simpsonj

Reading 'The Long Earth' by Terry Pratchett and Steve Baxter, love the concept and the authors are exploring it beautifully. Already looking forward to it's sequel.

Another vote for Aerohive and LAN3, installed over Easter and both it and LAN3 have been excellent.

As far as I'm aware, each PC you buy needs to have a windows licence, whether it's XP, Vista, 7, or 8, of whatever variety of wondows (Home, Pro, Ultimate) which you can then upgrade or downgrade to the version of Windows your school is using and you'll be licenced via the EES. I don't believe you can "trade" licences anymore. However, how anyone is going to audit your licencing (and I don't know who does this?) I do not have a clue. As long as you can prove you've got an EES agreement with the correct Full Time Employee number, I would imagine that would cover any audit, unless they are going to inspect each machine and its purchase history to ensure they had a copy of windows preinstalled...

^This as well. Many Bromcom how to guides were sat unwatched as I went through every issue they covered with different members of staff...

Take a look at the blog @sonofsanta created EduGeek.net - sonofsanta - Blogs for some ideas!

@sonofsanta the impression I got with the first WoT book was that it was almost written as a stand alone book, and it wasn't necessarily conceived as a series. Once Robert Jordan got the go ahead to make an epic sage, he then does everything you mention, people have different motivations, making them appear evil to some, good to others. It does still have the issue that there is a 'dark lord' who is evil, but there are definitely grey areas when it comes to motivation, trust and not everyone likes how the lead characters go about their business... Still, my recommendation would be Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimen, fantastic read.

Kia Swift, whilst pretty unfashionable, seems to be a pretty good car. Girlfriend picked one up for around £600 6 months ago to learn in, and it just flew through its MOT. Not exactly speedy mind, but this might be a good thing! Tbh, at his age, I was just happy to have wheels, so a Peugeot 205 did the trick for me.

There's this method which I haven't tried as I went the official microsoft method of using sysprep. You may also find this website helpful. Should point out I've been using Mandatory profiles for student users for 2 1/2 years with few issues...

Sure thing, we bought two Olympus VN-8600 Voice Recorders, and I haven't heard from the MFL department since! Far easier than trying to use Audacity imo. Looking at where we bought our from, they appear to be out of date, and replaced by something like this: Olympus-WS-811-Digital-Voice-Recorder

We use digital dictaphones, far easier for mfl to manage, and seem to do a good job of picking up sound.

Sounds like a bad hard drive to me...

Is this on laptops or desktops? I've always had the issue with laptops (possible due to long log on times) but never desktop keyboards. Most new laptops have keys that are very hard to prise off, not that some students won't try...

Doesn't work through a proxy, so no good here (for the time being anyway!)

We're looking at getting a bunch of cheap Android 4.0 tablets, at roughly £50 a tablet, I'm willing to see whether they are worth it for pure internet research. However, my main concern is students putting a security code onto the tablet, so does anyone know of a way to either disabling the security of an Andorid device, or resetting an Andorid device to factory settings quickly and easily? For those interested, the device we're looking at is here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/NATPC-M009S-Capacitive-Android-Tablet/dp/B008EXTT3Y/ref=sr_1_5?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1361464088&sr=1-5

At a guess, you might need to set CREATOR OWNER to have full control as well...

Either my blog Windows 7 shutdown through Group Policy Preferences - Blogs - EduGeek.net Or TheScarfedOne's blog should give a good guide on shutting down windows PCs.

My Tag is Archangel CK though I don't get the opportunity to play as much multiplayer as I used, always looking for high scores to aim for, especially on Pinball FX 2!

You could give Unity - Game Engine a try. Otherwise if he's really into RPGs, I remember Neverwinter Nights 2 had a fantastic editor/game creator, along with Skyrim/Elder Scrolls series.

Fully aware that I'll probably be shot down in flames, I have heard from other techies that Windows 8 actually runs very well on old hardware. Just putting that out there as an option...

