jcollings

This may be of interest to someone current vacancies

Yep - in dreamweaver, next to where your hyperlink properties are there is a drop down to determine the target of the URL (I think it's called that) - choose blank and it will open in a new window (after you have re-uploaded the page)

We use Sage - it's still the DOS version! Our finance team seem stuck on it and don't want to upgrade!

We have been supporting several feeder primaries for 8 years or so now. We took on an extra person to do it (funded as part of our technology college bid). In the main it worked well in the early years. We provided a set number of hours per week to each of the schools. I also talked to them and advised on strategy etc. We've also teamed them up with some of our suppliers so they get similar pricing to us. Overall it has been a success but it has also been challenging at times. Some issues we had :- 1) Staff leaving and being replaced with less experienced staff here. This has meant the more experienced techies are having to go to the primaries until the new staff settle in and grow their skills. 2) Primaries expecting to be able to phone anytime and get a techie out to them. Despite SLAs they still do it and when they are struggling it's awful hard to say no 3) The secondary school ICT has grown like mad so we need to spend more and more time on it - this leaves less for the primary schools. 4) Some schools had us alongside external paid for support - this working relationship can be fractious especially when the external support is doing things in a way you think (know?) is not best practice. On the plus side we have rebuilt several schools infrastructure for them and sorted an awful lot of messes out. This has put those schools in an excellent postion IT wise. Of course as most of our services were provided free of charge they liked us all the more! Personally I feel it's a great thing to do - it strengthens links & ensures schools get quality support and advice from people who have nothing to gain from selling x,y or z product.

Jack Straw is one of the other guests.

As localzuk says - SIMS personnel is pretty robust. Most of our staff can't see personnel details such as addresses. The ones that can are meant to! It is pretty easy to make it that way and I can't imagine you'd find a product that is much different.

Next week here in Cumbria! I am so looking forward to the break!

Not sure how to change the refresh rate globally but you can change which panels people see globally so it would be straightforward to turn off panels for all users (and back on again) centrally so you wouldn't need to login to everyones profiles.

Here there is me as IT Manager, 1 assistant manager & 2 junior techs. We are all term time only + 4 weeks. 1 person is in most days in the hols doing maintenance. We are a 1400 student secondary, 175 staff, 650 laptops/PCs and all the gubbins that goes with that + supporting a few feeder primary schools. We manage fine not being full time. If we do need people to work extra in the hols for a big kit refresh etc. they get paid overtime (I don't but I just accept some extra work goes with the salary)

Hope this of use to someone Lancashire County Council's Vacancies Database A terrific school by all accounts.

I would also add that if you feel there isn't a social life at school try and start one. There may be lots of staff all privately thinking the same thing. Stick a few notices up - try and get something moving - sports, quiz night, karaoke - anything really. We have a few people here who organise stuff and it usually goes down well. A bunch of us play 5 a side in the sports hall on Friday and sometimes go for a curry/beer. It all makes work a bit more fun.

That's one of the things I like. I also enjoy spending a bit of time out of the office, mixing with the kids.

We get 5 lunches for 1 25 min duty at about £1.80 a time so 5*£1.80 for 25 minutes work - seems like a reasonable deal to me. Also it saves me having to remember to put cash on our cashless catering system!

We have a similar scheme. If you do a 25 min (half of lunch) duty you either get a free lunch everyday (upto a certain value) or you can opt to be paid. Ours too is around the £20 and hour mark. There is a reason for it being quite high but I can't remember what it is for the life of me now.!

I think we paid about 5K but no install fee. Go to say we've never looked back - it identifies so many little issues such as post registration truancy very quickly and easily. It's really helped us hammer attendance issues.

Yep - Lesson monitor costs - mind you it wasn't 7k for us!

I have to say that we started doing a bit of VM stuff a while back and I was suprised how cheaply you can get it up and running. VM capable servers are pretty cheap these days and ESXi is free!

+1 for that - I thought it was one of the best films I've seen in a long time and is Tarantino at his best. The tension & suspense in some parts of the film are awesome.

We use Microsoft VB express & C# express for programming as it's on the computing A level. They are free which is always good. We also use Scratch lower down the school which the kids seem to love.

Maybe they do know but want the technician to think about how he/she would like to develop and what areas they feel they need more training in. Before appraisals I certainly ask my team to think about those things so we can try to align their wants/needs to the schools. It doesn't for a second mean I am not fully aware of how I think they should develop and which areas I think they need to train on - it's just helps kickstart a reflective process on their part.

If you register here SupportNet there is a load of documentation on basic report writing. The report writer is simple to use for basic reporting but can be a bit tricky for more complex reports. Personally I sat down with the books and got going easily enough and have just picked stuff up as I've gone along. IMHO the Capita courses are expensive and too slow. I've attached the basic reporting guide from Support Net for you to have a look at. How_to_design_a_simple_report_11137.pdf

Sounds permission based to me. I'd put yourself in the pastoral manager group as that should definitely have the right options.

Yep- I do lots of data management in our school, assessment, profiles, attendance data, Census production etc all come under my umbrella. I had an MIS role in most of my posts and love it, it adds some variety to the working week.

Wasn't that the President of Argentinas wife??

I buy those too and I can assure you what the man says is true. They really are non-iron.