Schools being treated like 'an open chequebook', says NAHT

 

News | Published in The TES on 30 April, 2010 | By: Richard Vaughan

 

 

Union calls for inquiry into supply and repairs of IT equipment after uncovering 'dodgy practice'

 

Headteachers union the NAHT this week said it had uncovered evidence of the "dodgy practice" of schools being "ripped off" in the supply and maintenance of IT equipment.

 

Speaking ahead of its annual conference in Liverpool, the union has called for a "major inquiry" into the procurement of IT equipment, for fear of schools being treated like an "open chequebook" by companies.

 

In a report commissioned by the NAHT, schools and teachers have revealed they have been forced into buying equipment they do not need or become tangled in expensive contracts that end up costing the school thousands of pounds more than was needed.

 

The report quoted forum posts from EduGeek, a website for IT professionals working in schools, which listed a raft of examples of schools being taken for granted by companies. One IT expert said companies exploited teachers' lack of knowledge, charging vastly different sums from one teacher to the next.

 

The expert said: "I manage a college and several primary schools. The previous IT teacher was charged £3,500 (for an empty server cabinet) and £145 per network point. I was using the same installer at the same time at my previous college and they charged me £600 for the same cabinet and £45 per point.

 

"I also had a local authority-approved electrician try to charge £2,800 for five sockets for over-head projectors (the job was completed for £345 by another (electrician))."

 

The news comes just weeks after The TES revealed that a school had spent £250,000 on three photocopiers after becoming caught in expensive leasing arrangements.

 

Richard Spragg, an IT professional who runs a company offering support to primary schools, said he was often staggered by what he saw.

 

"When I go into schools, there are far too many companies that seem to treat them like an open chequebook," Mr Spragg said.

 

"Schools bring in IT companies and trust them to do things. But so often, I find that it has not been done properly."

 

NAHT general secretary Mick Brookes has called for a Which? guide for schools when it comes to IT procurement, claiming that the targeting of schools could become a "major scandal".

 

Mr Brookes said: "We believe that there should be a major enquiry into the provision of and maintenance of IT equipment."

A pretty well written and to the point article, which I feel just scratches the surface of this matter. Don't even get me started on the (now former) teacher I have found out about who spent £250,000 on IT equipment in a 5 year period in return for £10,000 of personal 'gifts'. This was a primary school. And a friends company.

Edited to add: You can download the report from the NAHT site here: http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/resources/key-topics/ict/ripped-off-schools/

I must say it was a very worthwhile day, and although we both have ended up crippled from various injuries that the Cinema caused to us (the seats gave us both bad backs and Soulfish had a little incident as well during the day), despite those it was a very good day.

Unfortunately James O’Neill who I’ve seen present a few times before was unwell meaning that Richard Smith (Blog: - http://blogs.technet.com/deploymentguys/ ) very kindly stepped in and covered all of his slots and did so with some very good PowerPoints, audience interaction and pre-recorded screen casts.

The morning kicked off with Planning and Preparing for your deployment, something which I know many members are thinking about, if not already dipping toes in the water, of Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2.

They covered all angles for deploying both Desktop and Server, showing how things have changed from Vista & 2008 Deployment to 7 & 2008 R2 Deployment.

There are some new tools for doing so, which in some cases are only available for use on Server 2008 R2 (which is to be expected as 2008 R2 is the equivalent of Windows 7 but in Server form) and some will port backwards to Server 2003 and 2008.

They covered WDS, MDT & SCCM all for deploying the operating system, including the DISM, WAIK, WinPE and many other acronym-ed Microsoft products (the acronyms I cannot remember!) but all related to the deployment of the latest and greatest of Microsoft Operating Systems.

MDT 2010 (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd407791.aspx ) is the newest update and is needed for the deployment of Windows 7. This has new and updated features from the previous tools, it’s as you would expect based on the 2008 version but upgraded for 2010 J they have integrated / upgraded tools such as WAIK 2.0, WinPE 3.0, DISM, USMT 4.0. Some of these are new to 2010 and some are upgraded from 2008 / combined into MDT 2010 so some will be new names. With the combination of MDT and those tools you can do a fairly end user input-les (Lite Touch Install) of Windows 7 on any PC. Including injecting drivers based on specific machines, multi-cast the images out.

