beeswax

The attached file is the fix which stops the accordion menu messing with lightbox gallery.accordian_menu_fix.txt

As there are only 9 of them so far it's not a big deal, but I will have to get something in place shortly, and to be honest it's one of those items I'm putting at the bottom of a big pile. I'll turn it over from time to time.

Thanks. I did eventually settle on this answer through experimentation. The particular bunch of pupils who are from another school are some of the worst behaved I've seen. It seems that our sister school has used the opportunity offered by the 14-19 diplomas to offload some of its troublesome pupils on us for a couple of days a fortnight. I don't think this school has a VLE at the moment, though they may be going down the LEA offering, Uniservity. If they do they'll be the only secondary school in our borough to do this, as far as I can tell.

Moodle.org: Modules and plugins and some messing about with the css to get the colours looking how you want them, and the width of the top item should be set to 99%. It will also mess with the lightbox gallery if you have that module installed. There is a fix for this but I can't get to it from home.

As part of the build up to the 14-19 diplomas I've been asked to give access to our Moodle VLE to some pupils from another of the schools in our group. I don't want them to see or acces any other courses; is there a way of achieving this?

It's usually those job descriptions which end, "you'll be asked to undertake other tasks as and when necessary" which you should worry about. In this case that's probably 99% of them. I think that the SLT in that school realizes what the job actually entails, so think yourself lucky.

Lean services is a concept I came across last year. Harvard Business Review:"lean service pursued brilliantly by Fujitsu" : FUJITSU UK might offer some light for IT staff.

I was emphatically told by the bod responsible for negotiating our BSF deal that there was no chance of us being re employed by the schools. Now, saying never is not a clever thing, as we don't know what the future will bring, but I sometimes get the impression that our meetings are a necessary evil.

could have sworn I heard the crack of a whip just then.

I feel I should point out that if a managed service provider fails for one reason or another, those who are tuped stay tuped. There's no going back to being employed by the school or the LA unless there's a complete about face by the powers that be.

I get 23 days + Bank Holidays. I suggested working overtime but it wasn't met favourably.

I'm in Unison and have passed it on to the rep. Ironically, she's on holiday using up all the entitlement she hasn't taken during the past year. I work full time and am allowed to take my holidays during term time so long as there's cover, though this doesn't usually amount to more than a week as I don't want to leave the other two techies to handle all the problems for more than that (I'm not being patronising to them either). My wife and I find it easier to take a week's holiday at Easter because of various commitments, but with this festival being such a moveable feast you can sometimes get a holiday year with no Easter holidays in it, and another with both Easters in it, further reducing entitlement. SLT don't like you carrying days over into the following year.

That's the situation we have here, 3 days shut down between Christmas and New Year, but the impression I get is that SLT are looking to have us take an extra 3 days out of our current allocation, i.e. 23 days - (3+3) = 17 days for the rest of the year. I'd prefer to have those 3 other days during summer, or at least a time convenient to myself and my family.

Sorry, didn't make myself clear. Term dates aren't changing, SLT just want us to take a further 3 days out of our holiday allocation at Christmas.

Had a general staff meeting with an SLT member present recently and he "floated" the idea of closing school for an extra 3 days at Christmas. I get 23 days a holiday a year, 3 of which have to be taken over Christmas. Adding these 3 extra days means 25% of my holidays would have to be taken in the depths of winter. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a national "initiative". Has anyone else encountered this?

