IT Ideas

Suppose you want to make loads of groups and calendars and populate them with users and don't want to spend any money on any tools to do it. Well you can use GAM  and a couple of scripts to do this. In a school you might want a Google Group and Calendar for each teaching group. You can achieve this using paid for tools such as Hapara's TeacherDashboard and tools that sync your MIS to AD and then to Google Apps - but these cost money and in the second case assume you actually have active directory. So this is how to do it without any of those tools and zero cost. Creating Groups You will need a csv file with a list of group names first - classes names perhaps. Save the csv file to your GAM directory. Run the following command: gam csv groups.csv gam create group ~groups groups.csv = your csv file, the 'groups' in ~groups = the name of the column of groups in the csv file. Populate with group owners You might want teachers to be group owners. So to add th...

I've been a long time user of ClearOS  for gateway, DNS,DHCP, backup and a variety of other services. It is a Linux distro that is backed up with a marketplace of great apps that can be easily managed via a web config (although you can drop into cli whenever you want more control). The new samba directory app allows ClearOS to behave as a full on Windows Domain controller and file server without the cost of Windows Server. So this is a demo from installation to a working DC and files server. Its about 40 mins for the full job - so skip though bits - gives you an example of what you can do. Please note the the Samba Directory App is currently in beta - but I've not spotted any bugs in a my test setup yet.

I've been tempted to buy light portable touch Chromebook for myself for a while now. I initially considered the Asus Flip which has a nice design, but relatively slow processor and small screen. Instead I bought the Acer R11 Chromebook as its get a faster Intel processor, 11.6" IPS screen and currently can be had for £179.99 compared to the £200+ of the Asus. Now I have a 2013 Pixel which is a great device but it has a few shortcomings. Firstly, the battery life is only a few hours and secondly it's quite heavy and a bit big to lug around. The other issue I have is that I use Realtime Board and Explain Everything quite a lot and while they work fine on the Pixel - the positioning of the screen is not ideal for writing on. The Flip feature of the R11 allows you to work at what ever screen angle you want. The good points of the R11: Seems pretty robust - despite being a plastic case. Keyboard is OK as is the trackpad. IPS screen is far better than most Chromebooks. ...

Ericom AccessNow has recently been moved to version 7.3. This version brings direct copy and paste from remote apps to local apps - a very useful feature. You do need to use Chrome as your browser. Brief demo:

Annotated seating plans have been something we have been working on for a while and I've just about got there in terms of functionality. This has been a combined effort between several members of staff and myself, with getting the data off SIMS (our MIS) in a sensible format being the most challenging aspect. It looks like: The system basically does the following: User makes a copy of a central sheet. Selects a class Data auto populates and updates periodically User arranges students in a grid So as little end user (teacher) setup as possible required. Broadly speaking this now works. The issues that do arise come from the inability of SIMS to extract all the data we require in one report. We use 8 reports in total with then need merging into one central data sheet. The following two videos look at the inner workings of the seating plan sheet and the backend datasheet. So it's not perfect, but for most classes it works fine now. Updating the ba...

We have be using Ericom AccessNow and Secure Gateway for a while to give access to Windows Apps on ChromeOS and also to allow off site access. The latest version has a revised user interface and a clearer look. Brief demo below:

This is a brief demo of a system I've been playing with to replace a commercial contact system we currently use. Still in the testing phase - but might work quite well for a small to medium sized school using Google Apps. I'll update this once we have tried it with real parents and see how well (or not!) it actually work.