They covered in a lot of depth SCCM for deploying Windows 7, this was, as many have found very heavy going, and seems in my view too complex for many in schools to bother with, it is very nice, powerful and flexible but the time taken to set it up, configure it, test it and take advantage of is too great in my view (I am sure many of us can find Ric_’s posts on trying to get it to deploy Windows 7 and his pains he had with it (oh and Ric they showed us how to fix your drive letter issue, you will kick yourself when you find out how to do it as it’s a simple option )

The Application Compatibility Session was presented by Chris Jackson – The App Compat Guy (Blog - http://www.appcompatguy.com/ ) who was over from the USA to present, and brought life and excitement to the event, including hurling SWAG around the cinema! (An idea for the next Edu-Conf I think )

They also showed us how the Application Compatibility Toolkit can be used to help check out how your software will cope with the move to Windows 7 (or not as it maybe) and how to use Shims to potentially get some software working correctly. The tool can give you a nice inventory list of all your software and can run very powerful filters as well as look at feedback from other users, Microsoft Certification lists etc about is it / does it work with Windows 7, known issues with it etc and options you have to resolve them.

A good website, apart from the Blogs of the presenters, is the MS App Compatibility Website – http://www.microsoft.com/compatibility which is a searchable list of software that has statuses on its compatibility.

As some of us know, some websites don’t render the same in IE8 as they did in IE7 or even 6 due to the stricter adherence of the standards, and there are ways of checking this out easily and seeing what causes it to go wrong as you can use, in Win 7 GPOs to set it to render some sites in other modes!! Did you know if you hit F12 in IE8 you get a Dev Tools option where you can use these tools to check the site out and change its rendering modes, and use the last option – Document Mode to change the types of rendering it does. A very nifty tool (one of many that we were shown today!)

Another useful tool is the Expression Web 3 SuperPreview (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8e6ac106-525d-45d0-84db-dccff3fae677&displaylang=en ), it comes in 2 flavours a free version and a paid for one – paid for is part of Expression Web which is part of the Expression Studio which is free to Schools Agreement Holders. The free one allows you to compare sites in different version of IT and drill down in more depth as to where it’s going wrong, and play with code from them and see what is happening with sites, so maybe a good tool for you web devs to have a look at and see what’s occurring.

Another useful web tool is Fiddler (http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler ) this also gives you some dev and checking tools.

There was a long session on WAIK and WDS combined together to give a smooth deployment either via PXE boot or onto DVD, USB Stick etc for your customised Windows 7 Deployments with some brilliant videos from Richard. This was as it sounded, basically use WDS and MDT2010 and its built in tools and you should be able to do near enough everything you want and need to with your Windows 7 Deployment in school, college, office or even your test LAN.

Then followed a large session on SCCM and Zero Touch Deployments, this is where Soulfish is better chipping in as I’m afraid I didn’t really follow this session that well as it is very complex but does have some brilliantly amazing power! But it is very much a High End Tool and you need a big LAN for it IMHO.

Migrating Server Rolls from Joey Snow (Blog - http://blogs.technet.com/jsnow) Again another MS USA guy come over to support this event, and he showed us all the new shiny automated tools for migrating from your existing tin to your new Server 2008 R2 based systems be they physical or virtual boxes.

Lots of new shiny migration tools for things such as Certificate Services rolls, DHCP, DNS, Fileserver, Printserver etc lot of them, all done through PowerShell in the main (if you don’t know about PowerShell yet you really need to start learning as more and more and more server stuff is going to be using it to control it )

A useful website for this part of the event, including the tools is – www.microsoft.com/migration which has them available for download and complete with step by step guides and work though.

The final session of the day was using the USMT (User State Migration Toolkit) this is about moving users over from the XP to Windows 7, keeping desktops, favourites, settings and preferences exactly as they were but moved into the new Win 7 locations and setups, there are many ways of doing it some as part of your main deployments, some on their own, some on the same PC, some from one to another, some whilst re-formatting your PC etc (you get the idea many ways of doing it!) but they all give you the power back to act on it and keep your users happy. Soulfish was very interested in this for his Laptop users for instance.

Another useful tool built into Win 7 that I hadn’t seen before is PSR.exe, which is great for making help sheets as well as supporting users. You enter psr.exe at the run command it pops up a box with a record button this then records every step you take to do an action, errors it creates, files it deals with etc, its designed for support personnel to log and see what is happening with an end user. When you hit stop recording it makes a .zip files which has a webpage inside it, full of screen caps showing where you clicked, files accessed etc a VERY useful tool and well worth people having a look at!

