IT Ideas

This is a guide (or documentation for my own use!) to the provisioning of Google Classrooms across a large domain and how to achieve ongoing sync of student members. The advantages of doing this are: Teachers don't have to do anything - all their classes are just there. You can add multiple teachers to classrooms. No inviting a secondary teacher. Students have all their classes at the start of the term. Students are automatically in the correct classes. Classes have totally consistent names. You can do it for FREE - however, there are paid for options if you don't want to go the DIY approach. The following requires you to have the student, staff and optionally, guardian emails on SIMS. Step 1 - Setup up GAM - you need this to do command line processing on your domain. It's a very powerful tool to do batch commands. Step 2 - Export a list of current Classrooms and archive any you don't want. I'd recommend this as it means users will only see the ones ...

As a long time user of Hapara Teacher Dashboard, I thought I should document how you can update classes on a daily basis from Captia SIMS - the most common MIS in the UK and the one we use. Step 1 - Generate a suitable students report (same one I use for syncing Google Classroom - see another blog post...) Step 2 - Set this report to run on a schedule and output to a network share on a Virtual machine that is online all the time. You do this with the "commandreporter" on your SIMS server. An example command that lives in a batch file that runs as a scheduled task (the username and password is a SIMS user with sufficient privileges to run the report): " C:\Program Files\SIMS\SIMS .net\commandreporter" /user:USERNAME /password:PASSWORD /report:"haparastudents" /OUTPUT:\\Win10man\gam\hapara\hapara.csv /QUIET Step 3 - Write a script to reformat the csv file to an acceptable Hapara format. So key things: Convert "/"'s into "-...

I recently realised that an easy way to collect and sort Photos and Videos was to use Forms. We had to take photos of every room in the school and have them archived for easy discovery in the event of an insurance claim. So I made a simple form that had the room name as the first question and a file upload question for the next: I linked this to a spreadsheet and added the formula =split(C2,",") to an extra column. This simply splits the list of image urls into separate cells to make them clickable. On a phone, you just load up the form, add the room number, hit the upload button, select upload file and choose Camera. You can then add photos straight from your camera.    Took a couple of minutes to setup and no photo organising required at the end of the process. Quite a neat way of uploading photos and automatically organising them. Also useful as multiple people can use the form and upload photos to the same folder and have ...