beeswax

It certainly worked for Alex in A Clockwork Orange. ;-)

heard this on the radio the other day.

It has been called powerpoint karaoke.

If by LGPS you mean a pension, then that doesn't transfer. It becomes frozen at the point of Tupe-ing, and you begin a new one.

So as LA's are going for Single Status for all admin and technical staff, schools want to be able to set teacher's salaries themselves?

As we seem to be discussing the ethos of working for a particular school and mucking in together, I'd like to mention something which happened a few weeks ago. I was setting up the hall for morning assembly, projector, screen etc, and checking through with the teacher what she wanted from her laptop. It was a powerpoint presentation which contained a link to a website. We ran through it and the site wouldn't load no matter what we tried. The teacher had been up past midnight putting the finishing touches to the presentation, and assured me the link worked. She was getting edgy, and her class, who were doing the assembly were getting restless. I Googled the content, but all the links were dead. Then I had the idea of going to Google's cached pages, and I found it. Assembly went without a hitch, the teacher and her class were praised for the presentation and I got to metaphorically sweep up after the parade. At the speed I type, it's probably taken me longer to get this down that it did to sort out the presentation. There are dozens, if not hundreds of incidents like this taking place in schools up and down the country every day. How will a help desk manage that? How will it ensure that not just what happens in classrooms is seen to? How will it cope with the small incidents like the one outlined above which help to build a stronger team spirit and make sure that pupils aren't let down? All the extra work a teacher puts in to ensure that her class show themselves off in the best light would go down the pan. School isn't just about what goes on in the classroom. We all help each other in different ways, such as looking over a CV for a Year 11 pupil applying for his first job in IT as I've done. Losing something like this, the ethos which comes from wanting the best for your school, no matter what we may post on here to let off steam, this takes a long time to build up, it doesn't happen overnight. It comes from knowing the people you're serving, who you can have a joke with, and which teachers will not be able to remember their password after a 6 week break. Schools are organic beings. However confused and noisy they may seem to the outsider, there is an underlying order to it all. And it's in knowing your way in and around this system that we provide much more than IT support.

It may be a problem with assigning drive letters. Try this piece of software from M$, it may help.

If it looks like a worm and wriggles like a worm, then it's bait.

I think it's a conspiracy. It doesn't stop there y'know. Have you noticed how most doctors have been to medical school? ;-)

just spent a fruitless 10 minutes searching for this myself. I know it's there, I've seen it.

AFAIK you can only rotate the screen once logged on, so prepare yourself for a lot of hassle.

@olcinm: I attended a short (1 hour) presentation of Uniservity a few weeks ago, as they have won the contract to supply a VLE to all our LEA primary schools. When I spoke to our LEA rep later about why he had chosen this particular VLE when it offered nothing that half a dozen others didn't, he said that he could work with this company and they really understood education. So that seems to answer your thoughts on why some LEA's choose Uniservity. It allows pupils to personalize (to a certain extent) the pages they view, and what some Year 7's were doing with their space put the surrounding Uniservity designed "blocks" to shame (they looked so retro). It didn't seem to offer any functions over and above those available in Moodle, so why should we pay £3.5K a year for something we have no control over, when some of that money can be better spent buying in Moodle expertise? When our EDIT team were part of the council they were all for a Sharepoint based solution throughout the borough. Since they were Tuped their views have changed.

Being serious, these pencils are the business.

here it is. I can't take credit for any of this.

Colour Pencils Reviewed

what took you so long?

There are a couple of points to raise initially, will your chosen VLP be hosted in house or externally? If the latter is the case, then there's a pretty good chance that support is part of the package your school/LEA will have bought into. If you are hosting it yourself there's a chance that you've bought into a package which has a third party coming in to install and configure the server/software for you. If that isn't the case then it'll probably be down to you. Whichever of the above options are chosen, you may then be asked to assist teachers in uploading work, and even producing work to populate the site. When SMT have decided on a VLP, find out if the winning company have any examples with which to populate the site, as it could look bare for an awfully long time before staff come up with anything. This may not be what you want to hear, but it might help you to formulate some questions before any decisions are taken. *EDIT* Find out where "the buck stops", who is ultimately responsible for getting all this together.

not sure if this is exactly the place for this, but just come across this site.

they died with their boot disks on.

The site currently has 5567 members of which 925 are active. I feel it would be safe to say that some people have drifted away as they've gone into different jobs, the private sector etc. What these 925 active members can't guarantee, is a regular income stream to Edugeek. If some of these active members object to paying a subscription, then the amount needed to cover costs and asked of the others increases. As the fee goes up, more people drop out. The fee goes up again, and as people drop out again you get murmurings of discontent along the lines of, "This isn't the organization I joined X years ago, I'm off!" not only is Edugeek losing members, but it's also being bad mouthed and gaining an unsavoury reputation as a rip off site. Then we come to our members abroad who may well have differing costs of living, should we have a graduated scale of fees? Then employ an accountant/secretary to do the paperwork? (By the way, who does the paperwork now? Who pays the phone bills?) It may be unpalatable to some of us on planet Edugeek, but at the moment it's the best and fairest means of supporting all that Edugeek stands for and wishes to accomplish in the future. Now if you'll just let me get down from my soapbox, I'll be on my way.

I'm still trying to convince the school to cough up £50 to donate funds to an open source CMS I use for the school website. It's been 18 months or more since I first approached SMT about this.

I'm about to start my second year at Ultraversity (I appreciate that they probably aren't that highly regarded in some quarters on this forum) and I want to look at the roles of the IT technician (I include NM's in all this) in schools and compare and contrast this with technicians in other faculties. There's a post here where Lee_K_81 says, What I'd be very grateful to see posted here is something along the lines of Science, 8 teachers, 3 technicians (which is the case at my school), and a general drift of how you think your job has changed, if at all, (numbers of machines, additional stuff, e.g. AV etc) in the past 3 years. Initially, I'm looking to build up a general, non scientific, picture of school life. No one will be mentioned by name and any material collected will be used to build up a general background before concentrating on my own school. Hopefully, some of you will find the time this half term to do this, thanks in advance.

If you're referring to what used to be known as "Grant Maintained", then yes, BSF applies to those schools too.

Your well argued critique of a nation's cuisine is unanswerable.

<----- er?