firefox_2006

We have OFSTED in today, I kind of hope they pick up on how little the learning platform is being used across the school but I doubt it somehow. I think the VLE is built into our rather complex improvement plan, but kind of gets ignored.

The key thing is to get backing from ALL of SMT on this, as without it, it WILL go nowhere fast. Staff will try and come up with any old excuse not to use it (our head of MFL refuses to use it). Try and cunningly "force" reluctant staff into using by putting things on there that requires them to login to get access to, rather than on a shared drive. I need to speak to our Assistant Head again to get ours moving as progress has kind of haltered somewhat. Good luck with it!

Its a mixture we get in there, from YR7's to YR11's (6th form just go to common room upstairs) so finding something that caters for all is difficult, thanks for suggestion, might give it ago. More welcome....

Hi We have been asked to setup the laptop in the school hall at lunchtimes to show either a DVD/TV program. We have been showing topgear through iplayer the past couple of days, but this has gone down like a lead balloon (girls complained). We have a few DVD's which the bursar has purchased (the simpsons is going on AGAIN today). But what else could we show? I thought about BBC News? Any ideas? Something that might capture the students a bit.

Pivot? Stick man animator - that must count?

N+, CISCO, MCTS (Microsoft), MCITP (Microsoft again)....the list goes on and on......I have been looking at doing some myself for a while but you need to be disciplined to do self study (which I am not) otherwise firebrand training and the like are an option (bootcamp or accelerated learning), but be prepared to pay at least £2K for full MCTS.

The SENCo here bought two copies of Dragon Naturally Speaking and wanted me to show her the in and outs of it. The trouble is, the Philips digital voice recorders don't recorder in mp3 or wav formate (.czr?) so you need some technical knowledge to convert the audio before putting it into Dragon software. Also the program is suppose to train to an individuals voice and create a profile. All of this was not taken into account before buying it! We have the Assistant Head teaching some Media Studies students in the 6th form because there actual teacher has never used Adobe CS3 before! Had the Head of IT asking for videos and training materials as I think the media studies teacher is finally going to get himself up to speed lol

I have just removed IE9RC as I noticed it was not playing correctly with our school Joomla site, back using IE8 now.

Hi We have a strange issue when students are working in Access 2007 and trying to save the documents to their user areas, the workstations just freeze/lockup. Is there a reason for this? regards firefox_2006

Liam H I have been in contact with Alex Stender at LondonWeb, he is in the process of getting one of their "trusted and reputable" resellers to help us out, seeing as our current one has totally mugged us off (even LondonWeb can't get hold of him!). Their number is 020 8349 4500. I have just had to go and re-assign another lot of keyboards and mice for Period 2 lesson (the hubs are cable managed under the desk, but somehow manage to un-assign themselves).

LiamH Like yourself I had been waiting since last week for an email that seemingly was never going to come, so I gave up and phoned Londonweb and they have advised me to try a few things and have offered to "dial in" to one of our stations which I am setting up now. We have a spare softxpand station (luckily) which I am trying to setup for classroom use but I have tried 3 USB hubs now and cannot get a second keyboard and mouse to connect, when I connected the keyboard and mouse directly to the pc (not via hub) they worked! Going to keep messing about when I have time/finally get another keyboard and mouse to work. I did not realise that running softxpand in trial mode causes it to restart after 6 hours! I have been doing this as we have had various issues and getting the codes unlocked everytime is a pain!

Compare what they said to what Ron Atkinson said....If Sky was/is any decent reputable broadcaster then they should be sacked (as Ron Atkinson was). They have apparently been "removed" from any envolvement it tonights broadcast anyway.

I have also sent an email as well to londonweb.

Currently: SoftXpand SEN Software: ball ache to setup

LiamH I share your pain, Since we had it installed over a year ago it has been a completed headache...no migraine since day one. Cable management is KEY to this system, all the USB hubs need to be locked away and assigned appropriately. Also, can you get MovieMaker or Google Earth to work by anychance? Our reselller had to write a "hack" to get MovieMaker to work (which is now not working). Our stations reboot at random times throughout the day (you don't even need to be logged on, an idle station just restarted as me and the assistant head looked at it!) Poor performance all round (I suspect this is due to the way in which our reseller has configured the main tower stations) means we have YET to get 100% use out of it yet. Oh and to top it all off, our reseller has totally mugged us off, leaving us with a faulty solution that does not work. We our now persuing legal action, its gonna get messi.

Any I.T. clubs being run? get them to assist maybe in IT lessons? "wet playtimes" get them to setup dvd in hall/theatre...any boring mundane job that a trained monkey could do...we once had a student who liked to tamper/hack the computers so we got him to test some of the old PC's/monitors and the bursar came down and stopped him for "health and safety reasons" something to bear in mind I suppose.

Hi Has anybody managed to get this to work? I have managed to get it working on my work PC (Quad Core, 6 GB RAM, HD Graphics) but not very successfully elsewhere on the curriculum Dell Optiplex 360 stations we have. I have tried Canary build of Google Chrome, but the teacher cannot get it to work when logged on as him, but when I log on as admin/tech user, it works ok. Google Body - Google Labs Shame because it looks quite useful.

Nobody knows how to do this......?

Supernatural?? Sam and Dean Winchester.....SCFI...can be a very funny show...they even did a spoof episode last series on Knight Rider to CSI (one with the Ginger bloke).

Hi I would like to know how to add a login form to an article on our school Joomla website, similar to the one used here > Blakeley Heath Primary School - Welcome to our website! I would like to get staff to use the VLE more, and seeing as the school website is setup via group policy as the homepage in IE, it would be useful. thanks firefox_2006

iTalc - Supposed to be good, not tried it for a while...

Why did you leave? I might apply for this....closer than my current school (extra 5mins in bed, yay!)

I think you have hit the nail on the head here. This is the issue I am having with our VLE, approximately 15-20% off teaching staff are using the VLE at the minute, which is not really good enough. Our Assistant Head is getting me to print off the usernames and passwords for parents this week, but what's the point when staff and students are not really using enough? Like anything in schools, unless Senior Manglement push it, it WILL get ignored. I think more regular training might help, and I kind of like the idea of "Learning Platform Champions" to bolster the use of it, and providing after school drop in sessions maybe, but this needs to come from the top down.

We have been using SoftXpand for approximately a year now and have had nothing but problems with it so far. The main fault being a reboot issue where the main tower unit just randomily restarts (sometimes several times during a lesson) causing students to loose work. We have sent "dump files" off to miniframe in Israel on several occasions and are just in a vicious circle at the minute. Every new release has some bug attached to it which is infuriating (version 3 + always asks students to reset their password as it has expired (which it hasn't)) and you have to hack Movie Maker to get it to work on all the stations. Also the much coverted single point of failure issue makes me think whilst this is a good solution in theory....it has some way to go in order to be a complete alternative to standard desktops.

Hi As far as I'm aware you don't actually install the application on the server, just the adm templates. I could be wrong as it was a while since I set it up on our 08 server. Bet you got loads of phone calls ask why this and that was not working....ooops!