Network Collapsed

[localzuk]

Our School has ICT in Every single Classroom and 13 ICT Suites and 4 sub 15 PC suites in Large classrooms.. I would say ICT is everywhere ...

 

And I support papakura in their concerns...

 

We don't have the funds or space for introducing ICT into every classroom in our school. We've got some ICT provision in specific areas (namely art, dt, maths and english). But we have 3 ICT suites which are utilised 98% of the time. (We do have IWB's in every classroom though).

 

My point is that all subjects can carry on teaching without ICT, except ICT dependant subjects such as ICT, electronics and media studies. There is no denying that.

[GrumbleDook]

We would have serious difficulty due to resources being stored centrally on the servers.

 

I would put this thread down to a similar vein as a football manager being hacked off about the pitch being flooded and neither the in-house plumber or the contractors getting things sorted, meaning that fixtures get cancelled adn the club being docked points!

[localzuk]

We would have serious difficulty due to resources being stored centrally on the servers.

 

I would put this thread down to a similar vein as a football manager being hacked off about the pitch being flooded and neither the in-house plumber or the contractors getting things sorted, meaning that fixtures get cancelled adn the club being docked points!

 

All our staff keep copies of their work on their local machines or on usb keys. So the infrastructure going down doesn't affect them in this aspect.

[GrumbleDook]

We just have too many resources to do that ... and we then get into the situation of making sure they back up resources they keep locally ... and after it gets to 4GB per teacher and so much of it is duplicated we stop them, get them to structure the shared department area better and only drop things onto their local machine when needed.

[srochford]

You need a UPS if you have a server. It ensures the server gets shut down properly in the event of a power failure! Not shutting down an AD server properly can lead to a corrupt AD.

 

It can do but in my experience it's pretty rare (ie it's never happened to me and I hate to think how many times we've had DCs shutdown by just pulling the plug - not always deliberate but I have done it just to see what happens)

 

Having said that, I would agree that a UPS is pretty much essential. They're not terribly expensive and they are useful to just protect you against minor things going wrong with power.

[srochford]

 

My point is that all subjects can carry on teaching without ICT, except ICT dependant subjects such as ICT, electronics and media studies. There is no denying that.

 

Teaching of normal lessons might be able to continue but what about coursework etc?

 

I might be misunderstanding you here but I would have thought that most schools would have pupils doing GCSE/A Level etc coursework using computers (even it's just a word document for a project). Losing the computers as it comes to the end of the year would be massively disruptive to that.

 

I know that coursework for many subjects will have been submitted by now but we certainly have students desperate to get coursework finished before the end of the year - network down time just now would cause real problems.

[localzuk]

Teaching of normal lessons might be able to continue but what about coursework etc?

 

I might be misunderstanding you here but I would have thought that most schools would have pupils doing GCSE/A Level etc coursework using computers (even it's just a word document for a project). Losing the computers as it comes to the end of the year would be massively disruptive to that.

 

I know that coursework for many subjects will have been submitted by now but we certainly have students desperate to get coursework finished before the end of the year - network down time just now would cause real problems.

 

That is true, but then out of the normal 5-7 years that a high school covers in terms of teaching, there are 4 or 5 years which are still doing normal lessons. Not everything is about GCSEs and A-Levels.

[GrumbleDook]

Year 13 - A2

Year 12 - AS

Year 11 - GCSE

Year 10 - GCSE (including modular work that is submitted in year 10)

Year 9 - GCSE and KS3 SATs (we start our Technology GCSE courses in Year 9)

Years 7 & 8 .... KS3 curriculum ... not exam work.

 

So ... we only have 2 years that can survive without IT at a push. And even in these year groups we use IT for continuous assessment (AfL) and access to resources for skill building.

 

I can't think of a single department that could survive without IT for this length of time. Even the PE dept run a BTec Sports Studies course that has a large amount of coursework, Drama involves written coursework ... I think Dance may be the only course that can get away with it, but the other courses within the Expressive Arts faculty need IT.

 

I would expect every single HoD at my door each morning asking what was going on if I wasn't communicating it to them all on a regular basis.