Crowmanuk

I've got assignments working ok for me but the one teacher i've tried it with keeps getting an error when he tries to post or save it as a draft.

We use google forms which automatically emails the site manager with the request, theres a few fields that have to be filled in and he's really happy with it as he's got everything recorded now.

I need to create a school calendar that can be shared on a website so staff can see what is going on, is secure so only staff can view it, can be updated from ios, android and outlook devices by senior leadership. At the moment I’ve got an exchange email that senior leadership have access to and can update that calendar, because its exchange based they can just add that account to their mobile devices and have full access to the calendar but sharing it with other staff is a pain as mobile devices don’t show shared calendars and I don’t want to give them full access to it. I cant figure out how to show a “live” exchange calendar on a website/sharepoint either, I can copy all the events and put them into a sharepoint calendar but that needs doing regularly and its not the most elegant solution. I can copy the school calendar to the public calendars too but again, its not live and would need to be copied across everytime that something was update, also public calendars don’t show up on ios devices. I’ve taken a look at google calendars and that can be shared with other gmail users and embedded onto a website, I can make the calendar available to everyone but but I really don’t want all that information public even if I passworded the webpage it would be on as there is information about staff holidays and other stuff that wouldn’t be on a public school calendar. So I need a secure calendar system that works with mobile devices, is embeddable and secure. Any ideas? p.s. Damn ios to hell!

I'd definitely take a look at "explain everything", its one of the best apps i've ever used for creating content, I recently gave it to a PE teacher who's loving it, drag a powerpoint, pdf, pictures or video into it, annotate and talk over it while recording and export it to youtube or dropbox, and youve got a video of whatever you want that students can watch over and over, he's having a go at blended learning and for the class that he's trialling it with its really working well, i'm really proud of what he's doing with it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4JOsrEsyo0 Must agree though, if they dont know what apps they want then they dont really know what they want the ipads for and they might as well go with angry birds and all the tv stuff.

i've been asked to evaluate doddlelearn for our school as we've got a bit of cash left in our BSF pot, i've gone over the site and it looks pretty good, have any of you used it or got any opionions about it? https://www.doddlelearn.co.uk/ Cheers Fellas

We ran Xibo on a tv with a Revo3610 and it was pretty much rock solid, you can do all your schedules and special events without any problems but come September we get Planet estream under BSF too, cant wait.

That exact same thing was the reason I stopped using the bbc news feed, I think I resorted to using the sky news one which repeats all day long but at least it worked, I'm really looking forward to September now when we get full planet e-stream in and we can actually embed a tv feed as we will have a tv tuner built into it.

Well I walked my legs off yesterday and still didnt get round everything I wanted to see, I reckon you could do with at least 2 days to get round everything, even with our cherry picked shopping list of things we wanted to look at we still walked round for 6 hours and didnt get round it all. Anybody got any spare feet?

We just had a broken ipad screen replaced by these guys Wirral Computer Services very quick service, looks like new now and it was the cheapest i've found, just £50 for the glass. spooky that is, within 10 minutes of writing this some silly sods dropped one and smashed the screen, aghghghgh

we've got a cachepilot and i'm fairly sure theres no way to rest it the way you want to, best bet is to get in touch with the LA support who can dial in to retrieve/reset it

Yes, just go here Twitter / Profil-Widget, fill in the details of the twitter account you want to monitor, and put the code into an embedded part in xibo

I've given up on embedded feeds and put a USB tv card in the machine with a little aerial and just overlay the tv on the xibo client, it works really well and I only had to modify the layout a little bit to make room for it.

Sounds like a recipe for brain death, I can't imagine not being busy doing something. We should be having a meeting soon outlining what we will be doing so I'm trying to stay positive even though half the stuff we'd been planning will get scrapped so I'm leaning more towards "what's the point" now.

Whats part of your daily task list then mate?

I think even if they did get past the technical side of things they'd never have time to do it all, I know we rib teachers a bit on here but their job is to teach which is the reason we do all the techy stuff, we're good at it.

Blimey, we Just go HT > NM & 1 Tech, we both report to the HT and its been like that since I started 2 years back.

Definitely in agreement with Richard, give each faculty it's own team site, they'll have their own calendar, links and they can customise it the way they need it, one thing I've found is that one size doesn't fit all and if you tailor the site to each faculty they'll use it a bit more. Just keep the navigation the same and it's not too bad to do. If you fancy a look at mine send me a pm and I'll sort you out. It's not the best looking one in the world but it's functional which is what I wanted.

We had something similar happen when I was in engineering, a big company came in and bought us out, asset stripped the whole firm and a toolroom of 100 men went down to 10 and all the work got sent out. All they were interested in was profit making and couldnt care less about anything else. Time for a hobnob....

Thanks for a different view on it Ken, its nice to hear that it can work out. But, if we move to a different role in Capita do we lose out on the 3 year job security that we supposedly get with Tupe? At the moment I love going to work every day, I love supporting the staff and the students, my job is never out of my head and i'm constantly thinking of ways we can make IT better for them. If i'm reduced to toner/keyboard monkey it'll rip the heart and soul out of my job and I dont think I could face staff every day having issues that I could sort out in a few minutes and have to tell them to "phone Nottingham, i'm not allowed to touch that"

If you take a look at what you can't do on this thread the list gets even smaller mate, maybe we'll get shiny new uniforms and get upgraded to doorman type duties http://www.edugeek.net/forums/bsf/19570-anyone-been-tuped-2.html#post207609 Wolverhampton here too and really not looking forward to getting tuped.

When we get bsf'd next year we'll be getting a hosted sharepoint, it's already gone through at one school locally though, it might be worth getting in touch with their network manager to see how he's finding things, Its Highfields school in Wolverhampton, Welcome to Highfields Science Specialist School. I have heard they're having teething problems though.

Watching now, cheers

Would this be available to download view later, we're currently playing about with it and any info would be good, I just dont know if I'm in on the night yet.

Havent really had any problems apart from RSS feeds which reduced things to a crawl but that was a couple of versions back and I havent tried them since, I havent had any problems with regions not showing what they should, although if you upload a large video/powerpoint it'll load the old page until the files have come down, if you restart once thats done it works fine. I've gone through a few different versions of our layout and we're now using 2 powerpoint regions, one for weekly events, the other for a powerpoint of images from events ( we did have individual images but if you wrap it up in a powerpoint its neater ), an embedded script to show the date in one region, another region with a flash banner, and I think we've got one more region at the bottom for important events which can scroll round all day. The scheduling hasnt let me down once and the only crashes I get are when powerpoint throws a wobbly. What I should try if I were you is take the elements out of the regions and add them one at a time to see if you've got something that is giving you a problem.

Had to post this cos it left me gobsmacked by how good they were. We have quite a few Acer X110 projectors in the school and one of them started to have flickering colours, so 2 days before the 12 months was up I got in touch with acer who arranged to pick it up, sent me a text to say they'd received it, sent another text an hour later saying it was repaired and another text 20 minutes after that to say it had been dispatched. I'm seriously impressed, nice one Acer