beeswax

If you're a fee paying school.

'Fraid not. I'll just have to keep looking . *EDIT* Found it (it's the top link, Mark, ta)!Thought it was the beginning of a thread rather than part way down.

There was a post not so long ago regarding the number of technicians the Science department has, for example, and the number of classrooms/teachers they had to manage, in contrast to IT techies who basically have to manage the whole school. If anyone could point me to it I'd be grateful.

Sadly, with the current price of CD/DVD drives, and the amount of time it takes to get an elastic band in place, you have to wonder which is more cost effective and time-efficient.

Once services are fully managed, the chances are that your servers will also be off site. When I last looked at this, you had to buy into a separate VLE (Granada Learning was the recommended one), so there was the price of this on top of the LG. The Learning Gateway itself handled MIS data etc.

They may not go wrong, but they might not be quite right either.

@ elsiegee40 I've sent you a PM

The home page isn't loading for me again this morning. *EDIT*And it took ages for this post to appear in the thread.

The main problem I see here is that the teacher is on the point of delivering a lesson, and s/he isn't going to spend 10-15 minutes of that lesson on the phone to a help desk. Some staff may be snotty to techs, but at least we're on site ready to respond.

I think the programme will naturally pick up speed as LEA's learn from the mistakes of those who who went before them. However, one of the main problems still seems to be that there just aren't enough people in the building trade to cover all the bases and council staff have been pared down to the bone over the years. One of the fears here is that in order to speed the process we'll get into "flat pack" buildings which will go up quickly, not necessarily meet the needs of the school communities, and within a few years start falling apart.

The Uniservity demonstration was similarly ill attended, with possibly three of the thirteen secondary schools showing up. There was a second "sitting" of the VLE in the afternoon, so maybe more people turned up. When our NM phoned the various schools' NM's they said they knew nothing about it, though the email invite I saw had all the secondary schools cc'd in. Perhaps these heads weren't interested, and having spent £thousands on their own VLE in some cases, as they were far sighted enough to realize that they had to get moving on this, chose to ignore their siren calls. The problem now is that we'll have a Tower-of-Babel-Aftermath scenario with everyone speaking a different language. @ Sahmeepee: I know what you mean about setting up a Moodle site for the 14-19 Diploma pupils, but it goes against the grain to have to set up another VLE for something that is in actual fact day to day school education, and could be accomplished if everyone had a common platform. I think adding another tier just complicates matters.

Another thing came to mind late this afternoon, and that is the 14 to 19 Diplomas secondary schools will be undertaking. This means pupils traveling to different schools for various parts of their education, and I would have thought that singing from the same VLE was desirable. Of the five schools involved in the north of our LEA, two have signed up with FrogTeacher, one uses Moodle, a fourth doesn't seem to have anything at all, not even a website, and our school, which has Moodle up and running, but is waiting, as are the teaching staff, for a final decision on which way we are going to go. I've been told that the final choice is down to the Head of ICT and me, but as this choice is limited to Moodle or Uniservity, despite making our views known on which VLE we preferred (Scholaris) .

I only managed to download the first doc, for some reason Parts 2, 3 & 4 don't want to play.

@Zak A few questions are: Is the server onsite? Definitely not Does it integrate with AD? Not yet – see Edu-IT’s post above How does it get access to SIMS & PARS? Read only from SIMS. Web parts on the way. In theory, they won’t have anything to do with it, and that could be why they’re looking forward to it. It will be managed off site. Teachers will receive training in how to put material online. The problem I foresee here is that this will be an electronic repository for the sort of handouts you get in class now. Some teachers will see the potential, but for the majority it will be an extra burden they will have to fit around teaching. I reported this back to our head of ICTAC (ICT Across the Curriculum) and her response was, “where are we going to find the time” and, “what’s the LEA rep’s email address so that I can put my point of view to him”. As this (email address) is in the public domain, and knowing how busy she was, I gave her the address. As your school is due to close in about two year’s time, this off the shelf solution may be the best for you, bearing in mind that a period of 18 months is not unusual for managing the change to a fully fledged VLE. Because of the negotiating power an LEA has, they may also have secured a favourable price for Uniservity. It may be worth talking to your head about it. Most of the sites on show at school portal are very samey looking, three columns with the central column being the widest, and left and right for navigation, but pupils do have the ability to “pimp” the central section. We were shown some pupils’ live examples which quite frankly made the rest of the site look amateur. I don’t know if Uniservity has a graphics department, but if they do the budget must be miniscule and perhaps runs to three crayons. As Sahmeepee said (above), the backend for teachers is very simple, looking something like FCK Editor, or any number of WYSIWYG editors, but with the ability to add voice and video. It was demonstrated how easy it was to cut and paste material, though his choice of the BBC weather page did raise the question of copyright in my mind (there can’t be many techies here who haven’t been asked to make a copy of a cd or dvd for a member of staff, just for their personal use). Left to teachers, this could be a potential minefield. After the demonstration I spoke to our man in the LEA and asked why this particular VLE had been chosen above others which offered just the same range of functionality. His reply was that the company had a good record of dealing with education partners, and, to paraphrase, “understood the market”, and I don’t intend that to be taken as a derogatory statement. There has to be some criteria for choosing a VLE, and if there is nothing to choose between the actual software, I suppose you have to look at what other bonuses the different companies are offering.

