Blind

I work at a small private school (grades 6-12) and I'm looking for programs to supplement our course catalog with a third-party online program. Since this I'm still in the initial stages of inquiry, about the only place I've found is k12.com. Our current plan is to offer supplemental courses like math one period a day and then have a math teacher supervise and tutor the disparate math topics that hour. I am open to looking at programs that have specific times and teachers that offer courses over services like elluminate. I just need to see what is out there and what you guys may be using. Any shared experiences or links to these services would be appreciated.

Our school is starting a middle school (11 & 12 year olds) 1:1 program with a 3 year lease and now we are having a heated discussion about if we should buy accidental damage and theft insurance. I'm looking for people share their experiences and observations to help us make the best decision we can. What say you? (BTW: I'm leaving the details of cost and hardware out to cast a wider net)

The teachers want to be able to listen to and record students talking to a recording or commenting on a video. The deal breaker for NSS is that my teachers want to group the students into partners from a central terminal and get recordings of the conversations. I've discovered that NetSupport is limited to individuals at this point.

Looks interesting, but I learned long ago to not get too excited until I know the price. Do you sell to people on my side of The Pond and who should I contact for quote?

So our spanish language teachers decided that they wanted a language lab and after spending 10 months to do 2 days of research, they seem to almost know what a language lab is now. Now it's my job to make their dreams come true and I'm discovering that these things cost shiny pennies. Then I noticed that the newest NetSupport School offers some language lab like features and I'm wondering if anyone has a school using them. I've played with the demo and it works, but seems to be a trifle limited (can't record all the students at once, can't setup chat sessions between groups of students). Any recommendations or insights?

I apologize if this is improperly located. I did not really know where to post this as it is somewhat all encompassing and too broad to shoehorn into the more specific forum categories. I'm at a private school that was just given a large donation, but it must be spent in our world languages (read Spanish and Chinese) department. Our school president has asked me to dream up an ideal classroom chockfull of technological nirvana so they can decide how to modernize the rooms. I'm used to putting things together with shoestrings and duct tape and my foreign language skills are non existent. I've already hit on the usual smartboard and document camera type stuff, but I was looking for more diverse ideas. Hardware, software, doodads, and thingamabobs. Specific to schools, language or not. I'm just looking for more ideas than my pea sized brain can dream up. I'm in the wrong side of the pond, so if you have links to the North American version of the products it would be beneficial. Please share your dreams and link the toys.

We have 1 DC(sk3) and 1 file/print server(2k3 r2) and ~200 xp workstations. I suppose I could make the file server a temporary DC when we only have a handful of people in the building this summer.... Like I said in the OP. DC migration for me is theoretical and I was waiting to do any formal research until getting pointed in the right direction. I truly appreciate all of the assistance.

Thanks for the info. I am an idiot and may be missing obvious things, but the only issue that I see with this approach is that I can't add the new server to the domain because I was hoping to use the same hardware except for a new raid install.

To put it mildly, our w2k3 domain controller was built by a lobotomized monkey. I wish to reuse the server hardware, but I want to reinstall and reconfigure Windows. I've created new DCs before, but I've never had to migrate users or settings from an old one. I've yet to do any research on what this will entail. (I thought I would ask for tips first) Any suggestions would be appreciated. Things like recommendations for third party tools... Should I upgrade to 2008... how this will effect client computers if I want ot keep the same domain name... should I just bring in a consultant group and be done with it... Thanks.

He is talking about R2 for Windows Server 2003. One of the big improvements it added was a more robust quota management system. I use it to limit our students to 250MB by default and then bump up individuals that have larger file needs like the graphic arts kids.

I thought so too, but I've set these to disable with no noticeable effect.

I'm not a scripting kind of guy. In fact, I use a program called Desktop Authority by Scriptlogic so that I don't have to be. However, I've come to realize I have an issue and their support has been less than helpful. Let me explain and see if you guys can be of assistance. Attached you will find a screen cap of the script window that appears just after a user logs in. Normally this flashes across the screen for a second. However, if a user closes this window they gain access to things like the standard Windows start menus and not my secure redirected menu. Not good. What can be done to make this window disappear?

I am perpetually nonplussed. This time it is more of an irritation than a critical issue, but I'm baffled by the symptoms and my google has not helped. Sometime between the last semester and last Monday, Word 2007 stopped allowing the built in language translator to function on several computers and only partially function on others. (However it still works mine and a few others I checked) Mostly on student computers, the option is grayed out when you click review --> translate* to use the built in worldlingo.com translator. On other identical computers (same image/hardware) if you change the language, it then miraculously works. This happens regardless of the users admin rights. I'm not aware of any changes, patches, or policies that would alter this setting and I know I did not purposefully disable it. Does anyone have any suggestions or resources that might help me better investigate? *I attached an image to better explain what I'm talking about. translate.pdf

It's now happened twice more in the last three school days. I'm trying to remember, but it may have occurred around the same time each day during a homeroom period. A disquieting coincidence that may indicate malfeasence if not for the easy solution to the problem. I find that resetting our first set of switches after our servers instantly fixes the problem. Leading me to hope that the solution is simply to replace one of the 4 switches in that room. Any other suggestions?

I not aware of any changes that would occur in the midmorning that would cause these issues. No new hardware or software and no recent system or configuration changes. I've had to replace a couple of faulty switches a couple of weeks ago, but otherwise it's been quiet. I aware of the concept of a broadcast storm and I thought I knew what a loopback address is, but I'm not bright enough to discern how a loopback would occur and cause these type of symptoms.