On the whole SLT are supportive, with me having two days a week to devote to the VLE. In reality I have to work round teachers' free periods. I have some CPD time, the equivalent of a week this year, in which I can take any training I need to develop my Moodle skills, but I haven't pinpointed anything yet. I can carry the week over to the following year. As for computers for pupils, SLT saw the money and took it. The LA was going to do it all originally. I didn't know of the BECTA information on this subject. We've given out around 100 laptops and had 3 refusals (I think). We also had a lady come along who wasn't on the list and didn't have any children at our achool but felt she was entitled to one as she lived on the same road as a couple of people who were entitled to a laptop. One further thing comes to mind. The incorrect recovery disks were included with the laptops, and as with these things some laptops were intially mucked up by having passwords set and then forgotten. XMA eventually sent us ONE recovery disk (DVD) and told us to make copies of it which we could then distribute as required. Sharp practice indeed considering how much they were making out of our phone calls. On the whole we handled the rollout well, though it involved all three techies over 5 days, time which wasn't spent sorting school problems. Because of our catchment area some of the laptops had to be expalined via interpreters.

We do provide some revision materials on our VLE (mainly for Science). Pupils access it (VLE) on a regular basis over weekends and holidays. Assignments are set and completed. We're running a simple poll on the front page of our VLE to determine who has and who hasn't access to a computer at home. Some of the teachers who have taken up the challenge of the VLE have been a revelation, completely unexpected, and there are several who are "champions" and evengelize on my behalf. As an IT techie it can sometimes be difficult to deal with certain teachers who are used to us being at their beck and call because they can't be bothered to see if a machine is plugged in before calling us out. That being said, the majority of staff here seem to appreciate what's being attempted with the VLE. Computers for pupils has been a mixed bag for us. Some folk turned them down as they didn't class themselves, or want to be seen as, "poor". Most have been given out. Internet (dis)connectivity has been provided by O2 with dongles being supplied (6 months late). These dongles (sometimes) work on a white list of sites and unfortunately the school website and VLE aren't on them yet. It seems that the BBC website is also blacklisted. We don't know how long it will take to get these added to the whitelist. Laptop "support" is provided by a company called XMA who seem to refer any enquiries from owners of these laptops to our IT department. This has become a major headache. No one wants to turn away a pupil who is eager to join his or her peers in accessing the VLE etc so you do what you can for them, and XMA seem to expect us (the IT techies) to do all the trouble shooting for them. Example: Failure of power unit. Try unit from another laptop and this charges up as normal. Change fuse in faulty unit, still not working. Email XMA with details of what has been done. Return email asks if we have tried using another unit to see if first unit is faulty. Reply that we have done this and noted this fact on original email which they had fired back to us with their reply. Replied again pointing out original email. Could we phone them (premium rate number) with the details? Why? Pupil regularly comes to office to find out how we are doing, parents phone us as they are getting no sense from XMA, constant pestering and time (and money) spent by parents on phone to XMA. I don't like letting down pupils and parents, but then again I don't like having to make excuses for XMA either. P.S. despite the snow we've been open all week.

Usually in the top right corner once you are in a course. Use the dropdown. Been beaten to it!

Here are 4 links which may prove helpful; http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/buildmlehefe/lifelonglearning/mlebriefingpack/17 http://www.directlearn.co.uk/downloads/VLEs%20-%20into%20the%20mainstream.pdf beyondresistance.com http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/change-management/changing-the-culture

The three of us (all full time) can take holidays during term time, and do. SLT know that school holidays are/can be busy periods for IT techies. The only stipulation is that we don't leave the school without any IT cover when we book our holidays.

Go into a restaurant and order scrambled eggs and a chicken leg. See which comes first.

What an excellent idea!

Thanks amigo.

I appreciate that I'm becoming a pain in the backside, but I'm really trying to get my head round this. I've created an addition to the Curriculum Menu (CEPA - Creative, Expressive & Peforming Arts) which appears in said menu. When you click the CEPA link either in the top menu or the curriculum menu, then the curriculum menu disappears/is not there. The CEPA article is still displayed. How do I fix this. More pertinently still does someone know of an online resource (I've tried the Joomla site but didn't come up with anything for this situation) which will help me and decrease the petsering on here? Finally, how do I access the Greybox Gallery?

Technophile: Atomic Floyd AirJax headphones | Technology | The Guardian http://www.atomicfloyd.com/airjax.php