Sylv3r

Did you choose the eco mode? If so you will just have been printed your barcode and won't be sent a badge through the post.

I decided to go with this option as well - as no doubt I would have put mine safe somewhere but forgot!

Long term supply get an e-mail address here for maternity cover etc. They wouldn't be able to operate effectively without it as e-mail is the main communication channel for staff.

hmmm odd. I've used it for years and not had any issues. It could be some sort of tracking cookie or a false positive. No adverse effects here on my network or home PC - touch wood.

You could also look at installing something else such as VLC Player (VideoLAN - VLC: Free streaming and multimedia solutions for all OS!) which will play most if not every audio and move file.

I'm coming down on the train Friday morning and will be at BETT on the afternoon, stopping over on the Friday night and will come along to BETT again on the Saturday morning before my train home.

We've had the cPanel educational thing for around 5 or 6 years now and love it's flexibility. Support is similar to enterprise level support and e-mail queries are monitored 24/7 and a response is generally received within 20 mins.

Congrats Scruff

As we bus a lot of students into school - the majority of the time a late decision is made from the bus company whether they can get the buses on the road etc. If a lot of schools are off, it is quite possible that there could be a long list of schools given out over the radio which may get missed. I agree the TXT system is expensive but it hits our target audiance immediately. We also utilise it to remind parents of events such as parents evenings, student exams etc which is another benefit of the system. I am going to investigate costs of similar systems to see if there is a cost saving from another provider.

We use Schoolcomms - we spent around £1,000 a couple of weeks ago just sending TXT messages when the school was closed for the week. 1450 Students + 150 staff but we also sent TXT's to both parents so in total we were sending around 2,000 TXT's per day.

The new model should be released in April time - if you can hold off until then or even better if your not going to use the camera etc the version 1 model will no doubt come down in price.

Yep another vote for Sharepoint either what was mentioned above or Sharepoint WSS 3.0 will do the job.

Cheers Guys All food for thought.

Anybody had any luck with the 3D projectors yet - the prices seem reasonable for home use but I'd like to install one into our lecture theatre here in school. Anybody recommend any models to buy / avoid. After speaking to a representative from Sky today they have said that 3D projectors are not supported by Sky 3D but I don't see how this could be the case - any ideas? Thanks Andrew

We never did get our energy monitor... I'll ask the caretaker if he has any news and whether we are likely to get it now the change of government.

No latency issues here for us just using bog standard internal sound cards.

What sort of differences does your staff have compared to your students? The only differences we set here is staff can access all webmail providers and youtube - everything else is the same. The advantage of this is in theory if it works for a member of staff whilst planning a lesson it will work for the students.

With the demise of the Harnessing Technology funding next year we are actively looking for cheaper providers for our Broadband. Currently we pay £19.7k for a 10mbit non filtered feed from our local authority. I have figures from both Easynet and BT for cheaper faster connections - which we will seriously consider implementing for an April 2011 launch as it does not make sense financially to pay more for a reduced connection.

As part of a review of all of our SLA agreements recently I asked the question to CAPITA for a costing for the exact support that our LA provide us - CAPITA came in at around £5k more than what we currently pay for the support from the LA. We don't have any issues with the LA support but I was interested if their was a cost saving at all going direct to CAPITA. I guess the LA have negotiated such a good deal with CAPITA and cover enough schools in the area to provide a good service at a good rate + if we had moved to CAPITA we would miss out on the free MIS courses available through the LA.

We use a barcode scanner but its generally when the kit is new and still in the boxes as the barcodes are easily accesible. Things like existing projectors / printers have all been added manually.

I looked at it but the takeup from students / parents was quite small. This was a year or so ago and probably Twitter was just new to some people. We have our own Facebook page with 1,500 or so members for annoucements and we also send SMS messages for school closures and we will continue to do so as the system works well.

I cant comment on the smartboards but we have a Promeathean of over 12 years and still working perfectly. It's had new lamps / projectors obviously in this time.

Our school was off today - bus company said they couldn't guarantee the safety of our students. And we are only down the road from Hightower.

Couldn't fault the food when I went after the conference last year.

We are currently looking at the Hitachi SAN's.