I had a short demonstration (around 1 hour) this morning with a rushed Q & A at the end. It was no better or worse than any of half a dozen offerings with the BECTA sticker. The site design was terrible though, and looking at the stuff on school portal it doesn't surprise me. When I said that it was all well and good having Uniservity up and running, but to begin with it's a heck of a big canvas to fill, and did they have any prepared content to populate the sites with, I got a flat no. Our BSF man within the LEA then went on to add that teachers would already have plenty of stuff to use such as PowerPoint presentations and work they had prepared for lessons which they could upload to the site. I feel the LEA is nudging us towards this solution by giving us to the end of next week (8th February) to take advantage of the "special discount pricing". The representative from Zak's school (I don't know if it was the head or a senior maths wallah) asked quite a lot of questions relevant to teaching staff, and was ready to sign up to it on the spot. I just wonder how many VLE's he's looked at. I honestly felt as if I was being indulged when I asked questions. It's proprietary software, and runs counter to the case the LEA support team were arguing last year, of going with a Sharepoint based solution. The council intranet is all Sharepoint, they have in-house expertise in configuring and maintaining it, and from what I gather, it's all going to be swept aside and replaced by Uniservity. Most of the primary schools have signed up to it, and in order to bring some cohesion to the whole enterprise they want all secondary school to do the same. Unfortunately, three school are running Fronter (at the LEA's behest I believe, though I'll stand correction on that) and at least two are using Frog Teacher, one of which only signed on the dotted line last November. Another secondary is going it alone with MOSS, and doing a good job from what I've heard. There's a lot of pressure on heads in our LEA to reach decisions as we're in Wave 4 of BSF (2010), and this comes on top of government requirements regarding ICT in schools. Whichever VLE they chose I don't expect to be involved in it when it's up and running, and so in a way I can wash my hands of it, but I don't like to think that our school is being sold a pup. This is all part and parcel of the ethos of working in a school, for the school, and that's another story.

Sharepoint User Group may have the answer. It is mainly business-orientated, but any questions I've asked re educational use have been answered.

As the father of two daughters myself and having been a school governor myself, I can appreciate that time spent in school is important, and that structured play is more useful than "dead time" playing online dressing up games, but your ladies are only doing online what generations of young ladies did by dressing up in their parents' clothes. There's a social dimension involved here. Your pupils are interacting and using peer review to assess each other's work, and this can be taken and used elsewhere. These are important developmental stages in a person's life. I also think a little R 'n' R is useful for recharging the batteries. The first thing on my mind when I woke this morning, actually the second thing, was that you had been slightly tongue in cheek, it had been a long week etc. and that I had perhaps been a little over critical.

Whilst I have every sympathy with your indignation David, I worry that you have effectively censored what these pupils do in their free time. I read your posts with interest as they are usually thoughtful and well argued. The care and protection of pupils in schools is paramount, but because the seemingly vacuous Stardoll offends your personal values, is that any reason to stifle it? Have you consulted with anyone over this decision? Please don't take what I say the wrong way. It may be that I write this because I don't have the same moral certainties as you, and sometimes I spend an age debating with myself if I should ban a particular URL.

Thank you E.J. Thribb

Sorry, can't help you there. Saw it in my local rag today, that's all.

I have to agree with you here Mark. People are asking for all these skills at a relatively junior level yet don't seem to realize how much work most of us would have to put in to reach this standard. *EDIT* that "etc"worries me

Just seen this vacancy in my local paper, Little Lever School is looking to appoint a technician on scale £15153-£16217. Closing date Feb 8th. Job not advertised on school (Joomla, but not Sysmanmk's) website that I can see, so here's the number -01204 333300

Can sympathise with you there. I once took on the overflow of a couple of wedding photographers, and waiting for the lab to return the shots was terrible. I couldn't sleep and eventually gave it up after a few months.

Came across an interesting concept this morning but not had too much time to look into it yet, but I thought I'd share it anyway.

Feedback on this - CCleaner did the job. Thanks again.