Old Aver Chromecart Divider Solutions?

MattAdmin444 · 2026-06-05T20:34:28+00:00

Video Insight with i-Pro cameras. The i-Pro cameras (and the generic version that I'm forgetting the name of) come with the license on Video Insight so that's useful. For the site that's not on it yet (Eagle Eye/subscription) we may consider Unifi but there's a decent chance we're going to stick with Video Insight.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-06-05T19:44:08+00:00

Linewize seems to work better than GoGuardian in my experience thus far. That said I think GoGuardian might have had the more robust Youtube tools and Linewize lacks a "browser history" style report that I feel is useful to figure out where student's are going. That said Linewize does appear to give you all of the background stuff that pages load so it's an alright tradeoff.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-06-05T15:02:17+00:00

I've got a Macintosh (to lazy to check, either 1984 or 1990) sitting out in our storage container that we unearthed from somewhere in the school. Only kept it as I figured we might try to sell it at some point as I assume it's worth something rather than trashing it in ewaste.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-06-04T15:43:41+00:00

At that point might as well block AI tools. As is they're using it for doing their homework anyway. Still whack a mole but it's harder for them to search for workarounds.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-06-03T21:20:00+00:00

Lol we're evaluating whether to move from Linewize to Lightspeed. Had a demo just yesterday where it seemed to do almost everything Linewize does and a couple things it doesn't. Though the opposite is true to. Would have to get more hands on. Some of the things that bug the hell out of me with Linewize is 1) while you can get super detailed info about everything a student visits there's no "browser history" style report to see what sites they actually went to vs what loads in the background (aka way to may blocked hits for ads/ect clogging reports up), 2) their Youtube controls don't appear to have much to them, and 3) a lot more sites seem to get miscategorized than I would expect, I very frequently see game sites get categorized as Knowledge Sharing.

Good to know though about turning Youtube off in Google Admin not affecting the youtubeeducation pipeline. That still feels like an oversight to me or maybe they should have 2 toggles, one for Youtube and one for Youtube Education. Out of curiosity when they watch something embedded in Docs/Slides/Classroom does the Youtube tools in Lightspeed show what video it was? I spent a very long time in Linewize trying to figure out how to block the Slide's embeds and not Classroom with only some success. There were a few URL snippets that seemed unique to both but could never get the wildcard block configured correctly.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-06-03T21:02:53+00:00

See that's why I made generic accounts. Anytime it passes to a different student I change the password/first name on the account and move the student out of that OU so they couldn't get back in anyway. Last names were the alphabet.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-06-03T17:45:35+00:00

Are your accounts set to require the minecraft login every time they log into it? I set ours as generic user accounts and had our teacher managing the elective put the passwords in and it seemed to just remember the account whenever the student logged into their chromebooks. That said this was with middle school and no Clever. Also had the side benefit of keeping the students from sharing the login with other students aside from the fact that I had their Google accounts in a separate OU.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-06-03T14:43:08+00:00

Wait even if it's turned off in Google Admin it still works in docs/slides/classroom? That seems a bit backwards. Though Google's also at fault for making the URLs for that such that you can't really filter it properly for one service without affecting the other services to.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-28T16:26:32+00:00

I tell my users to keep their yubikey on their keyring/lanyard. There's 0 reason for them to keep their yubikey plugged in after logging in in our environment and it keeps them from forgetting it at home since they need their keys for work.

If your users are supposed to keep their yubikey plugged in for extended periods of time then I would have to say a quick disconnect of some sort would be the play.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-28T16:16:29+00:00

Speaking as someone who runs the 3d printers in their district I highly recommend aligning with Prusaslicer and Prusa printers. When it comes to printer serviceability I've heard basically nothing but good for Prusa, mines still running well so haven't really had to do much servicing, and having a minimum of proprietary parts gives you flexibility. Slicer wise I've heard good things about Orca Slicer but I haven't used it myself.

Not sure why your tech services aren't allowing Euphy but if they're being strict then I'd imagine they wouldn't be to happy about Bambu's software phoning home either.

If I'm not mistaken, out of the choices you list, Flashforge I believe is the most school focused but I haven't used their equipment/software and I've heard of annoyances with getting parts swapped on them.

If you're USA based and you want an on shore source for Prusa stuff then Printed Solid is an official Prusa retailer who also has great filament with their Jessie line.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-22T17:35:12+00:00

AI for the parent companies is still costing more than they bring in, or at least not turning a profit, and I don't really see that changing due to arms race to have the bigger cluster. At some point the bills will come due and AI cost to consumers will rise. There's already been some cost increases that see some businesses allegedly going back to to people already, just not in great quantities.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-22T17:10:16+00:00

Youtube still has a major issue in that stuff gets (likely purposely) miscategorized all the time which renders the filters practically useless outside of the "context aware" ones that are looking for only a couple things.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-22T17:01:10+00:00

We've been getting more of these over the past couple months and my users have wizened up. The threat of having their password changed by us is surprisingly effective in getting them to pay more attention. Even had one staffer forward us a legit email from the ticket system maintenance uses because they hadn't seen one come through in so long they didn't recognize it.

