Easy_506

Thanks Ken. I'd like to think I DO have a choice in the matter...whether i'm with a union or not. In my opinion the school have already used up their 'any other reasonable request' credits when my role was adapted to include other things such as marketing/website building/live@edu email roll-out/parental engagement portal... I think those are reasonable add-ons to a Technician contract, but it seems crazy to me that you can tag on roles/responsibilities way above my pay-grade and call that 'reasonable'.

Yeah, good experience, but for me the cons outweigh the pros. Especially with regards to how much it'll impact things here at my original school (we like to keep uber-busy!).

Yes it is. I work under a network manager, so what they're saying is that I take on the same as he does, just for a different school, and one day per week. I'm not a member of any union, although i've been told that I should join one by most of the teaching staff here. I'm not really a unions kind of guy, but maybe I should get in touch with Unison...

Hi all, I'm pretty new here, don't post often, but always glean lots of valuable information from this forum, so thanks to all you regulars who contribute! I have a little conundrum and thought i'd get the opinions of those who know exactly what i'm talking about. To avoid complications, I won't go into exact specifics. Basically, i'm an IT Technician, employed in an inner-city secondary for the last three years. I've been told by our head that as of April i'm being sub-contracted out to a local primary school for one day per week. I asked what was in this for me, and I was told - nothing (no big surprise there). Having now been to look at the primary, i've seen that they essentially need a network manager. I can do the work required, but i'm a little annoyed that i've not been given a choice in the matter and i'm going to remain on the same (quite poor) technician's salary for continuing that role 4 days per week, and taking on the responsibility of another school. What does everybody think?

Lol. Yeah, our is UniServity too... *sigh*

Thanks again for your reply, but i'm not talking about restricting internet access, we've got LanSchool, Websense and an ISA setup for that. I'm talking about scheduling access for individual programs installed to each PC's hdd. EG - Joe Bloggs can play GameX between 1pm & 1.30pm, Monday to Friday, but not at any other time.

Agreed. Well interestingly enough, whilst having a casual chat with our council helpdesk people, apparently our LA may be taking care of the entire solution...

Thanks for replying, but I was particularly interested to know if there's a way of scheduling software access. I'd like to avoid moving into the realm of policing the internet and vetting flash games websites. Especially since you never really know which sites contain malicious content until it's on your system and AVG runs a scan...

We've had an issue with a lunchtime ict club where the kids are going onto flash games websites and ending up with countless trojan viruses getting onto the PCs. Disabling internet access is not an option unfortunately, and now we're being asked to provide a solution where games software is available on each terminal, but only during lunch times. Does anyone know of a solution where the kids will only be allowed to access the software at particular times on particular days? Thanks in advance for your help!

Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far... Can anyone provide some real concrete information with regards to the 2010 requirements? I'm hearing lots of contradictory comments elsewhere myself.

Ha ha! Yes, quite true. I'm still waiting for Nokia's retro 'Digi-Brick' range to come out... After all these responses, I think i'm going to get the people from Bromcom and Insight in to talk to us.

I only mentioned it because the way it was pitched to us, it was shown as a completely separate online entity, whereas we were hoping that it would provide us with a way of retaining the singular online presence, whilst delivering the required live data to parents. I think it came across to me as another VLE because of the way it was pitched to us, with personalised banner space, picture upload space, etc etc. I'd like to hear more about these web parts. They were mentioned very briefly to us, but I really came away from the meeting asking how SLG and the VLE actually interact at all... David, the answer is yes, we do use SIMS, but nowhere near to its potential. And because we were looking at a hosted solution, i'll give you a ballpark figure of £10k+ for the first three years. After reading through all the comments on this forum about SLG, I have to say it doesn't seem such a bad thing to have, but what niggles with me is that the package seems much bigger than it needs to be.

Thanks for your response Gatt. Admittedly I haven't spoken to anyone at Websense about this *yet* - just wanted a crack at solving the problem myself. I blocked the URL (and any part of it as you suggested) several months ago, but the kids still seem to be getting through via an IP address that seems to change with each visit. As I said, keeping up with these IP addresses is a job unto itself, so at the moment i'm not spending too much time on it.

Hi all, I hope you'll forgive me, i've only just discovered this forum and after A LOT of reading I decided my best foot forward would be to submit my own thread, in the hope that some of you can answer my questions and provide some knowledgable guidance... We are a secondary school with a Uniservity VLE and in line with the 2010 requirements we had a rep from Capita pitch to us a few weeks ago. What I can't quite get my head around at the moment (bearing in mind the first time I'd ever looked at SIMS or a VLE was two months ago) is the virtue of going for SLG, especially when we already have a VLE? It struck me that SLG was trying to be a VLE-lite, with the added bonus of being able to publish SIMS data online. Our key requirement is purely to be able to give parents access to data such as attendance, grades & behavioural comments. I was hoping that this could be achieved through some sort of VLE plug-in, but have seen this is not the case. Would everyone recommend looking at solutions other than SLG? I'll probably add to this thread as time goes on, but I won't completely brain-dump on you all at the moment... Many thanks in advance!

Websense has been unable to block this website now for some time, and I've personally tried blocking individual URLs and IP addresses. Does anyone out there have any other way of blocking this site, because from what i've seen they seem to use rotating IP addresses (ie - each time I find a pupil on there it is a different IP). Any assistance would be very much appreciated!