100 Grades Per Minute

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

...

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- ...

Following on from my post earlier, I am publishing a quick guide to removing this nasty virus. Hopefully it will let you clear it from your network a bit quicker then we have.

First of all, you need to shut your network down. This is important because Conficker spreads from computer to computer regardless of them being patched against it. We found lots of systems that were patched but still infected after the virus propagated over the network, only a few systems that didn’t belong ...

I recovered from the flu! Then after catching up following a weeks quarantine Conficker came to play.

On the Friday, the network came down.
By the following Thursday, core services were restored. So about a week.

Still a few bits left but now I am back to another week of catching up as our reports couldn't be filled in or analysed by admin staff. On the plus side, I could tinker with Remote Desktop to monitor the servers and had lots of experience cleaning up ...

Yesterday went well. Our reports for Year 8 were successfully set up on our online homebrew system after bouncing instructions back and forth over EMail and playing with the system itself through it's control panel. Between me and my line manager, we actually pushed the reporting ahead of schedule on top of other tasks sent to me. Though I did discover if I did go into work, I'd have spent most of my day sleeping at my desk given the big energy slumps I was suffering from.

Roll on ...