Starbug1

Is anyone else getting block pages on Arbor today, or had them previously? The error says the content "has been blocked because it does not comply with the acceptable usage policy"; see screenshot above. It looks like a Smoothwall issue, but it is generated within Arbor!

Does anyone use the site thirdspacelearning.com? This appears to be an AI powered site for "one to one" support, and has various onerous technical requirements, which seem to be difficult to meet, as we are struggling to get it to work reliably. I understand students cannot proceed if they do not have a microphone connected, and access granted for the site to use the microphone within their browser. Sometimes students get stuck on the microphone aspect, while other times they are stuck on blank/loading screens, and there have also been reports of poor performance. It could be a filtering issue, but we have whitelisted all the sites they have requested. If anyone has any experiences, tips etc, it would be great to hear from you. Many thanks in advance.

We use Wonde to sync classes, but is there a way for a teacher to create a custom Google Classroom, e.g. for an entire yeargroup, or for students who attend a particular club/activity, to forcibly add students to their own custom group? At present, they can only add students in a way that the student doesn't have to accept the invitation, but they want the students to be forcibly added, without the student having to accept (or being able to decline) the invitation. I found this https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-join-a-Google-classroom-without-the-code post which suggested that "Schools using Google Workspace for Education can auto-enroll students via their roster", but I can't find that option; am I right in thinking this may require "Google Workspace for Eduction Plus" or "Standard", which is the paid version, and not the "Fundamentals" option, which is the free one we have. I understand this could be done with GAM, but we're reluctant to go down that road. Many thanks in advance if anyone can help answer this.

Does anyone here use "Academy21"? Apparently we have a student using it for off-site learning. The student doesn't come into school, so we don't see them and don't see any errors first-hand. The first I heard of this site was when that student was unable to login; I was given a screenshot showing that Academy21 uses a URL beginning with "interhigh" that was blocked. I managed to get a full list of domains to allow, which included "interhigh.adobeconnect.com", "adobeconnect.com", "interhigh-my.sharepoint.com" and various others, which I whitelisted, and this enabled the student to login. Now they are logged in, but are stuck on joining a class, with a screen showing the following: "Connect LogoAdobe Connect. Troubleshooting Tips. Please wait a moment" I also asked if we could have a test account, so that we could login to the website as a student ourselves, and see what happens and get to the bottom of it, but that didn't happen, so it's very difficult for us to help. I emailed the Academy21 support address, which I did get a response from last time, but they are not responding to us, so I am wondering if someone here may have some experience with this and be able to point us in the right direction? I don't know anything about how/why this provider was chosen, and didn't know anything about it until I was told there was a problem, but if anyone is in a position where they are able to influence if any school uses this platform, based on my experience so far, I would advise against it! Many thanks in advance to anyone who can help us!

Thanks all, very useful to know.

Does anyone have any suggestions for privacy screens? Either monitors that have this built-in, or something that goes in front of an existing display screen, which will have the effect of only allowing someone who is directly facing the screen to be able to easily read what is displayed. The request I had was for two "monitor privacy screen protectors", however when I search for this, I find a bewildering array of options, many of which aren't rated particularly highly. Many thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Hi Yes that worked, thanks!

Our DT department use Tinkercad (https://www.tinkercad.com/) and we can access the site, however pupils are unable to create designs; staff can create things such as: However when pupils login, they just get a loading screen like this: I used https://get.webgl.org/ to check if WebGL is working and yes it is. The issue occurs when pupils are logged into the computers, but there is no problem when pupils are logged into Chromebooks! has anyone experienced this?

I have the exact same issue! @BKGarry did you ever get a solution to this? Has anyone else had this problem and found a solution? Many thanks in advance

We only had 1 user reporting it; I got the same error, so immediately reported it and asked on here, however however as soon as I did that, it has started working! So must have been a very temporary glitch.

Anyone else get errors such as "This page isn't working" "HTTP ERROR 500" when accessing Arbor, or is it just us?

