The following technical information is for IT staff wishing to have more control over Schoolshape products in their school. It is not necessary for the set up or use of Schoolshape. To learn more about Schoolshape products, please return to the Home Page.
Installation and Set-Up
Schoolshape requires no installation or set-up as long as the following conditions are met:
1. Ports 80 and 443 are open for outgoing connections.
2. A recent browser is installed. We recommend Firefox 3.5+ or IE8.0+, but Schoolshape should work with any browser capable of supporting Flash.
3. The Flash plugin version 10 or later is installed.
For use with multimedia:
4. A microphone is correctly plugged in or installed and is selected as the default sound capture device. We recommend using an external microphone for best sound quality.
5. A web-cam is correctly plugged in or installed and is selected as the default video capture device (for video only).
Technical Background
Schoolshape is a web application which runs in the Flash player. The host page (at http://www.schoolshape.com/login) downloads an SWF file via http which then attempts to establish a secure https connection to the Schoolshape server. When using multimedia functionality, the application will also attempt to establish one or more secure rtmps connections to the server to upload streaming media.
Storage Limits
Media files are hosted securely in our data centre with multiple backups. By default, for a School account with one teacher, there is 4GB of storage space available. This increases by 2GB for each additional teacher and by 4GB for schools subscribing to the video functionality. We shall gradually increase the amount of free space available as storage price drops. We anticipate that this amount should be sufficient for all schools. However, extra space is available at the rate of GBP20/year for 10GB. In the event that storage space runs low, warnings will appear in administrator accounts well before space runs out.
Getting an Administrator Account
If you wish to have more control over the use of Schoolshape in your school, we recommend that you create an admin account for yourself. You will then be able to add and delete a teacher/administrator/moderator or student account. You can also monitor space usage and limits on the Schoolshape servers, control account billing and update your School's information. Admin accounts are available free of charge and can be obtained by logging in as the principal teacher and following the instructions below:
Go to Admin -> Staff
Click 'Add staff'
Fill in your name, un-tick 'teacher' and tick 'administrator'.
Click OK and log out.
You can now log in yourself using your newly created administrator account.
Troubleshooting
Login page appears correctly, but logging in fails.
If you find that the login page is loading correctly but that logging in fails, it's probably because https connections are being blocked by your firewall.
All features work with the exception of video and sound recording
Most likely, you are allowing only https connections on port 443. Please allow rtmps connections to enable streaming audio and video.
Schoolshape frequently crashes the browser
If you are using IE6.0, please upgrade to the latest version. IE6.0 does a poor job of handling memory and frequently crashes with a number of complex Flash applications.
My school's internet connection is very slow, and longer recordings sometimes get cut off saying 'Internet connection is too slow to continue recording'
Some Schoolshape users do have limited connection speeds. We are aware of this and are constantly working to improve their experience.
Schoolshape buffers recordings in memory to cope with network quality variance, but this can be overwhelmed on very slow connections. 'Can I use Schoolshape over ADSL?' below.
Can I use Schoolshape over ADSL?
This depends on the Schoolshape product you wish to use and the number of simultaneous users. In the Examination System, speaking tests are conducted one at a time. As the audio stream is highly compressed, it poses no problems for ADSL users. In fact, we have a number of schools successfully submitting exams over ADSL. The Online Language Lab is designed to be used simultaneously by many students. Compressed audio streams are now only 5-10KB/s, and the software is capable of buffering several minutes of sound in memory at times of network congestion. In tests, we found that 30 simultaneous users on an 512Kbps upload ADSL connection caused no problems. (Students do not all upload streams simultaneously). You should not be concerned about conflicts with other users in your school unless they are also uploading big files. Schoolshape needs a roughly equal amount of upload and download bandwidth, and so will be limited by the upload speed of ADSL connections.
We are also working on a media caching server which you can install on a school machine. You could then get all the benefits and more of the stand-alone version, without having to maintain stand-alone installations. This should allow you to use even the high quality video functions on your ADSL connection, as all media will be served from within your school. If you would like us to move this up our priority list, please get in contact to let us know.
