Sylv3r

I contemplated giving access to our staff to update the content on our XIBO system, but after looking at it the staff I had in mind would never have managed! If we can simplify in, then we will probably go down that route, but at the minute its not taking us too long to manage.

Thanks for the look around - really impressive school. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

I know some people are using google analytics to track number of logins, but I don't think you can break it down into individuals.

We are going to look into Lync to do this sort of task.

We have a facebook page that updates our twitter page when posts have been made. As has been said above, general users cant make new posts but are able to comment on existing posts made by a site administrator.

We have a class set of iPAD's which we use in a crude sort of form as an e-Book for some documents. I certainly see an eBook into the future being beneficial to education - not quite talking about a 'paperless office' but the amount of money spent on reprographics, purchasing new text books each time a course changes / is updated may be cost effective. Management is certainly the biggest issue, and I think without a device for all you are limited to what you can do. If their was some way (which I think I remember schools in american doing) of 'loaning' titles to the students devices as per borrowing a book from the school library this would prevent multiple copies of the books being spread across the school for book publishers, as well as the students electronically leaving book reviews etc like they can with most modern library systems. Students would then loan a book title for 7 days and at the end of the 7 days the book would return to the pool for another student to loan it if required. Now I must admit, I buy the majority of books now for myself electronic I still feel theres a need for paper books in some circumstances and it will never replace a paper library completely.

I just got a couple of lamps today from Justlamps. The cost I got over the phone was vastly cheaper than that available on the website.

The ones ive seen for anything like a reasonable price are 0.3m. I either got them from Insight or RM in a various range of colours.

We seen it here with IE8 and Office 2010. Updated to IE9 now and not sure if the problem still exists. I thought it was Smoothwall related or thought I had read something about that but may be wrong - can't see how it is though...

Last lot I got was from ebay. Just had a quick look and theres someone on their selling 100 for nearly £140! Don't think I paid quite as much as that for my 30 I bought!

We had a few issues with it crashing on our CC3 network, but now use Office 2010 on our CC4 network without any issues.

No issues with our magic card printer. 300+ staff ID cards done and probably 400 - 500 sixth form cards done without any issues.

My box arrived today - thanks for getting it sent out so quick.

Thanks - I dropped an e-mail through this morning.

We moved from Zimbra to Live@Edu for our student e-mail system. All accounts have been pulled from AD and we use FIM to integrate via AD. Theres not much info available to help get setup, but the Microsoft support is free and we used them to help us get all setup. Only negative for us so far is that we dont currently use a password policy on our AD and to enable password sync the AD passwords need to be a minimum of 6 characters.

We do a bit of Visual Basic with selected students in an extra curricular club. Not something we run for all KS4 students but certainly something we are starting to look at and possibly A Level.

Have you tried speaking to local colleges etc for leavers? I can put you in touch with someone if this would be useful for you - we've had 2 day college placements over the last three years but eventually they complete the course and opt to work or go off to uni - which may suit you.

I would say around 75 - 80% of our staff use them for it's purpose. We gave staff very little choice and don't install standard dry wipe boards in the rooms anymore to force them to use them.

Good luck for the future - keep in touch.

Another option is to use a Terminal Server with remote desktop app - it wont actually give you access to the files on the iPAD but at least any changes made will be reflected on the network server.

We found a terminal server was more useful than just giving access to a user home area. Obvioussly costs a lot more than the above methods mentioned.

Office 2010

Slightly more expensive than that mentioned above, but we are probably going to purchase more iPAD's and use them as a dual purpose including e-Book reader via the kindle, iBooks app etc.

DT as in Design and Technology?

We bought ours from TechSoft ~ The Educational CAD/CAM Specialists ~ Home Page. 10 user licence but you can install it on as many as PC's as you like as it uses a dongle to limit it to 10 sessions only. We purchased a good 3 or 4 years ago now so can't remember the exact cost I paid, but their is annual subscriptions you can pay if you wish to have the latest versions and support - we haven't bothered up to now, but may look at upgrading next year and continue to do it every couple of years as their doesn't seem to be many big changes year on year.