Has anyone here migrated from SIMS to another system e.g. Arbor, Bromcom etc, and been unable to access SIMS, and also unable to access the helpdesk? The error I get is that "we have been unable to confirm that you are eligible to use this software...": We don't want to actively use SIMS now that we use an alternative provider, however we recently received a subject access request for data that we believe is in SIMS but not transferred to the new MIS. Does anyone know how to resolve this? I can log in to the SIMS portal but there is no way to log a ticket and the page contains various errors e.g. "An unexpected issue occurred. Refer to product documentation or contact support for more information"; I guess my login permissions are reduced because we are no longer licensed @SIMS_Customer_Support are you able to offer any assistance?

We are experiencing major problems with Smarttech MX interactive screens at our school. On some occasions the screen shuts down randomly, on other occasions the screen becomes responsive and you have to restart to get it to work. Smarttech refuse to come out and see us, and tell us to re-format the devices, which isn't helpful. Other schools within our Trust were going to get the same type of screens, but that's on hold now, as we have no solution in sight. Does anyone else have this problem? Does anyone have any method of getting Smart to actually come on site, and see the problems for themselves and actually come up with a solution?

We've got an issue with keyboards and mice being damaged recently. Does anyone have any suggestions for either more durable or more fixable keyboards/mice, that aren't excessively expensive? For example, some pupils like to peel back the button lid of mice; for some mice if they peel back the button, it will snap or warp the plastic, or break the mechanism and the mouse is then no good, however I have found that some models do allow you to snap them back into place e.g. some of the older Dell mice we had a few years ago were excellent for this; I was able to rescue many mice in this way. We can't afford expensive equipment, but equally I fear it may be a false economy to buy ultra-cheap items that easily get damaged (and/or that kids don't respect or don't like using), so it's a matter of finding the right balance between something inexpensive, but also reasonably durable and/or repairable, if there is such a thing? Any recommendations would be very welcome.

Thanks all. I suggested this software, and have not heard anything back, so I assume they are getting on with it!

Just to add that we had to manually re-match the classes. It was suggested to Wonde that classes get prefixed with the school name/initials, or somehow categorised/associated with the school to avoid this happening again and they said they will consider that for the future. My colleague at another school prefixed all their classes using GAM, so that we could more easily identify which classes were at our school, and we had to go through and manually select them. There was no easy way to remove the erroneous students; my colleague managed to achieve it through GAM (I think by removing all members, and then running the sync tool again to re-add them)

Our Performing Arts department has a requirement to compress videos, as the exam board has a limit of 600MB (I assume this is per video, and that some videos are larger than this). We have VLC installed on all PCs, so that may be the best way forward; does anyone use this? I found a guide at https://www.capcut.com/resource/vlc-compress-video#3 ways to compress video with VLC Media Player however if anyone has a guide for teachers, or any suggested settings, or any experience of doing this, that would be great. Ideally I want the process to be carried out by the Performing Arts subject leader, who will be submitting the video, so the process can't be too complicated, otherwise they may ask us to do it, which adds a layer of complexity (and, potentially, responsibility!) Alternatively, I see there are free sites online that offer to resize videos; can anyone confirm if any of these suits are suitable and offer good enough quality? This could be for all sorts of uses; performing arts performances to exam boards is just one example that has cropped up for us. I did try searching for an existing thread but didn't see one. Many thanks in advance!

Following an MIS change (from the absolutely awful SIMS system to Arbor), Wonde told us we would have to manually sync all our classes using their Edusync tool, which transfers data from an MIS into Google Classrooms. This would have been a huge task, however it wasn't even possible, as there was no drop-down to choose a class. When we queried this, they then did match the classes for us. All looked good, however unknown to us, several of the classes were actually at another school within our Multiacademy Trust, where the classes were the same name in the MIS. So now we have some classes with a mixture of pupils from two different schools, and I see no way to remove those pupils. We also don't know exactly which classes are affected. This was reported to Wonde, however they are not being helpful at all, saying that for each classroom we need to discern which school it belongs to (which, as far as I can see, would be an extremely time consuming process) and that we need to manually remove users, which again would be very time consuming, but I see no way to do this. Does anyone know if there is any way to get Wonde to actually resolve such issues? Is there anyone on this forum from Wonde? Or is it a case that we will need to ditch Wonde and use an alternative, for example we are considering Salamendersoft, who presumably would not get two schools mixed up (or, if they did, would presumably offer to fix it, unlike Wonde)?

