It’s finally here…almost!

This is a little heads-up to let you all know that it is planned that EduGeek will be receiving its much-anticipated upgrade to EduGeek v6.0 is coming in the next week. We will be doing a full test this weekend 15th-16th March if the final checks are okay and dont present any issue's we will look to migrate but if anything comes up it will be in the following week. We are just going through some extra testing and checks and will update here with an ETA.

THIS ARTICLE WILL BE UPDATED WITH ETA's

Updates:

Progress on the final tests has been good (last few fixes remaining) so we should be migrating very soon. A notice will be posted with a countdown.

What will the new site look like?

This is going to be a tough one to answer as we shall need to ensure that everything works correctly during the course of the migration and we’ve never done it with the live site before (for obvious reasons!).

What we can say, and please be prepared for, is that whilst we have taken every step we can to make the new site look as familiar as possible, it is a completely different platform and some things may not be where you expected them to be.

Please be patient as we are sure that you will find the new features we are to bring in more than worth the slight inconvenience of having to learn where ‘stuff’ has gone.

To hopefully provide you with answers to any questions you might have, we have made up a list of PAQ's (possibly asked questions )

Migration FAQ’s:

Q. How long will EduGeek be down for when we migrate?

A. Hopefully around 24 hours (probably less) with parts of the site coming much sooner (search takes a while to rebuild). It is planned that we shall take the site down possibly this weekend all being well unless something occurs causing a delay to the following week or two.

Q. Where have some forums gone?:

A. As part of the migration, we will also be undertaking some much needed housekeeping, and many older forums such as the legacy Windows ones (Vista, 7 and 😎 will be merged within the Windows forum, and some older ones such as the RBC forums will be archived (but still accessible).

Some other forums will be also be renamed to make them more relevant, with new titles reflecting the content within more accurately. Netbooks, PDA and Phones, we’re looking at you here!

Q. Where has my sig gone?

A. Because the new platform does not import signatures correctly from the old, we are having to do the import without these. Before we do, please ensure you have backed yours up. Then once the migration is complete you will have to re-enter this in your profile settings. (we may be able to manually recover some if needed)

Q. Will we keep you informed about how the migration goes?

A. Yes, we shall have a shoutbox in place as well as our usual Twitter feed:

/ Bluesky feed: https://bsky.app/profile/edugeek.net - and we may even have some fun things to look at as we do it live as well!

Q. Will there be any new features added to the new EduGeek?

A. Oh yes! It is one of the reasons we are moving. Some of the new features may be live when the migration has taken place, and some will be introduced over time once we are sure the new platform is stable, and we have gone through any snagging spotted.

Q. Can I help with any areas on the new site?

A. We anticipate that some areas of the new site will need us to ask some of you to volunteer to help us oversee, manage or moderate them. Once we introduce these, we shall ask for volunteers to help out if required.

Q. Will there be any kind of help on offer to find my way around the new platform?

A. Yes, we shall be creating a dedicated forum for this and hopefully you will find your way around in no time at all

Q. I've found a fault with the new site, can I report it?

A. Yes! We shall have a thread setup to allow you to flag up issues with us and help you out if you need it.

Q. Some styles and ranks are missing?

A. When we go live we will initially just have the standard blue style for the first few days or so to make rolling out fixes much easier but styles will return as soon as we work through any reports.

And that’s about it for now, we shall keep you all informed as to timings etc. closer to the date.

Exciting times!

We made it to the end of yet another year! Right now, across the world, desktops are being powered down, projectors turned off and servers given a stern eye in case they decide to do their own thing over the Christmas holidays once you’ve turned off the lights (we’ve all been there!).

This year has seen an almost return to whatever passes for pre-covid normal. We had the great pleasure of seeing you all in person, not only at BETT in March but also at our first EDIT Conf since 2019 in Leeds in October. We really enjoyed the day and we’d like to thank Smoothwall once more for sponsoring the day, and all of the speakers and exhibitors who helped support the conference to make it such a successful event. We should be getting EDIT back to its usual May slot in 2024 😊

If you missed the day, and would like to catch up on the talks, then you can catch up on them here -

All that is left is to thank everyone… our members, sponsors, moderators and other supporters… and wish you a very merry Christmas and happy new year. Hopefully we shall see you at BETT in January where we will be sharing stand NH22 with ICT Direct. Feel free to pop over for a chat and put your feet up on the EduCouch and have a HobNob.

Merry Christmas everyone from all of us here at EduGeek and we’ll see you in the new year!

Thanks to all of you that came over to see us on our stand at BETT for a chat, to rest your legs, eat chocolates and indulge in lunchtime pizza!

