Farloch

I have a NOCTUA NH-D15 DUAL RADIATOR sat on my i7 8700K. It's a BIG heat sink and it does obscure your access and view of all other components. Its certainly not pretty but it is cool.

Totally agree. Public birching in the school yard for the next offender ;-)

I think if you start applying a code to a childs name rather than using their name you significantly increase the chances of the recipients attributing the information in the message to the wrong child. You'd have to be really sure everyone was "singing from the same hymn sheet" and even then the potential for human introduced errors is limitless.

Now I can see some logic in that thought process. Possibly overthinking it but definitely some reasoned thought going on.

Yeah that's what I thought but I'd love to hear the argument for this..

I'm curious; in what way is a student having their own name as a login a safeguarding risk?

Yep 13 years in primary and secondary schools. (I should be up for parole soon ) Just explain that they are no longer serviceable and stop supporting them. If staff want to continue using them for personal use at home then let them. It gets them off your hands and saves you the hassle of having to properly dispose of them. You can't be responsible for what data staff decide to copy onto these (or any other) devices. Its beyond your control and staff have to take responsibility for the data they carry around and where they save it. You will never be able to police this whilst the use of portable storage devices is still permitted. Encryption of pen drives is a step in the right direction but it falls short of what is actually required to ensure data is secured.

We have had similar issues with group policy and scripts just going through the motions but not actually doing anything. It only seems to happen on our windows 10 machines and all the windows 7 machines work fine. After much weeping and gnashing of teeth I discovered that the machines when powered down were only going into a low power state thanks to the fastboot feature (apparently introduced in windows 8). I'd already set the group policy to wait for network but this alone didn't fix the problem until I disabled hibernation (powercfg -h off) which so far seems to have nailed it.

Sounds like after 10 years they should be put out to pasture anyway. I'd recall them all, secure wipe them and dispose of the lot. If teachers don't have their own computer then they need to get their hands in their pockets and buy one. Its not the taxpayers responsibility to provide teachers with the basic tools to effectively work in their chosen profession. Every other trade has to buy their own tools, I've never understood why teachers think they are any different. At the end of the day teachers own personal devices are not your concern so I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

OK -there's a lot of valid points been made here and I've climbed down from my soap box a little but I still lean towards common sense being the driving force here rather than fear of prosecution. I can't actually think of any situation where we have ever shown footage to a parent. Footage was only ever shown to a staff member to identify a pupil and to the pupil to show them they were caught red handed. I can't honestly see an issue with that as everyone is aware of who everyone else is so your not showing anybody anything they didn't already know. Now this is not a rant, this is a genuine question. The average person is filmed thousands of times each day just going about their day to day business. If you go to a concert or any kind of staged event you are often filmed and you are told of this in the terms and conditions of sale. By attending you surrender all rights to this footage and agree to it being used. Nightclubs for example have statements at the door that CCTV is in operation for security purposes and protection of staff and customers and by entering you are agreeing to this. Is it different for a schools and if so why? As long as you have controls in place to limit who has access to any recorded footage and you don't keep it for longer than is necessary I'd have thought that would be enough.

There's a world of difference between sharing the footage and showing it to a parent who needs to see it. Let me understand this; you're suggesting that if Child A and all his mates (C,D,E,F & G) walk up and smack Child B round the head and its all caught on camera I have to obtain permission from the parents of Child A, C, D,E,F & G before I can show it to the parents of Child B? I can really see that one happening. "I need your written permission to show evidence that will incriminate your child. is that OK" Not on my watch! What is the point of a CCTV system if you can't do anything with the footage?

Showing footage of a pupil misbehaving (whilst other pupils are present) to a parent does not reveal any more info to the parent than they could see from simply standing outside the school. You're not giving them the footage or uploading it anywhere. What's the issue?

So do you blindfold parents when they come into school in case they see another child? What nonsense is this? Far to much overthinking going on here. Common sense seems to be in short supply these days.

Ha ha - as long as there is nothing congealed on the screen

I have expensive tastes ;-)

I don't remember actually saying it was, but in a windows environment Windows is definitely compatible with Windows and you would get more for your money in terms of kit and performance using PC's. A Mac uses the same architecture as a PC so yes windows will run happily on a Mac without much fuss as Microsoft support the hardware. The fact it doesn't easily work the other way around says more about Apple than it does about Microsoft. We dual boot Macs because when we have finished playing on a Mac we can boot to windows to get some work done. Why would you choose to run MacOS on a pc? Surely if you wanted a *nix OS you would install one rather than an Apple variant.

I could go on all day about why Apple products would never be on my Christmas list but I just opted for a quick post. I'm not saying that Macs are difficult to manage or maintain. I manage a huge number of ipads across multiple schools and for the most part this works well. When it doesn't I could cheerfully throw them off the roof. What I am saying is that the majority of schools are more likely to be on a windows domain with windows clients and deploying the software mentioned would be far easier using windows clients rather than using Macs and would give you a lot more kit for your cash. I totally agree that Macos is compatible with other *nix operating systems but Apple notoriously does not play nice with Microsoft and its no consolation to know that your Apple kit is fully compatible with a vast array of operating systems your school is not actually using.

Get some high end PC's and dismiss the idea of even looking at Apple kit. A good spec PC will run all that and more without breaking sweat. Its easier install, manage and maintain, is half the price and is compatible with everything else. Strip away all the bling from a mac and you have an expensive underpowered PC running a custom OS.

There should be a bigger emphasis on people getting into the building in the first place. If the entry/exit points are tightly controlled then any visitor should only be able to get as far as the front foyer at best. Locking all the doors after an intruder is already on the premises seems to be counterproductive as it can trap people in a more compromising situation and setting off the fire alarm would surely release all the maglocks anyway. A building with panicking staff and children with all the doors manually locked in a fire situation could potentially cause more casualties than it would prevent.

You know you work in a rural school when the kids are saving pictures of agricultural, construction, and forestry machinery into their user areas instead of pictures of super cars.

Spinright is very good at getting the drive to read the data one last time and then moves it to a safe sector and marks the damaged sector as bad. I ran a scan for the best part of 5 days once on a drive which had become unbootable. I just left it doing its thing and it eventually moved the data off the damaged sector. I was then able to clone the drive to a new one and the user was back in business again.

At one of my previous schools we used Impero to enforce the AUP and log login/logout timestamps. We also backed this up with a separate CCTV system in the ICT suites which was piped directly to the IT office so the IT team could pull any footage on demand. Regular sweeps of the rooms between lessons also helped pinpoint when vandalism had occurred. We managed to get the teachers on board with checking the rooms before and after their lessons and this combination proved a very effective deterrent. Kids still tried it on but they didn't generally get away with it.