We got it 2 days ago, and it was correctly identified as spam by Google.

An update, in case anyone else has a similar query: my colleague mistakenly thought that the student records themselves should have parental email addresses set to "primary". However, I discovered that it's actually the parental records - linked to from student records - that should have this set, which ours do. I have fed this back to my colleague and have not heard back, so I assume that the matter is resolved.

Thanks; the response concurs with what I thought, but is at odds with what my colleague believes. I have a call with Wonde on Monday. My colleague thinks that pupil email addresses should never be sent as "main" or "primary", though it sounds like it is "primary" that is the issue specifically. I recall we had this issue a couple of years ago, when we used a system called "Inventry" for registers; that company insisted that we use the email addresses in a particular way (I can't remember the details but I think it was along the lines that parent email addresses had to be either "Main" or "Primary" but I can't remember which), however if we did that, then another company - who we sync SIMS data with for another product - said that their system would not work. So we were effectively forced to use one or the other, as it seems there is no common standard among providers, and we ditched Inventry. I am unsure why this is cropping up again now, as nothing changed over the Summer, but hopefully I can get to the bottom of it on Monday. I would have thought that any system that is emailing parents should ignore any "work" emails and only use "home" emails, but it seems that some providers have set up their systems to use anything that is "primary" (or possibly "main") If anyone at any other schools, or any systems providers, can clarify how the email addresses should be set up and used, I would be interested to hear.

Hi Sally Thanks; I agree that we need to ask Wonde, and I already did so and they are getting back to me soon. However the reason this actually cropped up is because I have been told of some issues regarding SIMS InTouch. My colleague informs me that InTouch uses "Primary" emails to contact parents, instead of "Home". Is that how it should be? What I can't understand is that this issue wasn't reported as ocurring last year, and we haven't changed our data this year. Furthermore, they have said that "I've picked this up when I've run the immunization report off which reports from SIMS and it contains primary addresses which normally appear as the parents. It's now showing pupils in all years' email addresses and not the parents' email addresses, which it did not previously. " We've got a call logged with the SIMS helpdesk Thanks

Hi all, We use the excellent "SIMS Bulk Import" tool ( https://simsbulkimport.uk/ ) to import email addresses from Active Directory into SIMS. I was under the impression that we should set pupil's school email addresses to the following settings, in order for Wonde to syncronise data into various other systems: Location: "Work" Main: "Yes" Primary: "Yes" However I've just been told they should be set to Main: "No" in order for messages to be sent through SIMS IntTouch. Is anyone able to confirm what settings we should have, under students, for: students school accounts; and parents own email accounts In order for all these systems to work correctly? What do other schools have these settings as? Many thanks in advance to anyone who can assist with this!

Thanks. We asked someone from Smart yesterday about the sound when the screen is off and they said it isn't possible. I have a question regarding the latest version of the Smart software, one of the teachers has reported that the old software (which dated from 2013) allowed them to load several lessons at once, but the new software only allows "two or three"; does anyone here have any knowledge or experience regarding this? Again thanks in advance :)

Hi We have a few questions 1) Should PCs be connected through HDMI2, rather than HDMI1? We had a PC connected to HDMI1 and the pens wouldn't work, but when we connected it to HDMI2, the pens did work. 2) Is there a way for audio to be played via HDMI but without the screen being on? One of our teachers wants to use audio a lot but doesn't want to display anything on the screen for extended times, and points out that it is a waste of power to have the screen on all the time. 3) Is there a way to make these boards default to HDMI2 rather than defaulting to the installed Android system? The teachers more commonly use the board to display what's on their PC, rather than the built in OS. Many thanks in advance 🙂