It was great to see so many of you again, both old faces and new. Hopefully we shall see more of you at BETT in January 2024 - only 9 months to go! (rail strikes and other factors not withstanding!).

If you were one of those who gave us your details to be entered into the raffle then today could be your lucky day!

Please note that we shall be offering the prizes to the winners in the order they were drawn, so the first drawn will have first choice etc.

The prizes are as follows:

RGB Gaming Keyboard

Gaming Mouse

3FIDO NFC USB Keys

Desktop fan

We are now contacting the winners via PM, so please check your messages to see if you've won a prize!

Well done to our winners and we hope to see more of you at both our EDIT Conf 2023 in October and BETT 2024 next January.

Usually, our Xmas message is a very up-beat round-up of the year with events and other things to look back on from the past year with positivity, but I do feel that 2022 had been sent as a lesson to us all as to how far we can be tested.

There were positives however, with BETT finally opening its doors after a two year break (although only one show!) to host a very busy, if much reduced, expo in late March. It was very strange to be able to walk across the entire show in under two minutes! Still, it was great to see so many of you all again and even though we couldn’t put on pizza at lunch this year we shall be back to normal running at BETT 2023.

Couple that with the gorgeous weather (we all came equipped for a January show!) it seemed very strange to leave the show in daylight and to be able to sit outside to have lunch in the sunshine. It was a rather nice week all in all.

We had, sadly, also been unable to host our May conf this year due to our catching covid at BETT and this is something we are to ensure happens once more in 2023. The conf, not covid!

It’s not all been doom and gloom however, and we have seen your support for each other shine through time and again and now it’s time for us all to wind down for a couple of weeks, spend time with family and friends and look forwards to a new year that simply cannot be as bad as the one we are leaving.

All that is left now is to thank you all, from our members, moderators, sponsors, advertisers and everyone else that has helped and assisted us throughout the year.

We look forwards to seeing you all in a much happier new year and we shall be kicking 2023 off with a series of webinars in the second half of January which we are sure you will find very helpful and informative, so keep an eye out when you get back to work for more information and go and put your feet up for a much deserved break.

From all of us at EduGeek we wish you all a very merry Christmas and a wonderful new year!

Just over 17 years since EduGeek went live we have now hit 200,000 threads! Containing over 1.8 million posts of helpful advice, lively discussion, and fun threads. This is a very big anniversary.

From what started as a hobby site with the intention of perhaps providing a little home for up to 200 school techies, we have now ballooned to over 108,000 members and millions of visits per year. To say this was unexpected back in 2005 would be an understatement.

We’d like to thank you all, current members and members past, in making EduGeek the lively, safe and friendly community that it is today. It’s been a big ride helping you through some pretty tense, happy and frustrating times and long may we continue to provide you all with the help and support you need in your daily lives.

None of this could be possible without either yourselves, our moderators and our sponsors and advertisers. We’d especially like to thank all of them for their help and support of EduGeek over the past decade and a half. It’s been an amazing experience.

From all of us at EduGeek

Here we are once more, at the end of a year that turned out to be a very good LARP-ing of Groundhog Day for most of us, we seem to be back right where we were this time last year.

Still, we can all take pride in the act that most of us are now in the situation that we can change our working practices at the drop of a hat, work from wherever you might be and have processes in place to adapt to circumstances rapidly. And that should make you all feel proud as I don’t think many have realised just how much their systems and methods of working have changed over the past 20 months.

Usually during our Christmas message we do a round-up of the year, what we’ve all done, the shows and expos we’ve met you all at and other news.

This year though, as with almost everyone in the EdTech sector, we’ve not been allowed to play out, despite our best efforts. From BETT, our EDIT Conference and ISTE, we’ve had to stay firmly grounded, but hopefully we shall see you at the slightly delayed BETT at the end of March 2022…if the gods of tech smile upon us that is.

All that remains is for all of us here at EduGeek to wish all of you a very merry Christmas and wonderful new year, wherever you might be, and offer a large thanks for our sponsors, advertisers and moderators for supporting us over this period to ensure that you all got the help and support you need from one another.

So, put up your feet over the next week or so and treat yourself to your favourite tipple and nibbles, don your Xmas jumper and relax in your favourite comfy chair. You’ve certainly earnt it!

Merry Christmas everyone and we'll (hopefully) see you in the new year

This is just a quick heads-up that EduGeek will be taking part in the September 2021 Check It Out! show hosted by Al Kingsley and Mark Anderson (Twitter - @AlKingsley_Edu and @ICTEvangelist) from NetSupport on Tuesday the 28th September at 7PM (UK time). Dos_Box will be taking part in the show and it promises to be a fun event. We may even have some news about the new site for you all!

