So, after much consideration in the mods forum we have decided that the following raised the most grins amongst us.

In first place for being very witty and clever (see, being clever isn’t a bad thing kids!) is this caption from @alan-d: 'The Year is 4014 and archaeologists believe they have discovered the birthplace of that much worshipped deity 'Internet Explorer’

Second place, and the winner of the Raspberry Pi B+ is @simpsonj for confirming what we all all knew deep down: 'This is what happens when you google Google...'

In third place, and the winner of the powerline adaptors is another clever entry from @sonofsanta: 'Network topologies come in a variety of forms: bus, star, mesh. Here we see the results of using the rarer "One Ring" topology. Whilst Binding Them All does have security advantages, there is a non-zero risk of invoking the wrath of Sauron and corrupting your ethernet cables into their evil twin (nethernet cables)'

And finally, the winner of our random prize is @Tesla for: 'Let me just divide this by 0 aaaand see what hap-'

For this you will receive this awesome ‘Divide by zero’ t-shirt:

Many thanks to everyone who entered this weeks competition and keep an eye out on Monday for another challenge!

.

All we want you to do is provide a humorous caption for the photo below.

As usual we shall be closing for entries at 2pm (GMT) on Friday and announce the winners between 4 and 5pm the same day.

A bit of back story about the picture here.

A couple of years back when BETT moved from Olympia to ExCel on the other side of London we didn’t really know the area at all and finding a suitable hotel for us all to stay in was a hit and miss operation.

In this case, miss.

It seemed to fit the bill. Very reasonably priced, right next to a DLR station and a mere 20 min ride to ExCel. We couldn’t ask for more really.

The drawbacks however became apparent when we found they had to lock the hotel door at 9pm each night because the locals were…well. Local.

This former...whatever it was, was right opposite and seem to sum up the area quite well.

If you want more information I’m sure one of our stand staff who stayed there with us will be more than happy to fill you in with the details. And stories.

We don’t stay there anymore.

Competition Rules:

1. This is open to ALL EduGeek members, no matter where you are
   
2. We are intending to buy the prizes for overseas winners from local sources such as Amazon. In the event that items are not available in certain regions we shall offer a prize of a similar value to the winner
   
3. You may win only one major prize but can be eligable for a runners up prize if you are deemed worthy
   
4. Submissions via comments or PM.
   
5. What we say, goes!
   

We know that you are rushed, particularly at lunchtimes and it showed by the entries we received, so what we propose is that we roll over the main prize from this week and extend the competition by an extra week with a challenge a bit easier to achieve. Scooby Doo sandwiches anyone?

That’s not to say some of you have not tried. In fact last night we had two entries that made us smile.

First from @sparkeh for his cuddly toy pizza night.

Are they old enough to drink btw?

Secondly this great idea from @nyiss:

Printed food! The future has arrived

Whilst falling short of the original premise of this week’s comp we feel that you should be awarded one of the runners up prizes.

So congratulations @sparkeh you have won a Raspberry Pi Model B+ and well done @nyiss a 500Mbps powerline twin adaptor pack is all yours

Keep an eye out on Monday for next weeks competition.

Or to me more exact, you treat yourselves and after 6 weeks of intense work during the holidays we think you've earned it.

What we require from you is to have a nice meal in your office. The nicer the better in fact.

We want to see cooked food, tablecloths, plates, cutlery and candles.

Or perhaps you prefer some extreme food? Sandwiches a foot tall, baguettes 3 feet long or homemade stack burgers 4 times the height of your mouth with all of the trimmings (mmmmm, bacon)!All pictures must be in the workplace and not taken at home or ripped off the internet.

Whatever you want to do make it a special occasion, involve everyone in the office, take pictures and post them below.

Good luck, and make our mouths water

*If you want to include the recipe for your creations please feel free to add them as well.

We’ve had a chat in the mods areas and come up with the following results:

• 1st: @Lasercat for the claw: (POST)
   
  
  Sometimes the simplest ideas really are the best. We shall be PM’ing you shortly to ask you to pick an envelope with your prize in
  .
  
• 2nd: @Joanne (POST)
   
  
  At last someone finally finding a use for an iPad in a school! For this she wins the powerline adaptor twin pack.
  .
  
• 3rd: @AndrewC (POST)
   
  
  For the lathe and cat pic A Raspberry Pi B+ is all yours!
  

• Wildcard Winner: @Hardtailstar (POST)
   
  
  Because sometimes to right answer is in front of you (and flattery will get you everywhere)!
   
  You win a rather funky t-shirt which will tell the world about your attitude to taking other peoples pics (jk)
  
  From: T-Shirt Hell
  

And that’s it for this week, well done everybody.

Keep an eye out on the homepage on Monday morning when we shall be announcing week two’s task where we ramp up the challenge a notch!

