beeswax

What do you mean we didn’t tell you were going too suddenly and without warning change the site! A pedant writes, should read we're, and to. Bazzing site by the way.

Lenovo

www.sciencegeek.net

Now there's an idea :twisted:

I visited a Norman Foster designed school last year, and the ground floor classrooms had glass walls, floor to ceiling. The school has to employ extra cleaners to wipe off the greasy marks which build up every day. At the end of each period as the pupils poured out into the wide central corridor the noise level was very high, more like being in a swimming pool during the height of the summer holidays. SMT acknowledged that they would have liked to do certain things differently, but there was no wiggle room where Norm was concerned. It's all or nothing. You would probably be better off using a firm of architects without such a strong ego at the head, and that's what you'll probably get.

You can always sell your hair if there's enough length and the quality's good (can't tell from the picture)

try this link for MS core fonts.

and no computer suites...... and no corridors ...... Did you know, if you get rid of internal corridors and make the kids circulate round the outside of the building you might have enough classrooms to accomodate all of the kids in your school? Novel idea that. I've been trying to find that article by Prof. Stephen Hepple myself. Didn't have time to read it the other week and of course I've lost it now. *EDIT* It would help if I could spell Heppell! The article is here and the relevant section is

and Arial 'normal' i.e., not bold, not italic. I did actually find the answer by posting on Edugeek, but it was over two years ago.

Hi Zak, I had a similar problem years ago, suddenly all my websites were only displaying Arial Italic. For some reason all the other versions of Arial had gone, deleted. I still don't know why, but once I'd reinstalled the missing font versions, everything was back to normal.

Happy New Year Grommit. Present at the meeting when I asked the question were the NM and the Head. However, as Grumbledook says above, you get what you ask for, and as I don't expect to be party to any detailed negotiations, this "seemingly minor" point (in the eyes of others) may not arise.

As you know, I'm just a humble techie and don't have that much influence on our head. Interesting news about secondary schools. I wish something would be sorted to be honest. Does Uniservity do all those things we require of a VLE? Parental Access, SIMS access etc? Does it sit on a platform like MOSS 2007, or is it bespoke? Zbysiu (mentally on leave since 1983)

...and a happy new year to you Dave. you caught us on the hop with *EDIT* Uniservity. 8O Though it looks better than the one I thought it would be. What about the secondary schools? Or are you still a mushroom on this? As far as I know Oldham secondary schools have gone with StudyWiz Are all the primary schools falling into line with LEA recommendations?

:idea: Topical Tip: I make mistakes when I'm typing as well, but I've found the Backspace key quite useful at times.

It is thought the name Santa Claus is derived from Sinterklaas, the Dutch name for the character based on St. Nicholas. In Washington Irving's History of New York, (1809), Sinterklaas was Americanized into "Santa Claus" but lost his bishop's apparel, and was at first pictured as a thick-bellied Dutch sailor with a pipe in a green winter coat. (Both Wikipedia) Ho ho ho.

That's Birtspeak, actually, and reflects the legacy of management-speak still pervasive in the higher echelons of the BBC as a result of John Birt's time as DG of that organization. That's why all of the extracts used in Private Eye are taken from BBC publications, be it job adverts or vision statements. What I find slightly troubling is the vision statement published in PE a couple of weeks or so ago about cross-media confluence, and that it made perfect sense to me!

We're going ahead with it as well, with pupils tackling it in their own time.

If you're using MS products there's the annual cost of the licensing. What is the age of the machines and how often do you replace them? Do you buy into any sort of managed service, such as an off site partner to run the servers? (I've just noticed where you're based, so you may do some things a little differently there) Looking at a past budget would also be a good idea.

@SteveB_NI though this comes a little late for the meeting, thanks anyway. From our talks with the (quite senior) reps we were told techies would be kept in the schools in which they currently work. I asked if we would be glorified gofers, unpacking boxes etc and they said no. I asked if we would be given admin passwords and they said yes. but as they said, they haven't decided if they're going to bid yet.

Yeah, I forgot to ask, how is the ice cream round?

You may find a useful font here

As with people who own Ferraris and other expensive baubles and don't put them through a machine wash for fear of spoiling the paintwork, if your Star Wars mugs are valuable to you then hand wash is the only way.

Our head has bought an Xbox for his teenage sons, but he has AOL at home. This is the quote from the Xbox site - "Will AOL Broadband work with XboxLive? It is currently not possible to connect to Xbox Live using AOL Broadband service provided over DSL. Although we have been working with AOL, we have not come up with a mutually agreeable workaround at this time. We are continuing to actively work with AOL Broadband to develop a solution to this issue. We apologise for any inconvenience and please check back here for updated information." Does anyone know of a way round this problem?

I can sympathise with that sentiment. I was a freelance photographer for 25 years. My Christmas do's (just me) were so poor that even I stopped attending.

This is a really difficult question you've raised as it depends on which point of view you're coming from and how much influence you have. Are you an NM, techie, head teacher or BSF consultant? Having been to a meeting of IT staff and the council bods responsible for laying down the ground rules for the BSF bids this afternoon, and having met with two representatives of a large company already undertaking the provision of managed services to several regions of the UK last Friday morning, I can see there's already a long way to go until the two meet. However, this doesn't mean you should do nothing to try and get your voice heard. What our council wants is biometric technology, mobile technology and an MLE/PLE amongst a host of other things. The head teachers are a hard-headed bunch, but quite often feel out of their depth when it comes to IT. Fortunately, some of them recognize that taking along their NM to these meetings can be useful, though there's still a lot of perceived secrecy. If I can give you a couple of examples from this afternoon; Schools will have a local choice fund (between 10%-20% of the school budget) to reflect their own specialism/priorities, and a Learning Platform - fully functional to at least BECTA specification and incorporating MIS data (existing content and data will be migrated in). This suggests to me that schools will eventually have no say in their choice of Learning Platform. In the case of our secondary schools, this presents a problem in that the council will announce tomorrow (Friday) what its choice of Learning Gateway for primary schools will be. If it’s the one that I’ve been told (off the record) it will be, then it doesn’t incorporate a VLE, this has to be provided separately. However, the company I spoke with on Friday morning about their idea of a managed service are in partnership with another VLE provider, and I get the impression that several heads will push for this company to run IT provision in our LEA’s secondary schools. I’m not trying to put you off your wish list/blue skies thinking here, but just want to give you some sort of insight into the sort of powerplay which goes on behind the scenes. I hope you are in a position to exert some influence on the decision making process, and don’t lose sight of who should benefit from this, the pupils.