for one of my schools and they love it. Doesn't integrate with SIMS or anything clever like that but teachers find it easy to use.

How that affect the rest of the network if the cameras are transmitting large amounts of data constantly?

I've inherited some 2007 Core 2 Duo iMacs and for various reasons I want to wipe them and reinstall MacOS. On the newer models I just press Command+R as they boot up and that gets me into disk utility etc. but on these older ones it's different, but for the life of me I can't find anything that works. Any Mac experts out there able to assist? Cheers.

I think SMB class is acceptable for a middle school as long as the expectations aren't too high. They have transparent proxy and PoE in most areas for wireless APs so installation shouldn't be too much of a stretch.