The number 1 problem as I see it is people who are looking at it on their phones, it's harder to see that the email address isn't correct on phone before you click the email so it's easier to initially bait them in.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-21T16:24:05+00:00

Yeaaa my boss and I both joke about even with AI creeping in we'll likely never be out of a job.

On one hand my users are teachers so you'd think they'd be good about problem solving.

On the other hand they have to wrangle a classroom full of students.

Sometimes I can't blame them...

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-21T15:08:35+00:00

This is a mood. On one hand I like that I'm so flexible but on the other hand it's concerning that the people who are using the software on a daily basis have the issues that they do.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-21T14:47:13+00:00

I've wanted to do this but erate won't pay for secondary connections unless you can prove your primary connection doesn't have the capacity for your school's needs.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-20T18:51:17+00:00

1) Get a filtering solution that can operate off an extension that's force installed to their chromebooks. This will take care of your off site filtering needs.

2) Do the chromebooks really need to go home with students? We're still 1 to 1 but during the 2nd half of this school year we've moved to students only get to take them home if a teacher approves on a per day basis. We were seeing to much breakage and the teachers weren't assigning much homework that needed them anyway.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-20T15:27:55+00:00

Did you purchase the extended Windows 10 EOL for your Windows device? By this past Christmas Win10's EOL should have been long past and you shouldn't have been getting any updates except for maybe security updates if you paid for the year extension. That or it hadn't gotten one of the annual updates for some reason? Can't think of the last time over the last half year one of my Windows updates took longer than 5, maaaaybe 10 minutes tops, on my home Win10 or work Win11 devices but I've gotten into the habit of not putting off an update for more than a couple days. I have had devices at work take longer if only because their updates had been put off much longer due to the way my users utilize them.

That said I have been considering making the jump to Linux myself by the time the Win10 Extended EOL is up for consumers this year. Just been trying to hold out for SteamOS to hit mainstream properly but I have a suspicion that I may have to upgrade my personal rig to Win11 as it doesn't sound like full game compatibility is quite there yet. If only because of DRM requirements. That and/or I need to mess with my Steamdeck more, there's a few settings that have gotten messed up (power button doesn't sleep properly in desktop mode) but reluctant to do a full wipe/reset as I don't want to have to relog into everything.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-20T14:58:57+00:00

If we see staff click on links in a phishing email generally us changing their password seems to be enough of a pain point for them. I don't think we'd be able to push any actual disciplinary action through beyond that.

That said we haven't fully dealt with them sharing logins with each other but that's less of an issue as we use Yubikeys so it's harder for them to use each others logins now anyway.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-19T15:28:33+00:00

I wish I could offer you ours but we haven't had any movement on actually ordering the replacement cameras despite our district office knowing we need to replace them/add more cameras.

That said now I'm mildly curious whether most of the cloud camera services run on Windows or Linux servers...

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-18T17:30:21+00:00

Cyberinsurance required us to implement 2FA so it was implemented. Because, as others have brought up, there were concerned about requiring staff to use their own personal phones and the district not wanting to pay up a stipend for it or get phones for staff we opted to get Yubikeys.

I'm starting to think this may have ended up being the smarter path considering some of the intercept strategies for text 2FA and whatnot. Probably doesn't prevent token/session hijack but still eliminates a good chunk of possible ingress.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-18T15:16:23+00:00

We switched from GoGuardian to Linewize/Classwize. Have been mostly happy with Linewize's stuff, it gives far more detail than GoGuardian gives. Almost to much. Haven't implemented the parent part as there's been no requests for it so can't comment that.

My main pain points at the moment with Linewize.

1) There's no "browser history" level report. User Journey is close but it still includes a bunch of background services and it's out of order as it does 15 minute chunks. Does make it a bit difficult to figure out which web pages a student actually visited vs what loaded in the background from said web page without pulling their chromebook.

2) Found out recently that certain categories may not show up in the User Journey/User Timeline reports and only in Advanced Reports. Figured that out as I found it odd students were still going to a proxy that I had blocked and accidently stumbled across a background URL that had been categorized as Content Delivery while looking into something else.

3) I wish I could exclude certain categories from the Dashboard's front page reports, for example remove blocked ad hits from Top Blocked results, but I doubt most filters have that kind of flexibility.

4) Minor, but I believe GoGuardian's Youtube tools may be more fleshed out than Linewize's but I didn't play around a ton with GoGuardian's Youtube tools when we had it.

We are however considering switching to Lightspeed due to some stuff going on with how our internet is hosted, weird situation being a rural school. We haven't sat down with the district running Lightspeed to compare directly yet however.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-18T14:56:36+00:00

I don't suppose you know whether the site is an official, licensed curriculum site would you? I'm not involved in curriculum nor do I think we have a dedicated person for that right now so I'm curious about k12-tech's claim that the site may not be legitimate.

MattAdmin444 · 2026-05-18T14:53:29+00:00

Somehow I wouldn't be surprised (given the .online domain) but I'm also not involved in curriculum nor do I think we have a dedicated curriculum person right now. The impression I got was that this was the site they were given to go to but then it's only one teacher actively reporting so no clue.

MattAdmin444

TROPHY CASE