Anyway, that is a very quick, well 2 and ¾ pages in word, run through of the day (and my train back is nearly in Leeds so time to depart from the land of Internet on the move), I would like to summarise by saying it was a great event and thanks for Microsoft putting it on as a free event once again and do urge members to go to these events as they are well worth it.

Oh and before people ask, as you would expect from Microsoft there were lots of opportunities to interact including via text, email and Twitter.

The event was filmed and slides and video casts are now starting to turn up on the Techdays site - http://www.microsoft.com/uk/techdays/default.aspx

Thanks to Soulfish for keeping me company on this event as well.

John

13:30 - Registration

Arriving in plenty of time I wandered up to the second floor and was presented with a 'goodie bag' containing a lanyard, several flyers for the featured products and some free stuff including a micro mouse from Toshiba, a 75g sample of Cyber Clean compound, a couple of free pens and a pack of cards from VMWare. There was also a small bag of lollies waiting on the seats for us from Microsoft.

14:00 - Thinking of placing notebooks in the hands of students? Toshiba presents a toolkit of things to know and consider. It is more than just picking the right notebook.

This presentation looked at the different considerations for laptops for students schemes including procurement, insurance, maintenance and picking the right type of laptop for the job.

Some interesting things that came up was the availability of an assurance program from Toshiba that could be purchased so that damage like droppages could be repaired under the warranty. Having a well thought out SLA with the supplier was also covered and suggestions like having spare easily replaceable parts stored on site and having laptops to switch out with failed ones as part of the original arrangement. Batteries were also discussed and are considered as consumable parts. The Toshiba batteries apparently usually live through about 700 recharges and are covered under a one year warranty. Comparitivly the hp gear has just increased its battery warranty to three years but has also increased the cost.

14:35 - Microsoft in Education – an overview from Microsoft talking about licensing, operating systems, new products, free solutions and much much more

The Microsoft presentation first covered what was included in the Microsoft New Zealand Schools deal - Windows 7 and Office 2010 along with CALS for Exchange, Server 2003 and SCCM. The rest of the presentation centered around the free offerings from Microsoft for education. The first product covered was live@edu which promoted features such as presence, live drive and Office online. This section was presented by Mark Woods who is Education Manager for MS New Zealand.

The rest of the demos were hosted by Ian Morrish Technical Strategist for MS NZ and covered the products outlined below:

AutoCollage 2008 - Which is a pay for program that is free to schools who register and automaticlly builds a collage out of pictures that you feed it. It automatically finds important features in photos like faces and centers the images around these points of interest.

Multipoint Mouse - Allows for the use of more than one mouse on a computer at the same time, this can be used for interactive voting or feedback

Pivot | Live Labs Pivot - This software takes a set of tagged images and organizes them into a sortable filterable pivot chart type that could make filtering through large amounts of images. It takes the source images and runs them through the MS deepzoom engine then it creates an XML file that is read by the program, there is a public api for this so there is the possibility of sourcing the images from something like a web based album or web portal and make them easily searchable in this format.

WorldWide Telescope - This program allows you to navigate through terrabytes of telescope images in a 3D environment in all sorts of spectrums.

Photosynth - Stitches photos together to create a 3D panorama of the images that can be walked through.

Kodu - A game development environment for kids that can produce games runnable on Windows or Xbox platforms. This can use the keyboard or an XBox controller for input.

The features of Photostory have also been integrated into Live Moviemaker Free Video Editing Software | Download Windows Live MovieMaker.

15:05 - Tea/Coffee and time to meet all of the 9 exclusive vendors that will be showcasing their products/solutions

During the break sandwiches and snacks were served which were quite good, it also gave everyone an opportunity to mingle a little and catch up with the featured vendors.

15:25 - vmware – “Virtually Organised”

VMWare did a few demos of their products including their application visualization solution and, their VDI solution. While the goals of visualization were conveyed effectively the actual description of the process was a little bizarre comparing visualization to "Mike TV" from Willy Wonka's Chocolate factory.

16:05 - Adobe for Education – products, solutions and practical samples

Abobe gave a short demonstration of some of the features of the new CS5 suite including the background aware element removable and exporting features that can create Windows mobile apps and eBooks right out of the creator tools.

