Brax

I have no words.

We've just got rid of our "Sheds", 50 years or so is a long time for a "temporary building".

Why don't they have a birds eye view floor plan?! It's my first time going and I'll probably be wondering half the time...

I don't have a solution either sadly. We've had to buy 40 keyboards today to replace broken ones across the school. Usually it happens in cover lessons as teachers tend to stick to a room and look after it. We can't bill the cover department so that's out the question. Have raised the issue with SLT lots and falls on deaf ears. Nowadays I've got so much on my plate that replacing keyboards is really the last thing I want to be doing next to changing toner.

We do add a few extra policies that would regularly get looked at by parents like the schools mobile phone policy for example.

Is anyone doing/attending a table talk?

Honestly no idea. I've also just booked in slots myself as i'm also going first time. What's frustrating is the tech labs events clash with the time slots.

Yep got flooded with tickets this morning but at least they've acknowledge it on the status page.

The school should have a DPO to deal with all the points mentioned. Assume there isn't one? IT should not be involved beyond gathering data requested.

We've just mass rolled out docks. The only good solution imo.

I've been ill twice this month and I rarely ever get ill. Both times it was excessive mucus and congestion along with quite bad fatigue. Covid tests were negative...

I didn't play for most of this year as other games took my attention and I felt the meta became very stale. Picked it up again recently and me and my friends are enjoying it. My favourite and most played champ is Vlad but I tend to play ADC now. Usually pick Caitlyn Ezreal or Zeri. Next season's changes look quite exciting and I'll no doubt be hyping myself up for when Arcane comes out later next year.

Hi Rob, We recently rolled it out ourselves in a secondary. I can't speak for how useful it is as all I know is that Attendance are very happy with it and they manage it. As far as hooking up to Bromcom goes I don't seem to recall any major issues. I believe you have to pay for write back into an MIS. It's now the go to absence reporter rather than a phone in/email. As mentioned in this thread the hard bit is getting parents to use it.

We don't run the desktop version of teams on these machines so it must be something else in the background. Super frustrating but that's exam software for you.

Hi all, Ever since the latest LAN update we've had a few tests now where they randomly get "Loss of Focus - Please Contact Invigilator". Now we've spoken to Pearson on the phone (eventually) a few times after these have happened and today we asked for a concrete solution to help resolve this in future. They suggested we disable our anti-virus. Has anyone else who uses LAN pop with Sophos had to disable it for these exams or is there something else we can do as I don't want to disable it if we can help it.

Davinci Resolve is probably the best option if they're secondary students & higher. Free but also considered up there as an industry standard video editor.

Our exams officer has got the hang of it now. Thankfully we're in the process of switching to iPads here so were able to supply the exams officer with a device. Using microsoft authenticator for pretty much most of the boards rolling this out.

Hi Kenny It's a difficult one and one I've thought about and discussed with SLT and the exams officer a few times. The process here and always has been word on locked down laptops using a local account and files saved to memory sticks. Memory sticks are assigned to a student for that exam series. The benefit of this with the sticks is essentially having a backup for the exam board if needed but as mentioned it does put the risk into a USB stick. We have instilled a culture of getting the students to save the word document to the documents of the computer before the start of the exam and saving regularly (autosave also on but it get's them into the habit). We have some pretty good file recovery software so if anything super bad happens to the laptop during the exam whether that's loss of power or other issue, we have a very good chance of retrieving it. The students will then save the document to the stick at the end of the exam to be taken to print and sign the work before they leave. The downside to this is then having someone deleting the word document to make the laptop ready for the next exam, we don't have too many that use a word processor here so it's manageable but could be an issue if this increases. I have looked at a more network based system with something like examwritepad but we very rarely if ever run into problems so changing the system here would require a lot of convincing so i'll watch this thread closely myself. Bonus is that JCQ were very happy with how we setup during a recent inspection.

Ah gotcha yeah we use teams for that.

Airserver?

I'm pretty much in this situation (living at home) and saving what I can but actively looking for other roles out of education as I simply can't sustain this and to be able to even rent my own place in my area I need to be earning more.

Could've sworn our exams officer used the Microsoft authenticator already for Pearson not sure why they need a seperate app. Regardless I've pushed the app to the iPads for staff that need it.

It looks absolutely ridiculous and I will definitely be going to see it.

Have you seen Playstation taking away titles for movies/tv shows that people have bought digitally? Keeping physical media still is so important imo because as shown they can take away content whenever they like. On topic I've found iTunes for windows works well. You have to "Sync" your phone to your library but once that's done it's pretty easy to drag and drop stuff over to your iphone. I tend to import CD's and throw that on there. Having said that I found out the hard way that if you don't use an official apple cable iTunes struggles to pick up your phone as a device.

... and they're SLT? You're not being unreasonable at all. There should be a process to induct them! We work closely with HR for new staff and once someone is confirmed they give us as much notice as possible and we sort out a sheet with their login info (which includes a temporary password which asks them to change upon login) which is given to HR and they deal with it as part of onboarding. New staff normally pass our way for devices or for a photo for their ID so they'll see us either way and should do really, they need to know who the IT team is!