beeswax

Whatever I try I cannot get the front page to display more than three articles. Is there a way round this?

@User3204: do Uniservity not do all this for you, or do you run it in-house? How much training did you receive, and were teaching staff also along for any training offered? When our LEA were trying to get us to use Uniservity I was told we'd receive a full day's training, but what was the point of the training if I was eventually going to be tuped across to a managed service and possibly not even be required to go back into the school again? Just over a year ago the LEA persuaded three schools to go with Fronter, and even offered support until this was withdrawn, leaving them on their own. Once again it was the technicians who were left to take responsibility for this and try to muddle through. I see from the forums that some people are trying to set up Fronter support communities, can I infer from this that Fronter either don't offer any support, or whatever support is provided is so poor as to be useless? Can anyone tell me what happens to the running of a VLE once a managed service is in place? Is it part of the MSP brief to support it? My views on this may be coloured by the fact of the seeming incompetence of our LEA. I'm sure some places get it right. It seems to me that the important thing for the LEA is to get a VLE in place; it's then up to the schools to sort out their own problems. It's going to work in some schools but not in others

Hmm. Just come across this. Might indeed be a good idea. z.

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/virtual-learning-platforms/28487-definitive-guide-sims-net-moodle-ldap-integration.html I believe penfold is even offering to do the intergration for a small consideration

Any volunteers?

I've been playing with sharing cart recently and it seems to do what it says.

I've found that with some laptops the wireless is set to "OFF" in the bios. Don't know why, but have even had this happen with a set of 30 brand new laptops where 27 of them are fine and the others have to be set up via the bios.

Just had this software brought to my attention. Is anyone using it, and what sort of feedback have you had from staff? It seems to be based on PowerPoint but outputs to Flash.

We don't have SLG, so that was another reason to use Bromcom (cost differential).

In fact it is very cheap (the figures are in school, but I think it was less than £2K to set up and the first year's running costs), and it was up and running within 48 hours. We already use Bromcom for the registers with PE staff being able to take registers via mobile phone when on the playing fields (I don't know if SIMS can do this) and so have Bromcom set up to read data from SIMS already.

It also depends on the school you work for. Some don't see the need to pay for training, whilst others recognize how quickly IT is changing and realize that in order for the school to move forward and embrace fresh developments a well resourced workforce is essential. The position of techies in schools is also rather circumscribed by the fact that most of us are expected to be jack of all trades and in depth specialization such as you may get in the private sector is very rare, unless you are prepared to put in the hours yourself. Conversely, this wide ranging brief is one of the main attractions for working in schools. A big plus point is seeing what you do make a positive contribution to the progress of the pupils and staff within your school. A managed service provider (MSP) will say that they can provide the trained specialists to keep IT problems to an absolute minimum, What Edugeek has done is to provide us all with a universal helpdesk covering a much wider brief than any MSP. One of my fears is that the personal touch will be lost. Anyone who has worked in a particular school will know which teachers are comfortable with IT and which need constant monitoring. In the end it comes down to you and how much you want to put into it, and which company wins the bid to manage your school. jcollings posted while I was writing this and i have to agree with him.

another vote for JoomlaPack here, couldn't have been easier to transfer a site without paying someone else to do it for me.

Once you're tuped you stay tuped, it doesn't matter who the MSP is, or if the MSP changes. If the current MSP fails to deliver you get someone else in who takes over the current tuped staff and the infrastructure, provided that someone else wants to put in a bid, at this point I'm scratching my head as to what happens next. Can anyone offer clarification on this point?

thanks for the list GD. I've only heard of the MS & Promethean groups.

Have to smile at that last bit GD, as from next September our new intake of Year 7's are going to be inducted into independent learning, learning to learn (given the skills to find out for themselves) and I was asked to put some of the material on the VLE/intranet for staff to get their heads round. I pointed out to the member of SLT that his IT techies were already doing this, communities of practice (Edugeek and others) that flexibility and adaptability are our watchwords. He's a good bloke but I get the feeling that all this is a little alien to him, as it will be to some of the other teachers, but we've a couple of years at least to knock them into shape before the BSF bulldozer comes along. I sincerely believe that most teachers work very hard, but the very fact of their careers and CPD being laid out for them in the way it is (and for very good reason) they don't need to scan the horizon for future developments in the way they will soon be teaching their pupils to do. It should be an interesting experiment.

When do you reach the age of majority, by the way?

It looks like Wink.

Cycle to work schemes

The comedian and sketch writer Barry Cryer wished that as he was now in his 70's, someone would invent a stair lift fast enough to get him to the top of the stairs before he forgot why he was going there.

Really beautiful site.

Though I wasn't a consultant, I was self employed, and this is how I worked out my charges. 1. What equipment did I need to complete the job=depreciation+insurance+replacement costs 2. Did I need a car=depreciation+insurance+replacement costs+fuel+servicing 3. Cost of commercial premises (office etc)=rent+council tax+electricity/gas/phone (services) 4. Someone to answer the phone/manage my diary=salary+insurance+NI 5. Accountant (someone to sort out the vat etc) 6. Ibuprofen/Paracetemol/Asprin/Health Insurance HTH

The deal is between the government, the supplier of these laptops and the LEA/schools, Toshiba sold the laptops to them and we don't deal with them. They are very difficult to deal with. For example, a laptop wasn't charging so we did a quick fault find by swapping out the power brick from one which worked. Phoned them up to inform them, asked to put it in an email, did so, get a reply asking us to check out the power by using the lead from another machine which we know has worked (and which we've already done) they eventually agree that the power supply is faulty and send a replacement five weeks later.

These laptops are brand new (well, given out as brand new earlier this year, though I suspect they may have been in a warehouse for some time). They are the Satellite Pro A200. Apart from the usual mess-ups you get from these situations such as someone setting a start up password in bios and forgetting it (and being asked an exhorbitant amount to reset it), we've had power failures and hdd failures.

As someone who suffers from a prolapsed disc I can sympathise with the teacher. At a recent physio session I was talking to a lady in the same position as your teacher, i.e. they wouldn't buy her a proper computer chair. The physio turned round and said he'd sign her off for a month if they didn't comply. I believe it's been ordered now.

I feel the problem you'd have with a primary school is that although you specialize in ICT you'd be expected to teach over the whole range of subjects, though of course with in depth knowledge of IT there'd be an "expectation" that you take on anything ICT related. I assume that you already have a decent working knowledge of IT, after all, it's what you do, so I would suggest taking a teaching degree, though if you only want to teach ICT you'd probably need to move into secondary education.