Starbug1

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 🙂

We also use Applicaa and a lot of things went wrong, in particular parental consent information (e.g. biometric consent, photographic consent etc) and our pastoral admin assistant also said the support wasn't good. Does anyone have any ideas for alternatives? Is there anything that could be seen at BETT this year that could work as an alternative?

Was there any outcome to this? I tried searching but was unable to find the outcome.

Thanks all. Unfortunately we are struggling to get NetSupport to work with Chromebook devices (well, we have it working but all Chromebooks appear in the same room, which is no good!) and therefore we may need to obtain Windows devices for our isolation room, instead of Chromebooks. We have a budget of £250; I see refurbished laptops are available within this budget from various suppliers, however does anyone have any recommendations in terms of a model that we could get within this budget range that would actually be reasonably durable? As the kids who are in our isolation room can exhibit challenging behaviour at times, the most important aspect for us for any device we procure is that it is reasonably durable and that parts such as keyboard keys are replaceable.

Does anyone here use NetSupport School with Chromebook devices? We have it working, however all Chromebooks appear to be in the same "room" as each other; we are struggling to get separate rooms set up. It is very easy to get Windows devices set up as separate rooms; we have it all set up in Active Directory and I can simply move a PC from one OU to another, and it gets the correct settings for the relevant room. However it appears to be far from easy with Chromebooks. Many thanks in advance.

We have a requirement for a set of Chromebooks for our isolation room. This means the devices would be used by the most 'challenging' pupils in the school, i.e. we would want the devices to be durable and repairable. Does anyone have any recommendations for a device that would be suitable? For example, the Acer Chromebook 511 appears to be designed for an education environment, and may meet our needs, but I'd be interested to hear if anyone has had any experience of this type of Chromebook before we go ahead and make a purchase.Also, does anyone have any suggestion for a trolley that can take 30 Chromebooks; for example, we currently have Compucharge trolleys which we are happy with, however the exact model is no longer available, and I'm not sure if we would want 'electronic power management', which appears to be offered on some models. I think we need to place an order early next week, so we don't have much time to spare unfortunately! If anyone can share their experiences and/or provide any suggestions, that would be much appreciated. Many thanks in advance!

I have also got a request for DT staff to be "administrators" for Boxford software. What did others do? Would Power Users suffice?

Unfortunately, ESS increased their price last year from £525 to £810. Schools ICT will do it for a much reasonable £695. In other news, SIMS does not currently (at least not officially) support Server 2022, but will do from the Summer 2024 release. I do feel that we should get away from SIMS because it seems crazy that an OS that was released over two years ago still is not supported, and by not supporting it, this means that if we go for the server move now, we have to do another server move sooner than we should, in another few years time. I feel that hopefully it won't matter for us, as by then we will have ditched SIMS.

We are going to move from projectors to touch screens in about a years time; it will be a gradual process with us replacing maybe a dozen or so each year until they are all done. However in the meantime our Casio projectors are starting to fail; we therefore want to buy some projectors that would fit on our existing projector mounts and just keep the old set-ups going until we can start to get the screens; does anyone have any recommendations for affordable projectors, either new or refurbished/second hand please?

Thanks. The only thing is, we may want users to be able to "bin" items but not permanently bin them. We can do a restore through the admin panel but I'd like to be able to avoid having to do that.

Is there a way to prevent our staff doing a permanent delete of any files/folders in shared Google Drives please? We use Gsuite and we use a combination of shared drives and personal drives; I am not too fussed about permanent deletions from personal drives (that would be useful though) but we would really like a solution for shared drives. many thanks in advance

I also get an error:

I understand some staff at some schools ask students to write their email address & password in their planners. Planners are taken home and could of course be mislaid, lost, stolen. Therefore I am not satisfied that this is a sensible policy; I also believe it gets students into bad habits. Is it reasonable to say that teachers should not be asking students to write passwords in planners, but maybe a password hint is reasonable? What are peoples thoughts on this? Does anyone work at a school that has a clear policy on this?

We also did not go ahead with this

I understand our teachers are using Jamboard in conjunction with Google Classroom and a teacher has informed me that a bullying incident occurred in their previous lesson. Does anyone know if there is any way of establishing who did this, for example is there some sort of log of actions that the teacher could view? And would this work after the lesson has finished; I am not sure if Jamboards disappear once they are finished with or if they still exist.