By the time you've read this we guess you are already knee deep in the usual, and not so usual tasks that occur every year without fail when the hoards reappear to undo all of the hard work you've put in over the summer, and, as is often the case, you need to employ special tools for the job.

From Philips screwdrivers, LART kits and Fluke testers we know you have them all.

What we want you to do is show them to us, or tell us about them, especially any custom or 'mentally based' i.e. imaginary, tools you may employ.

Please post pics and a list below and we’ll pick the best ones on Friday. Extra credit will go to descriptions, abbreviations and instructions in the use of non-'real world' tools - Don't keep them to yourselves!

Remember, the closing time for entries each week is 2pm (GMT) on Friday and we shall announce winners by 4pm. Good luck!

View Submission Thread

We here at EduGeek haven’t been idle either with our migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS) now complete – barring a little tweaking – and will allow us to better provide site access to our members in other parts of the world as well as easing the monitoring and management burden at our end. This move also means we can now begin to steam ahead with planning for EduGeek's move to a new forum platform allowing us to leave the tired old vBulletin forums behind *

So, to ease the pain of those first few hectic weeks you have just endured when your schools and places of work get all busy and excited again, we are giving you a little competition that has some pretty sweet prizes to brighten your day on the run up to the Christmas break.

Each week we will have one of the following prizes up for grabs:

1. 
   OnePlus One phone
   
2. Pebble smart watch
   
3. Roku 3 HD streaming player
   
4. Office 365 Home for 5 users
   

And just to spread the love a little further, each week we shall also have the following runners up prizes:

1. 500Mbps Powerline adaptor twin pack
   
2. Raspberry Pi Model B+
   
3. Surprise random prize!
   

The competition will begin on Monday the 29th September and will run for four weeks.

Each week we shall set you a little task and you must take a picture of said task and post it within the specially created forum. These tasks will not be exactly easy and will take a bit of work to win the prizes, but they are not impossible.

The competition shall run from Monday to 2pm Friday afternoon and at the end of each week we shall judge the best results and announce a winner by (hopefully) 4pm. Once announced the winner will be asked to pick an envelope which will have one of the major prizes in it (well, not physically in it, but you know what I mean!) adding an element of randomness to the proceedings

Competition Rules:

1. This is open to ALL EduGeek members, no matter where you are
   
2. We are intending to buy the prizes for overseas winners from local sources such as Amazon. In the event that items are not available in certain regions we shall offer a prize of a similar value to the winner
   
3. You may win only one major prize but can be eligable for a runners up prize if you are deemed worthy
   
4. Submissions via comments or PM.
   
5. What we say, goes!
   

Let’s keep it simple shall we?

*What do you mean it's the first you've heard about this?

{ This article will be updated if we add further prizes }

Let us be the first to welcome you all back after what I’m sure, as always, has been a frantic summer with, hopefully, the opportunity to take some much needed time off over the period.

We here at EduGeek haven’t been idle either with our migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS) now complete – barring a little tweaking – and will allow us to better provide site access to our members in other parts of the world as well as easing the monitoring and management burden at our end.

So, to ease the pain of those first few hectic weeks when your schools and places of work get all busy and excited again, we are going to be running a competition that will run with some pretty sweet prizes to brighten your week.

Each week we will have one of the following prizes up for grabs:

1. A OnePlus One phone
   
2. A Pebble smart watch
   
3. A Roku 3 HD Streaming Player
   
4. 1yr Office 365 Home (5 users) subscription
   

And just to spread the love a little further, each week we shall also have the following runners up prizes:

1. 500Mbps Powerline adaptor twin pack
   
2. Raspberry Pi Model B+
   
3. Embroidered EduGeek jacket (type to be decided by winner)
   

The competition will begin on Monday the 15^th September and will run for four weeks.

Each week we shall set you a little task and you must take a picture of said task and post it within the specially created forum. These tasks will not be exactly easy and will take a bit of work to win the prizes, but they are not impossible.

The competition shall run from Monday to 2pm Friday afternoon and at the end of each week we shall judge the best results and announce a winner by (hopefully) 4pm.

Competition Rules:

1. What we say, goes.
   

Let’s keep it simple shall we?

We have just launched the new version of the EduGeek App for those of you on mobiles. Android screenshots will be added as soon as we have a final build which is due any day now.

iOS: Get it from http://edugeek.me/to/iosapp

Android: Get it from http://edugeek.me/to/droidapp

Kindle: Get it from http://edugeek.me/to/kindleapp

The app is based on the latest version of Tapatalk and supports push notifications for new replies, pm's and more.

Notes from Little-Miss

@Little-Miss has written a list of a few of the changes that she has noticed on the new iOS app to help get you up to speed:

• Posts can be enlarged/zoomed by holding your finger down on post. Tapping the screen again exits that view.
• If a thread has continued over a few pages, you can move between the pages by using the down arrow at the top-middle under the thread's title.
• A quick reply bar can be turned on in 'settings' for threads.
• 'Forums' and 'messages' also have a white drop down arrow which has some view options. Definitely makes searching for a certain forum easier.

