100 Grades Per Minute

Year 13 chose today as their "muck-up day" as the pupils call it. Hence the current sights of Post-It notes declaring how we are going to miss them (amongst other messages) scattered accross the whole school. I'm not kidding either, every wall in every corridor and room accessible to the pupils are scattered with Post-It notes. It's like a tornado of sticky bits of paper whisked through the school over Period 1 and as fast as they come down, the walls are covered again.

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I spotted a little quirk today in Assessment Manager that anyone using it for reporting should be aware of. Over time, staff members will change and the Marksheets that have been assigned will slowly become out of date. In our case, a baby boom amongst the staff population led to a large number of maternity cover teachers being employed and thus assigned to the now teacherless classes.

This lead to the Marksheets that were assigned at the start of term to be out of date and still ...

When I went to attempt registration of Visual Studio Express 2010, Microsoft had the forethought to ensure everyone was included in the list of roles in the company. Even "that guy in every company who knows computer-based stuff and does it when he probably shouldn't be" is included.

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Today looked set to be another normal day, camped at my desk with a cup of coffee and tinkering with the homebrew system to set up school reports. As it stands, my heart sank when I fired up SIMS and an update appeared (also interfering with my project monitoring the SIMS server through MMC). At the same time, the webmail system was upgraded by external providers to a new one. We knew it was going to happen but not when. Today just got interesting.

Fortunately training the Admin staff ...

Unless you have been under a rock over the weekend, you will have heard of the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano blowing it's top. Ironically, World Earth Day is this Thursday giving Geography or Library departments a perfect chance to run displays based on current events. What ideas could you use?

• Teach pupils to say the name correctly
• Explain how to spot the ash by looking for the sky going from blue to grey as you look towards the horizon
• Explain how volcanoes work and the effects
• What

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One of my jobs each week is to assemble the school's display that is shown above reception. This typically involves a slideshow of images, which this week was provided by staff who were on a ski trip.

While looking at one image something stood out. That familiar stall where something isn't right or unusual on the screen and prevents me from moving on until I twig what it is. Students, check. Restaurant, OK that's normal so check. Appears to be at the top of the slopes, nice view in ...

...you stick pins in marshmellow caterpillars. Wait I don't think I got the little Internet meme correct there.

Some may recall my previous blog entry of why the education secotor is so enjoyable. The discovery of this little chap when cleaning up after the afterschool crowd further reinforces this. How random but cute!

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Recently, I was asked by the Headteacher to look into using a centralised system for the internal school display. I settled on Xibo, a system I could set up for little or no cost to the school. Unfortunately I lacked a machine to test it on.

The end result is a working Xibo install running on a Ubuntu-based Apache webserver. This proof-of-concept test server is installed on my...memory stick?

No fast hard disk, no large space to store files, just an 8Gb memory stick ...

First of all a belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone on Edugeek. A new year has begun and schools are enjoying their first day back to work, but 2010 looks set to start as 2009 ended.

Already there has been a lot of closures accross the country due to snow. More looks set to arrive tonight (if it hasn't already) and that means more risk of school closure. It is best to test your notification systems now rather then later, bearing in mind how much strain your school ...

Sometimes I look at why I work for lower money then my corporate counterparts in IT. Then I realise in corporate IT, you don't get strange and random situations every day due to the unpredictability of the students at the school.

As an example, I currently have some of the older kids singing a joint rendition of the song below in one of the corridors outside my office. You won't see that in corporate IT.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx1XIm6q4r4"]YouTube- ...