Sylv3r

We use CRB - this is the cunnighams product for the North of the country including Scotland - It's the same system but with a different name for local support etc. The CRB / Cunninghams system both use Biostore, and the latest version 3 - allows you to link with your MIS system for when you create student users an account is also produced on your Cashless system. Likewise with v3 you can link into various other biometric systems such as door access, library systems etc. We've had good support from CRB in the 3 years we've used the system and support generally arrives in school the next day to fix any issues if hardware related or remotely if it's a software config. On a side note - what do schools have in place, if the system was ever to be down whether that is a hardware or power cut during lunch? I haven't even thought about the fun and games that may cause!

I asked Impero to come along to our Durham / North East meeting and a lot of the NM's from the schools were relatively impressed and we managed to get a good deal for those schools in purchasing - I am sure Russ could do something similar for other areas of the country. As a matter of fact, we had Smoothwall demo their kit on the same day and this was also a good seller with the NM's.

Am i missing something completely obvious but when I try to play the re-runs, it is prompting me for a username / password combination. I don't think I received anything for e-mail etc.

I am the e-safety officer here as part of my role as Network Manager - no additional pay, although I also don't think it deserves one as it's not a lot of extra work other than the odd student assembly, newsletter item or parents e-safety meeting. Our designated Child Protection Officer is the Headteacher but a lot of the work is carried out by the Heads of Year or Student Support Managers before either of us get involved. I am not saying, it is not worthy of additonal numeration as each school is different and the increased workload will differ in all establishments.

We have our own page.

We use Facebook as a means of communication for parents and former students. However, we do have a lot of our students on our page as friends. The majority of the information we post includes links to our school newsletter, school holiday reminders and school closures etc. We have around 1,500 and it seems to work well and hasn't up to now been abused.

I only have my name, job title and school address and contact details on mine... probably becuase I don't have any fancy letters to go after my name!

Another happy Schoolcomms customer here.

We had this and the workaround I used was to display 10 students per page and not the full class of 30+ - a word of warning though if you set the webpart to show 10 per page and the member of staff manually changes it, it still only remembers the first 10 entries when clicking save.

We use UV Pens, but I guess by the sounds of it you want something as a visible deterrent?

I agree myself but the way we write the reports is a general comment and two areas for improvement for each student - an area for improvement is slightly more difficult to put within a comment bank especially as areas for improvement will be slightly different for each subject - still not impossible but it was felt that staff would be more than capable of writing three sentances including two SMART targets - in hindsight however.... In theory in a class your always going to have a top, middle and bottom band of students with each band having similar targets / report comments.

We do the odd job for our kitchen here too - and always get offered a bacon sandwich / hot chocolate etc on a morning.

We didn't bother with comment banks with profiles as a lot of the reports for students were too similar and not personal. It does cause a lot more problems with spelling, grammar and punctuation however and several checks are needed before they are sent to parents.

We installed it here manually on 35 machines - what a long 3 days that was....

Yes, we have our wireless on it's own VLAN which effectively blocks it from our main network. We use a smoothwall UTM, which allows us to assign one of the ports for our wireless to provide internet access.

I got my iPad 1 from america - it works no problem, but i'm not sure about the warranty question - personally I don't see it being an issue. How many do they intend to bring back - they may be tax issues if they bring a lot back and may get them taken from them.

Our helpdesk currently holds around 20 jobs, but I also use it as a To Do list for long term jobs so they are not forgotten about. Thankfully, no issues reported by a member of staff are still unresolved.

What is it? Do you have an idea of price?

we've been trialling it for around 2 weeks now and up to now the PE teachers love it. They are even thinking off other ways they could utilise the iPOD's in their teaching - bleep test app etc.

To install the Serial Part of the driver you can pass the following switch onto the msiexec command line: ADDLOCAL="ALL"

I pulled our shared areas around 12 - 18 months ago and now use sharepoint as our resource area. The necessary permissions are set that only teaching staff of a particular department can access their area. Students also have access to the English page with just the English student resources as an example. I must admit, our shared area was becoming a dumping ground and the sorting and uploading to Sharepoint did help with rectifying these issues. In a year or two's time we may need to stamp our feet a little to ensure that the Sharepoint document libraries aren't following suit.

We used to use Diagram Designer from here MeeSoft - it's probably been 5 years or so since it was on our network, but it did the job back in the day.

@Sylv3r

If you get stuck, give me a shout and I'll put some more detailed instructions together if it will help.

If you download the driver from the Promeathean site and run it using a "/a" you will be prompted where you want to install the .msi. It shouldn't take you too long to create the RM folder structure including .ini file to install the .msi Just copy the format from another of your RM packages. This is the way I do it, and it allows me to make sure that the driver is always up-to-date with little fuss.