General observations

• Pictures are displayed better within posts.
• Easier navigation within the new menu system
• Reply to PMs with a text box at the bottom.
• Animated GIF support.

So, first off, Windows versions:

As you can see, Windows 7 has been 'da bomb' since its launch and has shot head and shoulders above any other Windows versions. Interestingly, see the difference from when XP was it its peak and the take up of 7?

However not to be outdone, observe how Windows 8 has taken off in its first year? Pretty much the same as 7 did on when it was released. We'll have to give it another 12 months to see how that pans out growth-wise though.

And some of you said you hate it. Shame on you.

In case you were wondering, the last recorded stats we have for Windows 98 and ME (yes, people were still using ME until recently!) were, for Windows 98 the period 2012-2013 with 235 visits and for ME the period 2011-2012 with 37 visits.

Windows 95 died off in the 2008-2009 period with a mere 27 visits!

However, we still see several thousand Windows 2000 (non-server) visits per year (4061 in the past 12 months) and I wonder how long that will be hanging around for?

Now for all operating systems:

And that's pretty conclusive. It's Windows FTW with OSX and Linux barely making a dent and for the past 3 years they have effectively flat-lined whilst Windows had grown and grown.

And last but by no means least, browsers:

What I find interesting with this graph is not the meteoric rise of Chrome as the browser of choice for most 'Geekers, but of the parallel use of Firefox and IE. Considering that Firefox has to be added as a separate install compared to IE's ubiquitous presence on all Windows operating systems it does seem to indicate that an equal amount of people want to use something other than IE. What I'm looking forwards to seeing in the next 12 months is how that pegging of IE and Firefox compares to the use of Chrome.

As you can also see at the bottom of graph Safari and Opera are way down on the list, and in Opera's case I wonder just who uses that in preference to the others?!

I hope you have enjoyed seeing these and it took me the best part of Friday afternoon to knock them up, so if you have any other idea of what you would like to see please let me know, but please note that we are rather busy atm and it does take some time to sort out. Oh, and if you can see any trends in the data that I may have missed, please feel free to point them out.

.

We haven’t even included the tens of thousands of non-members who visit EduGeek each day to get the help they need either. Oh, and if you do lurk and use EduGeek, please join in and share your knowledge. You know you are more than welcome.

So let us begin by saying a big thank you to you all, and in no particular order:

• You, the members – Every time we get to meet you it is a joy, and I don’t think there is an online community anywhere with the breadth of knowledge you guys have.
  
• Our Moderators – Without who we’d drown in day to day site policing issues
  
• Our Sponsors, both past and present, who have helped to keep EduGeek running
  
• Tony Sheppard (@Grumbledook) and Russell Dyas (@Russdev) for being our first 'official' presence anywhere
  
• All of you who have helped us out behind the scenes over the years. From professional advice, manning the stand at shows, doing logos for us at midnight, speaking, exhibiting or lending a hand at our conferences, or just dropping us a friendly email to say thanks. We appreciate it.
  
• Companies, too many to mention - For helping to fund events and other behind the scenes help
  

To celebrate this HUGE event we shall be running several competitions over the next month or so with some very strictly limited edition prizes and goodies. So please keep an eye on the homepage for more information as and when they go live.

We also feel it only fit to show you some statistics that you may not have previously seen, just to give you an idea of the size of community you have helped to build over the past few years. Now, usually when we reach a landmark figure we tend to only show you stats from the past 12 months or so, but this time we are going to show you our long term growth trends which should give you an idea of not only where we have come from, but where we are going as regards to traffic and member levels. And for our older members who have been around the site since the beginning I think you will be amazed.

Lets begin with the growth in membership over the past years. I can remember getting excited when we had over 30 people on the site at one time back in late 2005 after we had only been up and running for 4 months or so. Now it is very rare that this number drops below 1000, even during the quietest of times and in case you are wondering, during the busy periods in the afternoon we commonly have over 2200 visitors running around the site.

Not at all shabby! And let’s compare this to our annual visit numbers since 2008:

Both of the charts above show an amazingly steady growth pattern and yes, the vertical axis scale is in millions! In the past 12 months (Oct 2012-Oct 2013) we have received over 22.6 million visits from around the world, so if you send us a PM please don’t take offense if it doesn't get replied to straight away. We’re very busy bunnies here!

On average we get just under 62,000 visits per day. To split this down, during the working week we get about 80,000 visits each day, and obviously that drops slightly during the weekend as apparently many of you have lives

And where are you all coming from? Well, the answer is simple. All over the globe.

