Pilot project combines identity management of UCS@school with BILDUNGSLOGIN

Pilotrojekt BILDUNGSLOGIN: Logos Univention und Verband Bildungsmedien
In cooperation with the Verband Bildungsmedien e.V. we will continue to improve digitization in education. The association has commissiones us to connect our identity management of UCS@school with their license management BILDUNGSLOGIN as part of a pilot project. It intends to provide teachers and pupils with simple access to digital educational media in compliance with data protection laws.

How To configure the BigBlueButton video conferencing solution for UCS and use it easily

Since the beginning of spring, school authorities and other educational institutions have been faced with the challenge of continuing their teaching with no or only limited face-to-face interaction. This article introduces the web conferencing system BigBlueButton, which may be a possible solution to this problem. In the first part of the article I would like to give you an overview of the most important functions of BigBlueButton and briefly discuss what you need to pay attention to the sizing of the servers and how to deal with problems caused by NAT and firewalls of the users. In the second part, I will explain how to integrate BigBlueButton into your UCS environment step by step so that users can use it with their usual credentials.

Digital Offers for Schools: with Nextcloud, itslearning and Co. through the Corona Crisis – Interview City of Wolfsburg

Mr. Ostendorf, how many schools, students and teachers do you supervise in Wolfsburg?
Being an urban district, our area of responsibility includes 37 schools at 43 different locations. About 1,500 teachers teach a total of 17,000 students at these schools.

Which digital offers are you already using?
We usually have local school server solutions at our schools. We are using iServ at three vocational schools, Logodidact mostly at secondary schools and we still have the MNSPro solution at primary and a few secondary schools. A pilot project was launched four years ago with a council decision. The aim is to test a concept for the implementation of a cross-school solution that is centrally operated and maintained by the school authorities. With the support of the system house Linet Services GmbH that is located in Braunschweig we implemented an identity management system based on UCS@school at six pilot schools with around 5,000 users in 2017. The digital identities of the teachers and students are stored centrally in the identity management system and each user has a uniform user name and password. With these, the users have secure and controlled access via RADIUS to the school WiFi, which is distributed uniformly to all pilot schools. Docked to the IDM of UCS@school we also operate the learning management solution itslearning.

Digital Solutions at Bremerhaven Schools: Interview with Andreas Froberg

Bremerhaven
Mr. Froberg, how many users are you responsible for in total at the schools in Bremerhaven?

As a local education authority, we provide the IT services and IT infrastructure for almost 20,000 users all told. 18,000 of these are pupils and 1,700 are teaching staff and other employees in our 40 schools.

What digital solutions do you have in your portfolio for the schools right now?

As far as solutions for schools are concerned, Bremerhaven works in close cooperation with the education authority in Bremen and the State Institute for School (LIS). Your UCS and UCS@school solutions have already been in use in the city of Bremen for some time now. When we started thinking about introducing a learning management system in Bremerhaven four years ago, it was only natural to take a look at itslearning – the solution that Bremen had selected the year before. It quickly convinced us, and, like Bremen, we decided on a centralized, interschool concept. That’s why we operate UCS in the BIT computer center and maintain a digital identity with a username and password for each and every user in its directory service. Following the setting up of this directory service, we created a personal work e-mail address for all teaching staff and other employees at the schools. itslearning was also made available for all schools. It was initially employed at all the vocational training schools, for senior classes in the grammar schools, and at some high schools. Since its introduction, we have noticed that use of the solution by both staff and students has increased steadily. In addition, many of the staff in the elementary schools are also using itslearning for organizational purposes. The introduction of the itslearning Sofa Tutor tool, which allows teaching staff to create their own digital learning content, brought with it new impulses.

Interview with Malte Clemens: Digital Offers for Schools, City of Hannover

How many schools with how many students and teachers do you supervise?

99 schools, approx.47,000 students, approx. 5,000 teachers

Which digital offers are you already using? How do you deploy them?

The state capital of Hanover (LHH) supports the schools in their administrative tasks, such as the maintenance and software equipment of the school secretariats’ computers.
There has never been a comprehensive central IT offering for the classes. By this, a large number of individual solutions have emerged in schools in recent years. The hardware procurement was carried out by the LHH and for the support the schools received an IT budget.

Interview with Dominik Fahrin, Special Service “Central Services and Data Processing”, City of Beckum

Logo Stadt Beckum
Mr. Fahrin, how many schools with how many students and teachers do you supervise?

In the city of Beckum we have a total of nine schools, six primary schools and three secondary schools. In addition, together with our neighboring town Ennigerloh, we also manage an intermunicipal comprehensive school. That means: around 4,500 pupils and around 650 teachers, although currently, we only manage the teachers with UCS@school.

UCS@school 4.4 v4 brings improved exam mode, computer room control and ID connector

The UCS@school team released the 4th version of the UCS@school app a few weeks ago. It is technically based on UCS 4.4 and brings some new functions as well as various adjustments and improvements.

In this article, I would like to give you a short overview about the most important new features for administrators and users, especially in the exam mode, computer room and laptop class control, single sign-on and printer control. Very interesting is the new ID-Connector, which enables data transfer between federal state directories, school district directories and school directories.

UCS@school: Automatic Integration of Samba Shares into Nextcloud

The free and open source file hosting solution Nextcloud is available in the Univention App Center either preconfigured or as a virtual appliance and is therefore quickly installed and set up on UCS. Nextcloud can also offer it‘s services on a central server in large, distributed environments and is therefore ideal for integrating network shares from other computers.