This is a great show that gives educators and others in the EdTech sector a platform to present their methods and spread their knowledge to others.

The show will be streamed live and you will be able to view it here -

It will also be available to view on the same

after the event. If you want to catch up on their earlier shows you can find them on the NetSupport YouTube channel here - https://www.youtube.com/NetSupport

This year that feels rather inadequate. No one could have predicted just how things would turn out at the beginning of 2020, and for possibly the first time ever, your skills, knowledge, hard work and inventiveness throughout the initial lockdown period and through the re-opening of the schools have not gone unnoticed by the wider educational community.

From setting up a wide array of remote leaning tools, to the sourcing and distribution of hardware to enable staff and students to work from home to sorting out better internet connectivity for your schools, colleges and universities, this year has been intense for everyone. And you have come though it with flying colours.

The way we have seen you all come together in the forums to help each other out during the pandemic has been nothing short of amazing. From setting up remote learning over a variety of platforms to sourcing hardware services the help you have provided to each other has been amazing.

You should all be very proud of your achievements.

We also know that some of you have had a very hard time this year with some losing jobs or being furloughed for long periods. We do hope that the new year brings a lot more opportunities for you.

We’d also like to thank our sponsors for the help and support they have offered you all during this period, especially those who had been trying to supply products and services to you all during a very awkward and intense time, but also the EdTech industry as a whole, who, in many cases, went above and beyond in their efforts to help out where they could with their workforce either furloughed or working from home.

From the start of lockdown we had been speaking directly to many companies, both large and small, all of whom were desperate to offer assistance to those either currently using or introducing their products and as their customers and clients were mostly now working from home this became quite hard for them at times, so we helped them out wherever we could.

You were all quite, quite epic.

And last, and by no means least, our mods and supporters who have been so amazing over the past year.

But now the end is in sight, with vaccines being rolled out, we think it’s time you all took it easier for the next couple of weeks and put your feet up with a glass of whatever takes your fancy.

You have all more than earned it.

From all of us here at EduGeek, we wish you all a wonderful, healthy and safe Christmas, and, with the gods willing, we shall see you in the real world at some point next year.

You can almost hear the tinsel and smell the sleigh bells, so it must be that time of year again.

Yes, that’s right, the lucky ones of you will already be desk deep in Quality Street wrappers (other brands available), donning Christmas jumpers of varying levels of hideous and not watching that clock on your wall/desktop/wrist at all.

So, let all of us here at EduGeek wish all of you a great Christmas break and thank you all once more for the help and sense of community you provide to each other and the difference you make to the challenging environments in which you operate. Thanks too to our sponsors, advertisers and supporters for ensuring that we can keep delivering the site in the way we do. Last, but absolutely not least, thank you to our moderators, without whom we’d be knee deep in reported posts!

Thank you all.

We shall see you all again in the new year. If you are going to BETT in January, we hope to see you IRL at London EXCEL so please pop by to see us, with ICT Direct, on stand SD40 (in the south hall) where we shall be providing you with a comfy place to rest your weary bones, freebies and, as always, free pizza at lunchtime.

This should be a very interesting show with it now spread over two halls dividing software/services and hardware between them and we are very keen to see how this works out.

It has been an interesting year for many reasons from Intel’s continued slide against AMD to Tesla introducing possibly the worlds ugliest car and the recent General Election.

Due to this last event, and the amount of communication we have received from members about posts in the Political Forum in the past few weeks, we have decided to close this forum from now for the duration of the holidays and will reopen it again in the new year. This is to prevent general Christmas grumpiness, which is never good, and to ensure you enjoy the break in a much more relaxed way. Plus this will stop the moderators having to put down turkey sarnies and seasonal tipples to deal with ‘issues’.

So, with that, we hope you all enjoy the break and wish you all a very merry Christmas and a great new year and, if we don’t see you on the forums in the meantime, we shall see you all in the new year.

Merry Christmas 😊

Dos_Box, ZeroHour and all the Mods

So here we are, a tad over 14 years into life, over 1.6 million posts spread over 181,000 threads, 12 BETT’s and 10 ISTE’s under our belt, many, many millions of visits each year and an ever growing and vibrant community full of the most helpful, knowledgeable (and often patient) professional techies you will find anywhere on the net.

Over the years we have taken great pains to meet as many of you as possible and it has always been a pleasure to see you in the real world.