See below for a pie chart showing you our top 5 regions, but in total our members and visitors are drawn from a total of 238 countries, principalities and regions worldwide.

And our demographic? Well, as most of you should know, we specialise in Education because supporting the hard pressed techs working in educational environments was the reason for the creation of EduGeek in the first place. However, over the years, as we have grown and members have moved jobs we have had to change the tagline from ‘The educational IT professionals life line’ to ‘The IT professionals life line’ to reflect that our members now come from all sectors, including government departments, health, banking, technology and pretty much any area where IT is utilised make up a large chunk of our traffic.

And you are all very, very welcome.

And that’s the story so far. Since 2005 when a small forum was created with the founder anticipating no more than a couple of hundred members, we have grown into what is possibly the world’s largest resource for those working with IT in educational environments and beyond. And it’s all down to you.

You should all be very proud of yourselves.

Let’s see where we go in the next 8 years.

Cheers!

Chris (@Dos_Box), Shaun (@ZeroHour) and Ric (@Ric_)

P.S. We should have hit the 1,000,000 mark about a week or so back but we decided to clear out some old legacy posts and threads which were part of the count but were system messages etc.

The relevant tweets etc in case you want to RT/like:

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

https://plus.google.com/116564711384660645051/posts/gGuGsj6c1Tw

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[ATTACH=CONFIG]17525[/ATTACH]

Last year Naace took the brave step of introducing an award aimed at technical staff in schools. At the time, when speaking with some peers from the technical community, some expressed concern about how a “bunch of teachers and LA folk could ever work out how hard technicians and NMs work” and considering how difficult that can be within schools I can understand that a minority had some scepticism about it.

The award is an Impact Award, designed to see what impact you make on learning, and it is up to you to sell yourself against the criteria of “how do you make a difference in schools and with learners”… and that can be a daunting task. You are asked to measure what a difference keeping servers running makes, asked about why it is important to communicate about the services you help the school provide and how it can be used to support / deliver the curriculum, asked about the lengths you have gone to when making sure that the child with a visual impairment is not simply “catered for” but truly feels included due to assistive technology you provide, asked about how you work with teachers and SLT to generate ideas about emerging technologies or simply better use of existing tools, asked about business tools, asked about extra-curricular groups ranging from coding clubs through to bee-keeping … I can go on but you get the idea.

This year I was lucky to be nominated by a friend (a teachmeet legend) and since I am not in a school anymore I fell back to thinking about what I really do.

I work with and support communities of people. All those things above? That is what they do … day in, day out … and I am lucky enough to help some of them flesh out those ideas, give encouragement so they will go to meetings with SLT about their ideas, work with them to help come up with standards in schools … but most of all I am a part of these communities. I am mere mortal without them.

Most of those short listed are regulars and contributors to these communities, whether via twitter or mainly via EduGeek.net. On the whole we should say that these communities have won the award for me (not false modesty but a true statement) …

So I dedicated my award to the communities … #ukedchat, TeachMeet, NetworkNorthants, NorthantsBLT … but most of all to EduGeek.net.

Next year I will be nominating someone from EduGeek.net … and this is not a challenge for folk to up their game, or any other manglement jargon, it is just to say that you all should keep doing what you at doing, hold your heads up high and be proud of the difference you make. It is recognised and I am thankful to Naace to recognising this.

Thank you all.

Originally posted on http://grumbledook.org

Editors note (ZH): It was also Tony's birthday on Sunday so please wish him all the best

It won’t be long before we start to hit 90,000+ visits per day now (we are already in the high 80k’s most working days) and this level of traffic requires quite a bit of policing and background knowledge of EduGeek and how we work.

To this end, it gives us great pleasure to announce that we have appointed 3 new moderators to help us out. So please raise an Edu Hobnob and welcome:

@Little-Miss

@Elsiegee40

@Soulfish

We are in no doubt that they will be a vital part of the EduGeek moderation team and we thank them heartily for their agreeing to help out EduGeek at a higher level.

We have just launched the EduGeek App for those of you on mobiles.

iOS: Get it from http://edugeek.me/to/iosapp

Android: Get it from http://edugeek.me/to/droidapp

Kindle: Get it from http://edugeek.me/to/kindleapp

The app is based on Tapatalk and supports push notifications for new replies, pm's and more.

If you have any problems please post in the Site Problems forum.