Does anyone have any advice regarding Office on Chromebooks? We have licenses for our students to be able to download and install Office on their own devices, however they cannot install Office from the Microsoft website when using a Chromebook. I see Office is available from Google Play: Microsoft Office: Word, Excel, PowerPoint & More - Apps on Google Play but would that require them to pay, or is there a way for them to use their Office 365 license? Also is there any benefit to using Office on the Play Store on a Chromebook compared to simply using the Office 365 website? If not then we won't bother with that.

A further update to what caused our latest issue: It seems that when the timetable changed on SIMS, ownership was not transferred it just removes the owner and add the new teacher but does not transfer the ownership from the old teacher to the new one. We have reported this to Wonde

Regarding the issue with the missing Meet links, that appears to have been caused by the classes not having an owner! Not sure how that happened If a teacher leaves and a new teacher takes their place, or if two teachers swapped classes, should the ownership of the classes be transferred automatically? We use Wonde to transfer SIMS data into Google Classroom.

thanks all for your replies; very helpful This morning we have more issues. Several teachers say they are unable to assign work to students in some classes (while other classes are fine) Anyone got any ideas?

We've had a few queries about oddities which I wonder if anyone else has seen occur; these are all with Gsuites accounts using Google Meets from within Google Classroom 1 Unable to blur their background on Meets I understand that in the bottom right of the screen they should get a three dots icon and then be able to click the blur background icon, but they say they do not see this icon. They say they have tried two different web browsers and applies to all of their meets. 2 Unable to pin themselves to the screen I understand they should see a pin icon next to the word "you" which should pin their own camera image to their screen so they can see themselves, but they say they do not see a pin icon. Again they say they have tried two different web browsers. I also asked them to try clicking on the 3 dots and change the layout; they say they have tried all different layouts and it still won't work. 3) A teacher lost all their host controls for a class A teacher lost all host controls; the lesson had ended but a student was still in the meet and they were unable to boot them off. Fortunately the student then left. I have advised that if this happens again they could login using another web browser, join the meet again and hopefully the additional instance should have controls. I suspect this was just a web browser glitch, but has anyone seen the before? It's not happened since, so big issue. If anyone has seen any of these issues before, or has any ideas, it would be great to hear from you. Many thanks in advance

Just to add, in case anyone is looking for this, the issue was relating to the app switching accounts. One solution is to use two different web browsers, one for school stuff and the other for personal stuff, and not use the app. But a more elegant solution is to use the multi-user functionality built into Android (which hardly anyone I know uses or even knows about!) and this will ensure the app uses the correct account.

I have had the same query; if anyone has any thoughts on this we would welcome them @CyBeRkId2002 @foofighterjim did either of you go with this? Many thanks in advance

We have a system in place for Chromebooks to be loaned out in the event of students islolating who do not have access to a device. But the argument put forward for this specific course is that any student who does not have access to a PC/laptop that has either Serif PhotoPlus or Photoshop installed should be loaned a device, even if that student is in school, as it would be unfair to deny them the opportunity to work from home.

We have some laptops which are only intended for use within school. We only have a small number and are intended to be used when there is a specific need e.g. if the student has a learning disorder such as dylexia or a disability or injury which makes writing using a pen & paper difficult. Occasionally staff will loan one to use at home, for example if a member of admin staff is required to work from home, or if a teacher's PC has broken and they ask for one to borrow for a short period until they obtain a replacement. However we've had a new request to loan laptops for students to take home, for the following reason: Students taking an OCR iMedia course were previously expected to do the coursework in school and were not able to do the work at home, but the exam board has now stated they can do the work from home, due to the coronavirus situation. Some of our students would like to take advantage of this change in policy, but are unable to do so because they do not have laptops (or even if they do have laptops, they aren't able to run software such as Photoshop or Serif PhotoPlus etc). Our subject leader feels that it would be unfair for those students to lose out on this opportunity, so would like the school to loan them out to students. We have not loaned out laptops to students before, though we have done this with Chromebooks. So in theory we could amend our Chromebook agreement form and ask parents/students to sign this, and that would presumably cover us in the event of misuse/damage etc. We don't have web filtering enabled on the laptops; does that make us liable if the student was to access sites they shouldn't, or would the signing of an agreement form negate any liability on our part? Could the school could be seen to be acting in a discriminatory way if the school does not loan laptops to students in the circumstances described above? I don't think a decision has been made yet and although it's not my decision I'd be interested to hear any views put forward and it would be interesting to hear if any schools have decided to loan students laptops for this reason, and also if any schools have decided not to.