Many of you have been here since our very early days, some of you are relatively new - and very welcome you are too - and some of you lurk (weirdly, we do meet many, many lurkers at shows and confs!), but all of you make EduGeek the place it is today. For that we are eternally thankful to have got to know you all over the years.

As mentioned earlier, we are due to be upgrading EduGeek just after the summer holidays, and we can assure you that the upgraded site will be amazing with lots of new features and facilities that will make using EduGeek more useful going into the future.

We are sure you are going to love it!

It really is quite a strange experience to see something that was originally planned as a small forum where maybe 100-200 members were expected to the huge and influential community we are today and for that, we thank you all.

To you, our members, for making EduGeek what it is today, our moderators for being mean to you at times, our sponsors for helping keep the whole thing running as well as providing much needed support at critical times and, of course, the lurkers!

Here’s to the next 100,000!

And here we are once more, desktops shut down, servers beginning to idle and cloud-based services untouched.

It’s a time to wind down, wonder if you have eaten far too much chocolate already and ready your digestive system for the upcoming barrage of treats and large meals.

And as such, we’d just like to say, once more, thank you all.

Thank you for your sense of community.

Thank you for your humour.

Thank you for your support.

Thank you to our sponsors for making EduGeek happen, especially the ones who gave us help when we most needed it, you know who you are.

Thank you to our mods for their tireless work, especially behind the scenes that you don’t get to see.

And last, but not least, thank you all for, well, just being you. And we do really mean all of you.

We too are looking forwards to a nice relaxing time over the Christmas, and, once back to work will be in the phases of our preparation for BETT, and let me tell you, it’s going to be a very fun show on stand E150 with ICT Direct and ourselves hosting a couple of LAN games for you to indulge in.

Without giving too much away, we suggest you brush up on your old school Worms skillz…

…then grab yourself a copy of Bomb Squad from here.

*You will need to install vc_redistx86.exe - included in the download – before you install

It’s free and terribly addictive.

Oh, and did we mention all participants will get a special freebie?

And last, but not least, we do need to apologise for a lack of a conf this year. Trust us when we say it was not through choice. It is a sorry tale of cancelled venues, geopolitical events (no, seriously!), travel commitments and frustration.

We WILL be having a conf next year and will get the planning going once BETT is over.

So, go home, put your feet up (you deserve it) and relax with a glass of whatever makes you happy and we hope you have a wonderful Christmas and new year and we shall see you in January.

Here we are once more at the end of another year and we know many of you are now anxiously clock watching and waiting to get away for the Christmas holidays whilst hoping something important doesn’t go ‘pop!’ before the final bell.

And we can’t blame you, it’s been a very busy year for all of us we suspect, and the new year is going to bring increasing demands upon us as GDPR kicks in and budgets are squeezed ever tighter.

For that you deserve to take it easy, so go home have a drink of your favorite tipple eat turkey\beef\fish\nutloaf, put your feet up and we shall see you all in the new year, hopefully seeing lots of you at Bett in London at the end of January.

If you are going to Bett, you will be able to find us along with the lovely chaps from ICT Direct on stand E150 right in the thick of things and of course we shall have freebies, a place to rest your show-weary feet and, as always, free pizza for all EduGeek members who can make it to the stand at lunchtime.

We shall post up more information on our, and our sponsors Bett activities closer to the date.

So, before you all go, we’d just like to thank you all for being the wonderful community that you are, our sponsors and advertisers for ensuring that we keep EduGeek free for all of you and our moderators for being amazing and allowing Shaun and I to get at least some sleep each night.

Have a great Christmas and an excellent new year from all of us at EduGeek

We'd just like to say a (slightly) belated thank you to all those who had attended EDIT the other week. It was a great day and certainly one of the best EDIT confs we have had to date, which also means we'll really have to push the boat out next time!

Due to all the upcoming GDPR questions and issues we have created a new forum specifically for data handling and GDPR questions. View the new forum: Data Protection & Information Handling

Please find attached below the various PowerPoints/slides/videos of the presentations at EDIT the other week including the full EDIT 17 webcast at the bottom.

We are still waiting on one to still appear due to them being done on other platforms or web based (Google) but we shall get these included as soon as we receive them.

1. Microsoft - Keynote

Slides: Coming soon.

2. GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) - Mobile Guardian

Slides: EDIT17 MobileGuardian GDPR.pptx

3. Google - G Suite Admin Best Practice

Slides: EDIT17 Google.pdf

4. Redstor - Backup and Recovery

Slides: EDIT17 Redstor Backup.pptx

5. Smoothwall - Is Web Filtering a Dying Technology?

Slides: EDIT17 Smoothwall.pptx

6. Haptic Networks - Virtual Reality

Slides: EDIT17 Haptic VR.pptx

7. Avantis - Classbook and VR

Slides: EDIT17 Avantis.pptx

Full Video of the whole of EDIT 17 (inc Ask the Admins):

Or you could simply be spending your time explaining to staff that having 1000 kids all hammering the internet means that no one gets any kind of decent bandwidth

So to ease you out of the year and into the Christmas holidays all that remains is for us to say, once more, a big ‘Thank you’ to you all.

And what a year it’s been (politics aside!) with BETT, our conf at the National Space Centre, ISTE in Denver and now deep in preparation for BETT 2017. It really does feel this year like it flew by quicker than we could keep up and next year in the computing world should be even more epic.

From the Windows 10 Creators Update (watch out for a piece on this in early Jan) in which Microsoft and their partners are going 3D in a BIG way.Gaming too will be massive next year, with Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony all looking to bring out new consoles by the end of the year, not to mention that a whole raft of 3D VR devices being released by Microsoft partners in the first half of the year for Windows 10 machines.

These are also supposed to be very affordable too (you may want to put in a last minute request to Santa for compatible hardware though!).

We shall wait with baited breath.

So, and without further ado, just let us take a few lines to thank the following people:

• The Mods. Without whom the forums would resemble the special circle of hell reserved for IT types. Trust me when I say they do far more than you can see and know about and for which we are eternally grateful
  
• Our sponsors and advertisers without whom we could not keep EduGeek running. Without their participation we simply would not be able to keep the site free to use
  
• And last, but by no means least, you, our members. You make EduGeek. Without your participation millions (and yes, we really mean millions) of techies wouldn’t get the help they so desperately need from the excellent advice you give. On a daily basis you make us (admins and mods alike) laugh, gnash our teeth, go ‘Hmmm’ and on the odd occasion find our offices have got suddenly ‘dusty’. For that, we thank you all.
  

So, have a great Christmas, unwind, indulge in your favourite Christmas foods, drinks and pastimes and we’ll hopefully see lots of you at BETT in London at the end of Jan.

Oh, and if you get something very cool for Christmas, please let us all know!

Happy Christmas from all of us here at EduGeek

It’s finally here…almost!

This is a little heads-up to let you all know that (fingers crossed) we shall be upgrading EduGeek to a whole new platform in the very near future.

We will be moving away from our current (and quite long in the tooth) vBulletin 4 platform to a whole new shiny Invision Power Suite 4.x (IPS) based site which will allow us to offer you a whole new bunch of modern features and plug-ins.

Why are we moving?

As some of you may be aware, our current platform is, in internet terms, quite old and support from vBulletin and third party plug-in providers is now almost non-existent, making security patching and the ability to integrate new and upcoming internet technologies a constant challenge with us often having to write our own workarounds.

So, we decided way back in 2012 to move to a new platform and IPS seemed to fit the bill nicely, with an integrated store (yes, we shall be selling merchandise finally!), working CMS and other options previously only available from third parties all provided via Invision, negating the past problem in vBulletin of plugins not working correctly when the main site had an update and plugin devs not updating their products.

Once we’d made Invision our choice of new platform they then announced that they were to launch IPS 4 the very next year and we decided to wait for the new platform to save migrating then upgrading shortly after.

This didn’t happen, and we had to wait until 2015 to finally see it. Unfortunately, they then didn’t release the migration tool which would allow us to move from VB to IPS until late last year and even then it was a very buggy beta. This coupled with glitches in the main site suite itself

All of this meant we had to wait until now before we were confident we can move. And here we, almost, finally are.

What will the new site look like?

This is going to be a tough one to answer as we shall need to ensure that everything works correctly during the course of the migration and we’ve never done it with the live site before (for obvious reasons!).

What we can say, and please be prepared for, is that whilst we are going to take every step we can to make the new site look as familiar as possible, it is a completely different platform and some things may not be where you expected them to be such as forum post controls and links.

Please be patient as we are sure that you will find the extra features we are to bring in more than worth the slight inconvenience of having to learn your way around.

To hopefully provide you with answers to any questions you might have, we have made up a list of PAQ's (possibly asked questions )

Migration PAQ’s:

Q. How long will EduGeek be down for when we migrate?

A. Hopefully about 48 hours. It is planned that we shall take the site down at some point during a weekend (from a Friday evening) and should be up and running by Sunday evening all being well

Q. Will you keep us informed about how the migration goes?

A. Yes, we shall have a shoutbox in place as well as our usual Twitter feed and we may even have some fun things to look at as we do it live as well!