(Apologies for the US spelling of Favourites, we are trying to get a UK specific build)

So we'd like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you who has either started a thread or posted in one. You make it all worthwhile, and without your contributions and questions, EduGeek would not have come as far as it has in the seven and a half years we have been running. So, just to celebrate here are a few figures for you to digest:

Site Stats (taken from Google Analytics 01/01/12 - 01/01/13):

Visits: 20,023,176

Pageviews: 32,950,296

Top 3 visiting countries:

• US - 5,839,855 visits
  
• UK - 5,331,900 visits
  
• Australia- 912,383 visits
  

Top 3 Browsers used to visit EduGeek:

• Internet Explorer - 31.70%
  
• Chrome - 31.25%
  
• Firefox - 29.78%
  

Top 3 Operating system used to browse EduGeek:

• Windows - 86.88%
  
• Mac - 6.26%
  
• Linux - 3.98%
  

User Stats (all time):

Top 3 Posters:

• Localzuk – 14302 posts
  
• FN-GM – 13,190 posts
  
• Geoff – 11,567 posts
  

Most people on site at any one time: 2252 (On the 4th Dec 2012)

Daily visits during a normal working day: 80,000+

Members: 57,000+ (as of yesterday)

Posts: 888,901

New Members (welcome!) in the past 12 months: 14,598

Obscure stuff:

Whilst gathering these stats I came across some rather random things, such as the 415 Windows 98 users who browsed the site last year! But not to be outdone are the 335,342 Windows NT users still out there. I have to celebrate a tiny bit though as this is the first year we have not seen a single instance of Windows ME on the site although 544,825 visitors are still using Vista. C'mon guys!

And not to let the Mac guys off the hook we see that 54,868 visitors were still using OSX 10.5 and even 649 non-OSX Power PC Macs were catered for.

What was also surprising was that we had 75 members join in June 2005 when we first went live. Seeing as the site wasn’t up until the 8^th June that came as quite a shock when I found this out and we now get (on average) about 1200 new members per month.

Now it’s back to BETT preparations, and we hope to see you there at the end of the month

And what a year it’s been for many. You've seen the ever increasing roll out of managed wireless networks running hand-in-hand with BYOD schemes and Windows 7 finally arriving to many of your networks. Just in time for Windows 8 to arrive on the scene. Not to mention the appearance of Macs, iPads and other table devices in ever larger numbers. As if you didn't have enough to do!

And we haven’t been idle either. From BETT to our conference and onto ISTE the first half of the year is a rather large and exhausting blur for us. The second half has been swallowed up with a huge back-end re-jigging of our servers – all done seamlessly so that you didn't even notice by Shaun - and a move to a new, larger office which will finally allow for us to get the EduGeek merchandise store up and running.

So all that remains for us to say before you bunker down for the holidays is: ‘Thank you’.

Thank you for your time, knowledge, humour (especially in adversity!) and the sense of community you all bring to EduGeek and especially to the moderators for keeping things all in order when we aren't looking.

We’d just like to say that working on EduGeek each day is a big privilege for all of us here in ‘back-end’ land and you really do make our day.

We’d also like to send out a huge bag of thanks to our sponsors and advertisers who ensure that the site keeps running and we don’t have to resort to some of the methods other sites do to fund themselves.

So take it easy, relax and enjoy Christmas, and if we don’t see you around n the site over the holidays, we’ll see you for real in the new year at BETT in London, at the conf or ISTE in San Antonio hopefully.

Wishing you all a merry Christmas, and a prosperous new year,

Chris, Shaun and Ric.

Dos_box, ZeroHour and Ric_

.

The new mode should mark threads inside a forum as read after you view the list and then time out, this should allow threads to be cleared out faster and doesnt come with the cookie issue of the old system although this option is the least used.

Post your feedback here, we will run a poll to see what comes out as the most popular.

1. Only schools may post vacancies for free
   
2. Agencies or private companies pay a fee of £20 (+VAT) per vacancy. Please use the 'Contact us' link at the bottom of the page to get in touch with us.
   
3. Please post wage levels with each vacancy
   
4. Any posts from EduGeek members complaining about wage levels will be removed and an infraction given
   
5. No posting vacancies by proxy i.e. 'getting a mate to post it up here as a favour'. You will be found out.
   
6. If you have any doubts please 'Contact us'
   
7. Members may post links to jobs that they feel may be of interest as long as rules 3 and 5 are followed.
   

If the /forums/ area is blank and all you see is a spinning logo there are a few things you need to check which can cause the forums list not to load.

Please check:

• Javascript is enabled on your browser
  
• Adblock/Noscript allow .edugeek.net and .cdngeek.net scripts
  
• You net filtering isnt blocking a script
  
• Your browser is up to date (Chrome/IE8+/FireFox 10+)
  

If you still have problems please contact us with the following information:

• Your browser version
  
• Your OS & Version
  
• Do it affect all browsers on that client?
  
• When did you start experiencing the issue
  

By using this page

This page will be updated with scenarios as the arise.

This means that unlike before if you don’t read a thread when logged in at work, it will still be unread when you get home. This also means when your signed in via mobile browser/app the unread threads list stays accurate before.