The reg edit should disable the Capitalisation of each paragraph, everything else is handled by the GPO, including disabling spell check via the proofing tab. There's a bit in one of the links that mentions adding a lot of numbers to a GPO, these numbers are aspects of Word and its GUI, which are then disabled. I'll double check when I'm back in on Monday, but I'm 99% certain the GPO worked and spell check couldn't be turned back on.

The only way I've found is via the exam profile, so I logged in with each exam account (We only have 6 where this is necessary), unticked 'capitalize beginning of table or cell' option, and logged off, saving that setting. In the future, I 'll make a mandatory profile and assign that to student accounts. The other option would be to make the word options settings change as admin account, export the registry, and then carry out he following: 'Only little snag I had, there is NOTHING which turns of Auto Capitalization ‘at the beginning of a table or cell’ under the auto formatting in Word Options. The only way around this is to modify HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Word\Data manually. This is a nice big binary value. Fun stuff!.. Using comparison software, I checked the value on/off and compared two registry exports. My code writes six 0′s disabling this.' Taken from the third link. Then assign the registry edit as a GPO. Non are particularly 'clean' solutions, but they should work. If anyone finds a neater way, I'd love to hear it.

Just wondering how other people track who uses iPads, and how you monitor web usage? We run SECURUS, which tells me the username of the user, the time and which machine they are using, along with a screenshot of the AUP violation. I would ideally like something similar for a deployment of iPads. Now that I think about it, you could put in some kind of RADIUS authentication that kicks in everytime the iPad needs to connect to the interent, which could potentially give you a log of all the websites visited. Would still need to look through the log on a daily basis, and if you had a substantial amount of iPads, that could take awhile. If anyone has or knows of a neater solution, I'm all ears...

As long as I have my towel, I'll be fine...

Indeed it is The only difference being the repeating of the shutdown command on the hour for 8 hours, which helps when students turn the PC back on, or were still logged in when the initial shutdown command had been sent.

It's that time of the year again when I have to start looking at disabling spell check on Word for various Mock Exams. If only Wordpad had headers and footers, I wouldn't need to go through this every year... Anyway, having updated to Office 2010 over the summer, my previous group policy objects aren't going to work with Office 2010, so time for a new way of doing things. First of all, I'll credit the website where I got the info, and feel free to follow them rather than my ramblings! This site will pretty much guide you through the entire process: http://wgsnetman.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/disable-ms-word-2007-proofing-tools-via.html It states its for Office 2007, but it works just fine for Office 2010 as well. You'll also need to download the admin templates from here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=18968 And there is another method you might want to try here: http://www.migee.com/2011/12/06/disable-grammar-spell-check-thesaurus-proofing-in-office-2010/ Having read through the above links, I downloaded and installed the Admin templates into my Sysvol group policy directory, and then carried out the instructions from the first link, including the extra instruction in the comments section you might miss: "Office 2010 no longer has the Group Policy option to turn off the Spell Checker. However it this can still be achieved by writing a DWORD value to the registry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Proofing Tools\1.0\Office Value name "WordSpellingOptions" Value=0 No Spell Checking. Value=5 Spell Checking Enabled." With the group policy and registry setting in place, I tested it. Spelling had definitely been disabled, and I couldn't access any of the options to turn it back on. Also the shortcut to run spellcheck had been disabled. Sadly, Grammar tests were still being carried out, and my Word document filled with little green squiggly lines. I edited the GPO, and went to User Config - Polices - Admin Templates - Microsoft Word 2010 - Word options - Proofing and disable anything and everything to do with spell and grammar checking, including everything under AutoCorrect and AutoFormat as you type. This completed, I tested again, and success, the squiggly green worms had disappeared. However, there is one last remaining issue I can't work out, which is that the first letter of each paragraph is being automatically Capitalised. I should be able to solve this by manually logging onto each Exam account, and unticking the 'capitalize beginning of table or cell’ option. I would far prefer a network soloution to this, if anyone finds one, please let me know! Please note this was tested on a Windows 7 PC, with Office 2010 in a Server 2008R2 environment.