Q. Will there be any new features added to the new EduGeek?

A. Hell yes! It is one of the reasons we are moving. Some of the things you can expect to see on the new site are:

• Dedicated news section/feeds
  
• Member articles
  
• Reviews
  
• Wiki
  
• Dedicated jobs section
  
• Competitions
  
• Merchandise store
  
• Video feeds
  
• Webcasts
  
• Vendor directory
  
• Small vendor areas
  
• Sponsors areas
  
• White paper hosting
  
• Newsletters
  

+Others!

Q. Will all of these new features be available when the migration is complete?

A. Some of these will be live when EduGeek comes back on line and some will be introduced gradually once we are happy that all is well, the platform is stable and they work as advertised

Q. Can I help with any areas on the new site?

A. Yes! We will have quite a few areas where we shall need help. These will include things like:

• Writing articles
  
• Reviewers
  
• Working on a news letter
  
• New site areas moderation
  

We shall be putting a shout out for volunteers once we figure out just what will be required and when

Q. Will there be any kind of help on offer to find my way around the new platform?

A. Yes, we shall be creating a dedicated forum for this and hopefully you will find your way around in no time at all

And that’s it for now. We shall let you know the exact dates for the migration in due course and we are sure you will find the new EduGeek a lot more acessible and expansive than our current system.

As the saying goes, ‘No rest for the wicked’!

We are, once more, packing our bags, as well as a whole raft of assorted geekery required to setup a tech stand at a trade show, and are off to take part in the ISTE Conference in Denver, Colorado.

The conference and expo takes place from the 26th June to the 29th and once more we shall be sharing a booth (#1524) with Smoothwall and are looking forwards to a frantic two and a half days at the Colorado Convention Centre where we shall be meeting our US members and having a good look around at what is on offer in the largest educational technology event in North America.

If you are at the show, please pop by and say ‘Hi’ as we always love to meet you for a chat

As always there will be plenty of our sponsors and supporters present and you can find them on the following booths:

Smoothwall\EduGeek - 1524

LanSchool – Lenovo Software 1732

NetSupport – 2541

PaperCut – 3534

Fortinet/Meru – 3946

Meet the Teacher - 4019 - *this is one of School Cloud Systems products

Impero - 708

So, if you are attending the conference, come and see us and we'll give you some free stuff and point you in the direction of our sponsors and other interesting stuff we have seen and if you want to get together after the show we'll gladly buy you a drink and have a chat.

See you there

EduGeek is again hosting its own Minecraft server, for the use of any and all members of the site who wish to play. Hopefully the first of a number of gaming servers.

The server is now running Resonant Rise: Mainline, available via the ATLauncher. All the optional mods are installed except EiraIRC. You can pick between JourneyMap and VoxelMap.

To log in to the server, you will first need to update your profile, adding your Minecraft username to the relevant field. The whitelist will update every 6 hours, at 6:00 and 12:00.

Server address: mc.edugeek.net

Dynmap: http://mc.edugeek.net:8123

We have a TS now! It should be mostly ready, connect to ts.edugeek.net and please try and using a bookmark to set your username to your EduGeek username for membership tags.

If you would like to join either of these groups please follow the steps below:

Android:

Please fill in this survey and we will email you a link to join the beta testing program asap.

iOS:

Please fill in this survey to allow us to add you to our test pool as the iTunes App store requires manual steps for us to enable access to test.

Once we have our test app approved by Apple you will be able to get the beta via the Apple app TestFlight.

Feedback or bug reports:

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/edugeek-net-site-problems/165792-android-beta-app-feedback.html

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/edugeek-net-site-problems/165791-ios-beta-feedback-thread.html

For most it has been a fun packed year with Windows 10 finally arriving and proving to be much better received than Window 8 and with the added benefit that it came free for home/personal upgrades. So, Yay Microsoft!

On the EduGeek front it has been a year of us waiting with baited breath as Invision Power Suite 4 was finally released after a couple of years in development.

IPS 4 is the platform to which we had planned to migrate EduGeek about 2 years back and all we needed to make the move was the migration tool which would allow us to move the site from our current VBulletin 4 based site to IPS 4. Only they didn’t have the tool ready in March when IPS 4 launched and it was only a couple of weeks back that we could finally get our hands on it for testing.

That said, we have now pencilled in a timeframe for the migration which we hopefully intend to do shortly after BETT at the end of January as long as no major issues appear.

IPS 4 will allow us to operate a far more feature-rich and dynamic site and finally launch the much-requested merchandise store, news section, Wiki and lots of other goodies.