How did it work before:

vBulletin Manual:

Inactivity/Cookie Based - once a user has been inactive for a certain amount of time (the value of the session timeout option) all threads and forums are considered read. Individual threads are marked as read within a session via cookies.

vBulletin would use a cookie which was stored locally to track your last visit time which would also be checked against the database's last visit entry and it would then decide what should show as read and which shouldn’t. This meant generally mobile devices or multiple pc's would never know exactly what was read and what wasn’t.

How does it work now:

vBulletin now flags the recent threads you have read in the database to allow the information to stay in sync across devices/pc. This flag information is not stored forever and is cleared after several days to prevent database issues.

I have a huge amount of stuff showing up:

This is due to the change where the system no longer uses the cookie, because of this it has no idea what’s read and what is not accurately and will show considerably more threads than usual.

To fix this browse to your UserCP and hit the "Mark All Read" button listed below subscribed threads.

You can also do this from the "What’s New" page by hitting the "Mark All Read" button.

Post any questions or thoughts below.

This change may be reverted depending on feedback.

In Stage 1 we have redesigned the navbar as well as switching to jQuery for forum tab generation along with other features.

We will be rolling out the changes for v5 over several stages for the next few days to allow final load testing with real load and complete testing (and sleep).

If you experience any issues please try to grab a screenshot and post it in the "Site Problems" forum.

Why is this page orange?

Microsoft Office 365 have sponsored the launch of EduGeek v5 by means of a *homepage take over* which involves integrating their branding to our site.

This styling is applied on our site homepage and the Cloud Services forum only and will last for 2 weeks.

Where are the themes?

A large array of themes are in the works currently and will be released in a later stage. Initially this makes fixing bugs a simpler process without having to streamline the themes consistently.

What's new in v5 stage 1:

* = Further explanation below.

Features:

• jQuery based tab generation
  
• AJAX Based thread refreshing (active later this evening) *
  
• Thread Prefix filtering *
  
• Negative rep disabled (more changes to come)
  
• Forum Runner & Tapatalk access *
  
• Jump to my last post button ►
  
• Now with added Facebook on the EduGeek Page
  

New Forums:

• Cloud Services - Ask questions about the various cloud services on the market
  
• Windows 8 - Post Windows 8 thoughts, problems and more here
  
• Windows Server 2012 - Like the Windows 8 forum, post your questions and problems with the newest server edition.
  

Styling:

• New navbar styling
  
• New login window styling (2 additional improvements to be pushed later tonight)
  
• Tablet styling tweaks (more to come)
  

What's coming next:

All subject to change

• New frontpage design
  
• New Wiki System
  
• Last 5 threads in email notifications
  
• Automatic basic word filtering *
  
• Video Directory
  
• Improvements for Tablet devices
  
• Futher site styling changes
  
• More profile options
  
• New Blog notification icon
  
• New Forums
  
• New Mobile style
  
• And more...
  

Further Details:

AJAX Based thread refreshing

We had a similar feature to this in EduGeek v3 but when we went to v4 we didnt have a replacement solution until now.

This should prevent the occasions when your replying to a thread to find someone has answered it as you typed.

This feature will be activated later this evening/tomorrow to allow for real time testing.

Thread Prefix filtering

When you see prefixes listed in a forum you can now click the [Prefix] and the forum will filter the list to show only threads with that prefix.

Forum Runner & Tapatalk access

We have enabled plugins for both apps, we recommend Forum Runner over Tapatalk as we have had issues with their plugin which may result in Tapatalk being disabled at some point.

Warning: We will try to support both but please dont buy either just for use on EduGeek without realising that we may be forced to disable them in the future due to problems outside our control. We are looking at app solutions for mobiles as well which would be free but there is no eta.

Forum Runner:

iPhone/iPad App Store

Android Google Play Store

Automatic basic word filtering

We will cover the most obvious swear words to prevent issues where people have not really realised that their post may cause some schools filtering to block access to EduGeek.

When a swear word is automatically censored you will not receive a infraction unless you attempt to bypass the filter or post a large amount of expletives.

The feature will go live with a small set of words and from there we will add/remove as necessary as time progresses. You may discuss the addition/removal of words by contacting an admin using the Message the Admins forum where we will discuss the merits.

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The seminars include:

Managing Apple Devices

I am sure many of you now face increasing calls for Apple devices and clients to be integrated into the classroom this seminar should prove extremely useful in getting up to speed with managing both iOS and Mac clients in your network environment. If integration seems daunting or even if you are currently testing various approaches and devices this is the seminar for you to get up to speed fast.

During this session you will be shown a variety of tools available to aid management using OS X Lion Server whether it be managing iOS or even trying to integrate Mac clients into your existing network as well as touching on dealing with users bringing their own devices in.

We have been assured that although this is a quite a technical session you will be eased into the technical parts and naturally is network agnostic so a Community Connect network is not necessary.