16:55 - Xirrus Wireless

The Xirrus wireless presentation was interesting as the product appears to be totally modular with a central mainboard integrating the controller, a Power PC chip and CF card along with a reprogramable FPGA that provides encryption at 100% wirespeed. The radio modules are interchangeable modules that can be swapped out when new WiFi standards are created. The mainboard includes two GB links that can be teamed and the unit draws its required 66 watts of power from a PoE injector. The big thing is the number of clients that are reportedly supported, 512 from the eight radio setup and 1024 from the 16. According to the representative they are even working on active RF jamming technology to prevent intrusion for the military.

Xirrus also offer a free wifi inspector tool here Xirrus: Switching Without Wires - Advanced IT Wi-Fi Networking Tools for Windows and Mac which could also be useful.

17:00 - Drinks and nibbles – time to network, chat to exhibitors and ask questions

Another break, more food and an open bar were available.

17:30 - Prize draw followed by more drinks and nibbles

The prizes that were given out were:

1x Adobe Creative Suite

1x Toshiba Netbook

1x Accessories pack

Overall the event was a worthwhile way to spend several hours and hopefully it will become an annual event.

Original Event Notification Posted here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/nz-general-chat/53357-event-edit-national-roadshow-decision-makers-schools.html

Fixes for issues will be coming soon as well as some new features but initially this is vb4 relatively flat.

This, and Microsoft's little push for videos, got me thinking that there might be other members that could also share their enthusiasm.

If you have a technology that you would like to show off in a short video, contact me by some means as I'm going to suss out some kind of template to use

Gareth

Edugeek Article.pdf

For all those that have been waiting, go click the link and have fun.

For those that don't know what this is then read on....

EduMove is a file migration tool with a difference, it was developed in order to make your lives much easier when migrating user files from server to server while retaining the file and folder structure, permisisons and updating the users home drive paths in Active directory all within 3 steps.

the tool is free to use and is provided as is amd as always feedback is apreciated.

<Edit>

For anyone who has problems downloading from the attached version, try this download link as an alternative.

EduMove Download - EduGeek

</Edit>

Please note IE appears to have issues with the attached file. Looking into it - ZH

edumove.zip

Now I have your attention, I'm going to lay down the rules on how EduGeek works....again.

This is my town, and whilst many of you have set up nice houses and get on well with your neighbours, some of you have decided that you can do what you want. Mainly this is visitors to the site who have little or no respect or knowledge of the rules we use here, so I'll lay it out for you.

We are one of the most respected IT sites in the world. EduGeek is where BIG companies come (and lurk) to get feedback and information on their products and services. What you say and do here reflects on all of us as a profession, and it goes a long way, all the way to the top in some cases. When the chairman of RM sees fit to pay us a visit on the first day of BETT, and call us 'very important', he's not saying it lightly. EduGeek is mainly a place of serious discussion, and is famed for it, humour too plays a role, but when it starts to degenerate into the net equivalent of a Friday night in Blackpool then it's time to get the big stick out.

Yes, humour is important, but when like us, you are viewed actively in schools and by law enforcement agencies, who view your posts on school security and pupil trends with great interest, then we must watch how we behave. We've breached that line between fun 'oo'er missus' innuendo and are now posting things unsuitable for viewing in the workplace.

So it stops. Now. Immediately. No 'ifs' or 'buts'. There are other places to be juvenile (I go to two other online communities for this type for online socialising). EduGeek is a place where your voice and comments carry far further than you can possibly imagine. Please don't spoil this rather special place we have, they are rather rare you know.

Chris.

So what we have thought we can do is to choose a different UK charity in the education sector (preferably IT focussed) each month to give any donations to, in return for an 'edusupporter' type of tag which we've yet to decide on.

The only thing we need from you (apart from donations!) is a list a charities we can donate to, so if you know of nay please list them here so we can have a good look at them.

Chris.

So this competition is simple... just tell me how many badges are in the picture. Easy!

The closest 8 guesses will each receive a full set of badges. This competition is not open to admins or moderators. All guesses should be posted before midnight on Sunday 31 January. Members are limited to 1 guess which should be enterred via a post in this thread. ONLY guesses should be posted in this thread. Any discussion should be taken to a new thread.