Needless to say we are very excited about this and if you come to see us at BETT we shall hopefully have some sneak peeks for you to take a look at.

On another note we do need to apologise for the lack of a conference this year. This was down to our moving the planned date of the conf to October then getting the run around with potential venues as we had intended to host it in Manchester to make it easier for you to get too.

This coupled with our having to also set aside time for the site migration well in advance (reliant on the migration tool being released) meant we only had a couple of dates we could have hosted a conf on but sadly it never all came together.

We WILL be having a conf once more next year.

So, all that remains if for all of us here at EduGeek to say a big THANK YOU to everyone here.

Members, mods, sponsors and all those many people who help us in small ways in the background, we hope you have a wonderful Christmas and we’ll see you at BETT (stand E300 with Smoothwall) in January

In the recent Sysadmin day I won the years subscription to https://lastpass.com/ , at first I was like I FINALLY WON SOMETHING IN MY LIFE! but after looking at the website I am afraid its not for me as luckily I am blessed with good memory! So instead of letting it go to waste I thought why not let someone else have it! In 100 words or less explain why you want it and it must include at least 1 Monty Python reference (extra points given for doctor who references). You have till 1PM Monday! Then I will pick my favourite! Good luck.

We know at times working in IT in education can be a thankless job but we would like to offer a few prizes to all of you out there to appreciate the tireless hours all of you provide to help the greater good in education and other areas.

EDIT: Here is a little song for you all:

The first competition is a simple one, post a reply here before the Tuesday 00:00 (UK) and you have entered (only 1 entry). The prizes for the competition are:

1 copy of Windows 10 Pro (OEM but a full new machine license)

1 Wenger Laptop Bag (One of these for 15.5" laptops unless the winner has bigger laptop)

2 Licenses for LastPass Pro (1 year)

We will also be running a competition this afternoon (Friday afternoon UK) which will feature another chance to enter the competition for those that spot our special ad banner we will run until Saturday morning. Entrants via the ad will also have an extra chance for a license of LastPass Pro (1 year) that normal entrants won't. If you want the chance please ensure you whitelist us with any ad blockers you may use, it helps support us and our events we run for you.

Prizes will be sent out mid next week as some staff are on holidays right now.

Regardless we hope you all have a great SysAdmin Day!

In the chaos of this year's planned site migration and preparing for our ISTE trip later in the month we almost let this not-so-insignificant little milestone pass us by.

It’s been a very long ride from our very early days, when I expected no more than 200 people to join up, to just the other week when we surpassed 80,000 members (we blinked and missed that too!).

I went from answering emails at 1am, just to keep up, to quitting my job to run EduGeek full time (and dragging @ZeroHour with me a year or so later) which has allowed us to extend our reach and enable your opinions and views to really affect how the industry deals with schools now.

Looking to the future; EduGeek will be running on IPS 4 which should go live by the end of the summer holidays (once the migration tool has been released that is!). This new platform will give us a much more flexible, modern and feature-rich site including, at long last, a shop; a platform from which we can run for many years to come.

To celebrate our birthday, we have a few nice things to throw your way over the next couple of weeks, including:

• New design EduGeek polo shirts
  
• EduGeek wrist doughnuts
  
• New EduGeek pin badges with retro EduGeek yellow lanyards!
  
• And more!
  

We shall be announcing how we are to give these away in due course.

Finally, if you’d like a bit of a ride through EduGeek history, may I suggest you take a look at our Facebook page where we have uploaded hundreds of pics from EduGeek events past and present as well as unseen graphics and logos. Please feel free to tag yourselves as appropriate and no comments about my hair in the early days please!

https://www.facebook.com/edugeek.net

All that remains is for me to thank our admins and moderators (past and present), and all of you members, especially those we have met in person over the years; our lives are better and richer for it

Here's to the next 10 years. Let’s make them as fun and influential as the first 10.

@Dos_Box, @ZeroHour and @Ric_

The categories and winners were:

Early Years Digital Content:

Day Two Productions - The Traditional Storyteller Apps

Primary Digital Content

Rising Stars - Switched on Computing

Secondary, FE & Skills Digital Content

Soundbitlearning UK Ltd - GCSEPod

Best Whole Course Curriculum Content

3P Learning - Mathletics

ICT Tools for Learning and Teaching - web based

SMART Technologies - SMART Amp

ICT Tools for Learning and Teaching - non-web based

2Simple Software - 2Build a Profile

Digital Collections and Resource Banks

Encyclopedia Britannica - Britannica School

Highly Commended - LGfL - The Tudors in London

ICT Special Educational Needs Solutions

SOUND FOR LIFE - Forbrain

Digital Devices

zSpace Inc - zSpace Virtual Reality Science Lab

ICT Leadership and Management Solutions

SWGfL - BOOST

Free Digital Content/Open Educational Resources

Just2Easy - J2Code

International Digital Resources

3P Learning - Mathletics

Educational Apps

Red Jumper Studio - Book Creator

ICT Company of the Year - < £1m turnover

Sonocent Ltd

Highly Commended - Jigsaw School Apps

ICT Company of the Year - between £1m and £10m turnover

Frog Education

Highly Commended - EducationCity

ICT Company of the Year - over £10m turnover

Promethean

Innovation in ICT

Airhead Education LTd

ICT Service and Support

Toshiba

Highly Commended - Joskos Solutions Ltd

ICT Exporter of the Year

LearnPad

Highly Commended - Little Bridge World

Outstanding Achievement

Charles Clarke

Well, here we are once more at the end of another year which we are sure for most of you has been the usual round of hectic fire-fighting, network upgrades and often under-appreciated effort.

Don’t worry, we here at EduGeek know how hard you all work and, if your input in the forums is anything to go by, your jobs have been harder than ever before. Hopefully at least some of you will be working in offices containing many gifts of chocolate and other Christmas treats

So what's coming in the next year? Well, we have Windows 10 to look forwards to for a start which, I’m sure you will agree, will provide many of you with your first viable option to make those tentative steps away from your nice and stable Windows 7 networks after avoiding Windows 8 for so long. Other rumblings seem to be from those who want to move their classrooms away from whiteboards and projectors to embrace interactive projection technologies, with many more schools now integrating Macs, mobile devices, BYOD schemes and cloud technologies, thus making 2015 quite an exciting place indeed.

And it’s not just you who will be busy. We here at EduGeek have been planning hard for the next version of of the site - one we have casually name EduGeek X (why not? Everyone else seems to be able to do it!) – which will see us finally moving away from vBulletin and onto Invision Power Board at some point in the new year. This move means that we shall be able to offer both members and sponsors new, and previously requested, features on a platform that will support the most current internet technologies for many years to come. We can’t wait!

And then there is BETT. The behemoth education technology exhibition has once more crept, then leapt, upon us and with a great - and I can guarantee highly collectable - freebie in the offering (as well as the obligatory lanyards) for any member that takes the time to come and chat with us.

We shall, of course, have the usual free pizzas at lunch and comfy sofas for you all to rest your weary bones on. You can find us on stand E250 where we have once more been kindly hosted by Smoothwall; it should make the perfect base for your BETT trip as it is sandwiched between Microsoft and Google. So don't be shy; we really do enjoy meeting you all and please believe us when we say that you are really not getting in the way. So come to chat and relax, at least for a short time, you know it makes sense!

And finally, the annual EduGeek EDIT Conf is going to have a makeover. Firstly we are moving the date and location of the conf. We are well aware that it has become increasingly hard for some of you to make it to our one day event in May for several reasons and hopefully the following changes will help:

1. The date will be moved from May to October so as not to clash with the great many shows which take place between January and the summer
   
2. The Conf location will change to somewhere more accessible for many of you. We are currently looking at venues in Manchester which is a lot easier/quicker to reach either by car or train than Preston
   
3. The format of the Conf will change. Previously it has taken the traditional format of 'lectures' . In the future we want to make it more hands-on with practical demonstrations and tutorials being the main themes.
   
4. It shall be longer. Given the distance some of you travel we want to make it more value-added. As such we think that making it a two day event would ensure that you walk away with new skills and knowledge that previously we didn't have the time to organise for you.
   

Once BETT is out of the way we shall begin getting the Conf sorted out. In previous years we have had BETT, Education Innovation, EDIT and ISTE to sort out one after the other and it was getting a bit too intense organising all of this alongside running EduGeek. Moving the Conf will ensure that, not only will we have more time working on the site rather than doing external things, but that you get more out of it as well. Watch this space!

So all that remains is for all of us here at EduGeek to thank, in no particular order:

• You, our members: For being there for each other, making us smile on a daily basis and proving time and time again that online communities can and do make a difference in the real world
  
• Our sponsors, without whom we couldn't do all the things we do for you, including providing you with deals, freebies, competitions and real world contacts
  
• Our moderators: For policing the site and dealing with some pretty nasty spam attacks in the past year without you all noticing too much
  

So, from all of us here at EduGeek, we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

NOTE: This message was prepared before the outage last weekend which is why its being published now.