Developing an Effective AV and Classroom Technology Strategy

This session will take you beyond whiteboards and projectors! It will both educate and inform on the very latest AV technologies entering schools and how best to utilise them. From DLP, LED, LCD and OLED this seminar will take your hand and explain all of these technologies with a focus on the connection of a large array of external devices through them. The seminar will also discuss how you can best plan, install and support a variety of devices, from iPods, iPads and Android tablets all the way up to 3D displays, visualizers and digital signage.

Negotiation Techniques

The increasingly multi-faceted nature of the ICT profession in education has made negotiation skills all the more essential – be it communicating with staff, teachers, students, SMT or external bodies (even support providers!). The session is aiming to point the way towards making these processes easier for both you and the party you are negotiating with.

This seminar includes a range of techniques that can be tried out to see what suits the individual – as not everybody is comfortable with the more aggressive “negotiating” styles and we aim to give you a good background in the processes and theory behind effective negotiating.

Managed Wireless Networks

This is a fully practical session demonstrating a live managed wireless network provided by Meru Networks, running data, voice and video over a managed wireless network. This session will discuss and demonstrate how to connect, configure and manage a variety of wireless devices such as laptops, phones and tablets to a wireless network, as well as discussing the issues around the increasingly popular BYOD policies some schools are now implementing and talking about the issues this raises.

Introduction to Programming:

This session will look at how you can introduce programming back in to school as well as giving you the basics on programming including hands on time coding yourselves. It will also look at options for allowing users to program on your network whilst keeping it secure and reliable.

CC3 What Next?

Community Connect 3 is coming to the end of its life. This session will cover details on what options you have to migrate to CC4, whether it is a gradual or complete migration and how RM Education can help you to achieve it. If you're currently using CC3 then this is the session that will demonstrate the ease of moving to Community Connect 4 Management toolset

CC4 Management: Your way to an RM Easylife:

The network manager has many jobs to do within a school, some proactive and some reactive. In This session we will be looking at different software solutions to simplify some of these jobs as there are now a range of remote and scheduled management tools available which can help to manage both your proactive and reactive tasks. There will be lots of demonstrations to show how CC4 can simplify everyday network management tasks with its range of remote and scheduled management tools.

CC4 Troubleshooting: Drivers

This session will look at how drivers work with both hardware and operating systems, and how they integrate with CC4 for RM and non RM hardware plus perhaps most importantly, how to troubleshoot driver problems. If you are currently managing any network this session will be of use, if you are managing a CC4 network this session will explain how to understand CC4 driver support and how to diagnose any problems you may see.

CC4 The Future

With Windows 8 just around the corner this is a good opportunity to have a look at the future of CC4. This session will include a look at Windows 8 in full as well as some other exciting new features of CC4. It’s a real chance to see what's coming soon in the world of CC4 and what we are working on for a little further in the future.

How much does it cost?

If you are already an RM school and have a current support contract you are entitled to 2 free places (pending availability) and places for non-RM schools are £85 per person, which for a training day covering such an array of varied subjects is very reasonable indeed. The seminar days are CPD certified via the CPD Certification Service (http://www.cpduk.co.uk/)

Where can I attend?

Stansted - 20th April

Newcastle - 23rd April

Runcorn - 25th April

Birmingham - 27th April

Oxford - 30th April

Exeter - 2nd May

Cardiff - 4th May

Ashford - 9th May

London - 11th May

Find out more >>>>

Book Now >>>>

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview has been released to the world, giving users a chance to test the most recent incarnation of the Windows operating system before it's release. The preview also includes the Windows Store where apps will be free of charge during the testing period.

Microsoft claims there are over 100,000 changes since the early developer preview was released.

Download the Windows 8 Consumer Preview here and pop by the thread on the forums to tell other Edugeekers what you think of it.

* Thanks to Arthur for the heads up.

http://i.imgur.com/vLOAZ.pngvv

FEATURES

 

VIDEO

• Rewritten video output core and modules, allowing subpicture blending in GPU.
  
• Shader support in the OpenGL output, for colorspace conversion, including 10bits.
  
• New video outputs for Windows 7, Android, iOS and OS/2.
  
• New debanding, grain, denoising and anti-flickering filters.
  
• New deinterlacing filter, including an Inverse Telecine algorithm.
  

AUDIO

• New resamplers for higher quality audio.
  
• New dynamic range compressor and karaoke filters.
  
• Simplification of the audio core for faster processing.
  
• New audio outputs for iOS, Android and OS/2.
  

FORMATS

• Multi-threaded decoding for H.264, MPEG-4/Xvid and WebM.
  
• Support for 10bits codecs, WMV image and some other codecs.
  
• Rewritten support for images, including jpeg, png, xcf, bmp...
  
• Important changes in RealVideo and Real Format support.
  
• CrystalHD cards and Android OpenMAX support for hardware decoding.
  