Whilst at BETT 2010, I had a chat with a guy about Cyber Clean. Basically, this anti-bacterial putty can be used for cleaning keboards, mice, kepads, etc... anything you touch with your fingers (except touch-screens).

After a chat about how it comes in various sizes of container at various prices and about the benefits of using it over regular cleaning materials (e.g. foam cleaner or cleaning wipes), the guy offered me a sachet worth approx. £6. This sachet is meant to be good for cleaning about 50 keyboards so my immediate thought was it wasn't cheap stuff!

Paul (my apprentice) and I have just evaluated the product and were quite disappointed! Although the putty-like substance does indeed work its way between keys and into crevices, it doesn't actually clean the surfaces! We even followed the two-stage instructions on the back of the packet... 'Just press & pull!"

Even trying to de-dust equipment resulted in disappointment - blowing over the surfaces removed more dust!!!

Next I thought I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and clean the keyboard with AF Maxiclene first, using the Cyber Clean as an antibacterial cleaner afterwards. To be honest, I don't think it was worth the effort!

To sum up, the product seemed like a brilliant idea but its execution was poor. As a material for disinfecting keyboards after they have been cleaned, maybe it's OK but it's a lot of money for cleaning clean things!

Implemented by the National Centre of Technology for Education (NCTE) as part of a €150 million, three-year plan to improve the quality of ICT hardware, internet services and high quality digital content in schools,students can now view hundreds of articles, illustrations, interactive games and multimedia resources to support and extend their learning beyond the classroom.

Delivered in partnership with eircom, Ireland’s leading broadband and content supplier, Encyclopaedia Britannica is available free-of-charge to all Irish schools through Scoilnet and the Schools Broadband Network.

Ian Grant, Managing Director of Encyclopaedia Britannica (UK) Ltd comments, “We are proud to be delivering to schools in Ireland both our huge editorial resources as well as our training and professional development support programmes to teachers,ensuring thousands of learners and educators have access to the most current professionally written and edited source of knowledge available.. Britannica’s digital resources will provide the firm foundation for modern learning experiences for today’s generation of school-children.”

Encyclopedia Britannica Are BETT 2010 Stand L9.

As many of you are aware at the Edugeek Conference this year, A Small Application EduMove - File Migration Tool was announced to be released.

More information can be found here: http://www.edugeek.net/wiki/index.php/Edugeek_May_Conference_2009

I know that a lot of you are itching to get your paws on it! (i am too!)

The EduMove Code has been passed over to ZeroHour Today, and it should appear on the Edugeek Projects Site some time later this week here: http://projects.edugeek.net

So all of you who are planning to move your staff/student areas! Only a few more days to wait...

Thank you to Ozan (ICTNUT) @ OP Software who has been the Lead Developer!

James.

The SWG-1200 is available for education customers that need a higher performance than the existing SWG-700.

Accredited by BECTA the filtering technology that was one of the first to block flash based games already provides thousands of schools with state of the art filtering.

Smoothwall product manager Tom Newton says: “The addition of the SWG-1200 means we can offer dedicated and reliable hardware-based appliance to more sizeable schools with much more complex network needs.”

Hardware Specification

Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor: 2.66GHz, 6M Cache, 1333 MHz FSB

4 GBytes RAM

4 x Gigabit Ethernet interfaces on PCI Express® bus

2 x 500 GByte RAID1 Mirrored disk drives

Multi function front-panel LCD display with four push buttons for system information

19" 1 U rack-mount (width=16.92"/430mm, depth=16"/406.4mm, height=1.73"/44mm)

CE, RoHS and FCC approved

WEEE compliant

CrazyTalk provides you the ability to take any picture and animate it to provide a virtual puppet the software uses the advance facial morphing technology that in no time you will be creating characters that come to life.

You can see CrazyTalk at BETT2010 on Stand T27

http://www.reallusion.com/crazytal

Interactive technology specialist’s U-Touch will be exhibiting on stand M19 at this years BETT show at Olympia, London to present their extended range of education related teaching and conferencing audio visual products which have been successfully employed in many learning centres worldwide. The centre piece on the stand will be the new 82” fully integrated LCD with Windows 7 compatible multitouch, a gigantic presentation tool engineered using the NEC 8205 LCD. Also on show will be a range of other integrated displays and large format overlays for both Plasma and LCD.

BETT 2010 - U TOUCH LIMITED