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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.

What a fun morning... For about 30 minutes for no reason that I can discern, my school network went partially down. Some rooms were completely without network access and in others it was working just fine. I even had one lab where some kids could logon, but their neighbors could not. All our servers were up and had no errors. I could print from our print server to some places, but not others. The best part is that after about a half hour without me doing anything that I thought would fix the issue it all started playing nice again. I'm thinking a faulty switch, but the randomness of the locations with issues versus the mostly unaffected has me a trifle nonplussed. I guess I'm just thinking out loud and looking for some ideas.

I'm not in the business of defending Google's business practices or interesting in arguing about these types of issues, but if you do the apps for education, you can turn the ads off for all services with a single radio button.

As recommended to me on this site, we now use a shared spreadsheet with google docs. I've set it up to reserve computer labs and IT resources like projector carts. If you signup for the free apps for education program you can limit it nicely to your domain and give your teachers email and sharable calendars too.

I'm really beginning to regret getting a site license for CS3 Premium... Adobe's support is one of the worst I've encountered (thought I would try here again before wasting hours with them) and the software gives me endless headaches. The latest one is when you click on file -> open in PhotoShop Cs3 and then select the Use Adobe Dialog button, I can get unrestricted access to the C: drive. If I switch back to the OS dialog menu my C: is nicely locked via GP. Any ideas how to restrict this?

I recently put in a new internet file locker service to allow the kiddies to transfer files between home and school. (We don't let them use email and soon will be eliminating floppies, CDs and flash drives). The problem is a policy I setup this summer does not seem to like allowing the kids to download the files to their school network drives. They get a "This operation has been canceled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator." error. Unfortunately, I guess I'm the admin and I can't find the policy that's blocking it. It does not give a choice to save it in an alternative location. They can open the file, but not if its in Office 2007. I thought it might be the default download location, but I reset that to a wide open area with no positive results. Any ideas what the usual suspects might be in this situation? The server is 2003 and all the clients are XP with IE7

We are using super mandatory profiles with redirection for the students and local profiles with redirection for the teachers. Much quicker than our old method of everyone using redirected profiles.

Has anyone else encountered this situation? We have a site license for Adobe CS3 Premium and it works nicely except for PhotoShop CS3. Only in PhotoShop while saving to the network, if a student (no admin rights) tries to use Save As it will give an error prompting that the file already exists and asks if you want to replace it. It does not matter what the file name is, it claims that it already exists. If you choose the replace option, it will save a file without the extension. The save option works just fine and save as works in all of the other Adobe apps and with admin accounts. Photoshop can perform save as to a flash drive or to the local drives if it was allowed, it just will not Save As to the network. I've contacted Abobe and their response was to give our students admin rights. I told them that I really did not want to do that, I don't remember having admin rights being in their system specs, and this seems like a bug. They offered no other solution. Are the denizens of this forum aware of any?

Thanks for the idea. I was trying to use google calendar, but this looks like it might work well.

Oddly, I seem to be starting most of my messages with caveats… I’m not sure if there is a better place for this type of post. Please move it as required. I grow weary of my predecessor's system of using a paper signup sheet posted in the computer lab to schedule reservations and the leave a voicemail/email method to book data projector carts. I want a network/online tool to allow my teachers to reserve these type of resources. We use Google Apps for education for email and their calendar system does not really have a nice resource reservation system like outlook. And it needs to be drop dead simple as some of our staff think the wheel is a new and complicated invention. So what are you guys using? (It also helps if it’s available on the side of the English speaking ocean that should have lost that little skirmish in the 1770s. )

Looks like a nice piece of software. We already use Vision which surprisingly does not seem to have this feature. I worry about how nice iTALC and Vision would play together. Anyone know of a more standalone app?