INPUT AND DEVICES

• Experimental support for BluRay discs:
  - Menus are deactivated in this release (will come soon).
  - AACS and BD+ DRM libraries and keys are not shipped, for legal reasons.
  
• Support for SDI capture cards and QTKit devices.
  
• Support for new adaptive streaming protocols, like HLS and DASH.
  

FOR MAC USERS

• Completely new, single window interface:
  - Available in 2 colours: Lion grey and QTX black.
  - Extensions support and better Lion integration.
  
• Support for all QTKit devices through qtcapture and qtsound modules.
  
• Continued support for X 10.5 and PPC users (1080p and ProRes on Dual-G5!).
  

FOR ANIME FANS

• Vastly improved MKV demuxer.
  
• Rewritten linked segments and ordered chapter files support.
  
• Correct support for FLAC, RV and Hi10p in MKV.
  
• Rewritten seeking support in cue files.
  
• Various ASS subtitles improvements.
  

FOR PROFESSIONAL USERS

• Support for ProRes 422 and 4444, AVC/Intra.
  
• Support for Jpeg-2000 and DNxHD/VC-3 in 10bits.
  
• Support for EBU subtitles (stl) and EIA-608.
  
• SDI and HD-SDI card support for input on Linux.
  
• New Dirac/VC-2 encoder, faster than the previous one.
  

FOR DEVELOPERS

• libVLC, libVLCcore and libcompat have switched from GPL to LGPLv2.1+.
  
• New libVLC examples are available: media player, photobooth and mediainfo clones.
  
• New JSON requests on the web interface to control running VLC instances.
  
• Implementation of the MPRIS2 interface to control media players.
  
• VLC's web plugins have been rewritten for better integration and stability in all browsers.
  

Download / Homepage

http://i.imgur.com/fvyct.png

 

Last Friday I received a phone call informing me that I had to get myself to the Hack To The Future event being held at Our Ladies Catholic High School in Preston as a matter of urgency because the BBC are to be there and would be unwrapping, for the first time, the BBC Micro 2.

So, interest ignited, I quickly re-arranged my Saturday schedule and got myself onto the invite list, as this kind of opportunity couldn't be passed up.

A quick mention must be made about Hack To The Future (H2DF). This event was organized by Alan O’Donohoe as an un-conference and in the brief time I had to chat with him he let me know that H2DF was inspired by the EduGeek conference which he attended last year. They had over 300 young people and adults through the doors and from what I saw the level of enthusiasm from all comers was very high indeed. You can read more about the ethos behind the event here: H2DF and I sincerely hope they hold another one that I can attend for the full day.

Once in, bumping immediately into Arran Wicher (AWicher on the forums) who was helping out, I then had a brief chat with Alan who kindly took me over to the BBC room where they were demonstrating the Micro 2, and truth be told I was a bit taken aback at what I saw. The BBC Micro 2 isn’t a hardware platform as I’d been mentally building it up to be at all, far from it.

For those of you ‘of a certain age’ you may well remember the original BBC Micro, and its intended aim of teaching children in school to learn how to code. Well, it is this admirable aim that the Micro 2 intends to emulate; you see the BBC Micro 2 is a development environment.

To get the lowdown on just what it is I was very graciously given time to speak to Parmy Brar, the lead developer of the Micro 2 Project, to get a bit more information on what it is, how it came about and anything else I could find that would be of interest to EduGeek members.

The BBC Micro 2 is a prototype (pre-alpha still) cross platform development environment created for the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project.

It aims to be an environment where students, both young and old, will be able to learn the concepts of coding via set tutorials and exercises in a variety of languages, as well as exporting or developing work as web apps into iOS and Android via an easy to use menu system which seemed to work very well when I saw it in operation. Parmy was quite enthused about several of the set projects that has students creating their own web servers and then creating web sites with active content to go on them. He has actually created a web server on the Micro 2 with just seven lines of code, and is trying to get this down to 6!

 

Currently the Micro 2 only has Java and HTML support in the version being shown at H2DF, but Parmy informed me that several other common programming languages will be added, including Python and ‘C’.

The Micro 2 environment is cross platform and clients for Windows, Mac and Linux will be available, with the Mac and Widows clients being demonstrated at the event.

Considering the project is only 6 weeks old and was started without the prior knowledge of Michael Gove’s speech at BETT it seems the BBC has timed things to perfection given the creation of the new computer science curriculum, and there was some talk about the possibility of porting it to the Raspberry Pi when the device becomes available.

There is now a website (www.bbchelloworld.co.uk) that has just gone live this morning and will have more information on there about downloads and availability, neither of which questions I could get an answer for unfortunately.

Anyway, this looks like it could be something many of us should be keeping an eye on in the near future, as it may well provide a very useful coding platform for schools who are still looking to fill the missing software gap that the new curriculum is sure to deliver.

*This is the new BBC Micro logo. Look familiar?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bbc_micro

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