JLunn

Network Manager Grade - NJC E £21,156 37 hours per week, 41 weeks per annum (term time, plus two additional weeks) The main purpose of this role is to lead and manage a team responsible for the operational efficiency and on-going maintenance and development of the School’s ICT systems and infrastructure. Play a key role in developing the vision for IT within the school always maintaining an overview of the needs of all users. Provide strategic advice to the Senior Leadership Team. To support all stakeholders of Teignmouth Community School in raising standards. NO SIMS Support in the job description outside server hardware. Closing date Wednesday 10 July 2013 For further details and an application pack, please email Nicola Radford, Personnel Officer [email protected]. If you would like to discuss the role before applying please contact Jon Lunn, Vice Principal 01626 774091 or email [email protected]

We have trialed a couple of 7" and 9" Chinese imports in order to upskill our technicians and ICT teachers on Android 4. We also bought 4 x 9" from Ebuyer Android for some teachers to trial with Ebuyer creating a custom ROM that was helpful. As a result I would advise trying to get a dual core processor and definitely 1 Gb of RAM minimum as this improves performance hugely. The main issue with lower spec tablets is the feeling of lag that occurs when browsing the internet with gestures like pinch and zoom. If you pay the little bit extra for the higher specs and Adroid 4.1 (will highly likely be upgradeable to 4.2 when released with miracast which the family would like) you will actually get a device that rivals the Apple products due to its interface customisation abilities and the allimportant microSD slot for all their music and videos. Jon

Just seen that AB Tutor have released V7. Also seen that the cost for each tutor licence is now £250 for 1. Looks like I will have to start my approx. 4 year search for a more cost effective classroom desktop management solution. Or stick with versions 5 & 6. Why is it education software suppliers seem to all follow the business plan of start low (£40 a tutor with unlimited clients was an excellent model for AB Tutor and moved me away from Netsupport) and then when you have your clients increase the costs astronomically. Why not just keep prices low, develop the product and get more schools. Fingers crossed iTalc continues developing.

Good question, we haven't got that far as yet. The iPhone & Android App interface is trying to replicate the Apple TV in that you get a list of servers to choose from to transmit. We have only had a quick look at the McTivia web interface and the App settings. We are waiting for our 10" Android tablets to complete our trials. We have however found an issue with the App in that it currently doesn't send audio. So a YouTube video is sent with decent frame-rate to the projector but the audio comes from your handheld device which is a bit of a major issue. We are emailing the developers to see if it is work in progress.

eBay. It arrived last week and is another brand (can't remember of the top of my head) but trials with an android phone and an iPhone are impressive. Another benefit is when used in conjunction with the phones cameras you get mobile visualisers. Very exciting.

I totally agree with you. As a member of the dark side (an assistant principal, used to be head of ICT) I spend a lot of time asking people to justify the huge percentage proposed spend of IT budgets on iPads related to value for money and educational impact and value. After they have waffled for 10 minutes they usually end up actually saying nothing. I ensure every major ICT purchase has maximum educational benefit for as many students as possible. We are trialling 7" and 10" android 4 tablets. ICS has made such a difference. We have been very impressed with initial trials. The ability to create custom ROMS and export them to microSD gives you an instant cloning support sustem and with the 7" costing £50 and the 10" £120 there is a simple argument straight away. Combine with this device things get exciting McTiVia - Bring EVERYTHING on your Mac to HDTV without wire If all else fails ask the apple demo to demonstrate the use of MyMaths then they will be stuffed. The lack of flash support is a major major limitation. Where Apple will continue to compete with Google and Microsoft and make things difficult for their products. Android with its open marketplace will have support for all.

We are looking to use these McTiVia - Bring EVERYTHING on your Mac to HDTV without wire with android tablets and the MirrorOp app.

We are looking to split the role of our current retiring Systems Manager into 2 separate posts. A true network manager with no responsibility for SIMS apart from the server hardware and a SIMS manager that has no technician responsibilities but is expected to be of technical background as opposed to an administration background. Both positions are NJC E - £22313. More details and contact details at Teignmouth Community School - Staff Jon Lunn Assistant Principal Teignmouth Community School

Would people mind giving a rough ball park figure on how much they get to spend per year with their approximate school size? Our budget this year is £70,000 for a school of approx 1050 students. This includes: Braodband services all licencing annual commitments (Microsoft, Adobe, Ghost, Smoothwall etc.) Support contracts with LA for SIMS Consumables All hardware & software development Basically everything!! Jon

We are also at a similar stage. Having tried to upgrade and failing we took the opportunity to buy a new server and install a fresh 2.2 version. We are now in the process of moving courses across whilst parallel running the old 1.9. Like Phil we have seen this as an opportunity to have a fresh start which is probably not a bad thing due to the major architectural changes under the hood. Upgrading and potentially copying across 6 years of dross was probably not a good idea anyway. Luckily we have a nice apprentice technician who will be tasked with transferring the 1000+ courses across!!!

Apologies Tom and to the smoothwall team I should have mentioned we only use the free smoothwall version 3 and not the latest commercial version. Jon Lunn

We have been using AB Tutor for 3 years now as we found it to be the most cost effectivve classroom desktop management solution available for a network of over 700 systems with 15 suites. The licencing based around Tutor licences and unlimited client is by far the cheapest solution for us. We started looking at Impero along with Securus (as these were the two recommended in the Edugeek forums) as we wanted a network activity monitoring solution and not necessarily a classroom desktop management solution. Like most we struggled with keeping up with the filtering of the hourly creation of Proxy sites. We just didn't have the time to be monitoring all our students activity and disabling the sites in our Smoothwall filter or at Grid level filter that they were bringing into school. We needed on screen monitoring. Both Impero & Securus provide us with this and Securus has just resleased flesh tone recognition which was very tempting but the reason we chose Impero was that Securus was still a retrospective action system which relied on a technician reading through logs daily and disabling accounts. Impero developers assured us that they would consider adding to their policy structure the functionality of when a user breaks a particular policy their internet is disabled wherever they log on to the network and can only be enabled by a console user. This means in one fell swoop we would cut proxy site use as as soon as a few are caught and loose access to the internet for a period of account (depending on their previous offences) then others will not risk it. At the moment I don't know how much of this is a sales pitch but we payed a price for the licence now that enables us free upgrades to version 3 which would cost us double to buy. The fact is that Impero and AB Tutor functionality overlap quite a lot. If you only had the budget to buy one and you have no desktop management solution at the moment I would advise you go for Impero. If you can afford both AB Tutor is far more polished after the recent upgrade and is far more intuative for classroom teachers to use. Jon Lunn