maniac

I was one of those mad fools that decides to decend on London for the event. We only decided to go at 4:30 that afternoon while in the car on our way home from somewhere. 2 Hours later, myself and 2 friends were in the car on the way to london, managed to park on the outskirts and caught the tube in and boy was it packed! Got back home about 4:30am. Was worth it thou Mike.

rather than half a page of disclaimer, ours simply says the full name and address of the school and the fact we're a charity with our charity registration number and then a simple 'if you've received this message in error please notify [email protected] and remove it from your system.' We think that's all that's necessary, if you have one that's too long people just see it as an annoyance. Mike.

I don't worry about the actual games so much, but more about the websites they are on and what code nasties could be hidden in the webpages, most of them are riddled with advertising and popups and are not the sort of sites we want to be letting through our system.

I pay no attention to budgets, the school either needs it or it doesn't, and if it needs it they always find the money from somewhere! Mind you, that's one of the big advantages of working in an academy school, there's a lot of cash floating around. I've got as much money to spend at this school as I had at my last school, but my last school had 3x the number of students. Mike.

Who ever started this thread had better run and hide

I've used the weighing method for the last 5 years of counting vouchers, and Tesco have never complained that there's any problems with my figures. They weigh in increments of 0.1g with an accuracy of +/- 1g which is pretty standard for digital scales that most schools are likely to have.

Goto your science department, borrow a set of Digital scales. Then count one lot of 100 vouchers by hand and weigh them. You can then count them in minutes! It's accurate enough for the purpose; do you honestly think Tesco count them all at the other end? Course not, they weigh them too! Mike.

I've recently setup a FOG server, and can throughly recommend it. There's a few improvements that could be made, but nothing that stops it being a very useful tool. You get a lot of added extras with FOG, as well as an imaging solution it also allows you to do things like change host names remotely, user tracking, printer management, full workstation hardware inventory and a whole host of other diagnostic and useful tools that are all PXE bootable. The management of the whole system is though an easy to use web based interface and it's a doddle to setup. I've got it running on ubuntu linux on an old Dell server and it's very stable and quick, but it will run happily on most linux builds and there's plenty of guides on installing it on the net. Mike.

I don't think there is a 'best' and 'worst' I think they're all different and suit different schools. What one school loves about a particular VLE, another school will hate and visa-versa. When we were recently choosing a learning platform, we went to great lengths to choose one that suited the school, and not necessarily the one that offered all the technical bells and whistles. As a result our chosen platform is a fully hosted solution, which wasn't my personal favourite, but when staff saw it I got nothing but positive comments about it's usability, look and feel and features so it was an easy decision really, the staff are more likely to use something they themselves are enthusiastic about. OK, so it doesn't integrate with AD which I would like, but that's not the end of the world. It does link well with SIMS however, and in my opinion it's excellent value for money. A lot of people dismiss hosted solutions from the word go, but once you factor into the equation how much a server costs for the school to buy and run, paying for a hosted solution really doesn't offer that bad value for money. No backups to worry about, no firewalls and port forwarding to worry about, it's all maintained and setup for you, upgraded when necessary and totally hassle free so the school can actually concentrate on using it rather than maintaining it! And what platform did we choose? It's not listed above, we've gone for Viglen/IT's Learning and we are currently mid-way through implementation process. So far so good! Mike.

Download a linux build called PING, PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost) which uses partimage (the same tool on the system rescue CD) but has the in-built ability to talk to a windows server without issuing any commands, it prompts you for all the details needed, or you can pre-program the details into a configuration file on a bootable USB key or CD so all you have to do is select the image from a menu, no other details are needed. We used this to image our machines until recently when I setup a server running FOG, which again uses Partimage but on a whole new level including PXE booting and a whole host of other useful features. Mike.

We're ruthless here and delete any MP3 files stored in users home folders on account of the fact we can't afford to let them consume the vast quantities of storage that they do. Staff are told if they do want to use Itunes or simelar, to set it up to use the local C:\ on their laptop, and not their home drive. Mike

I installed eclipse.net on a server here over the last summer break, and it runs very well with no real problems. Everything is fairly quick on it, including search star. Installation went without a problem, and apart from a few problems with the task sechduler, it's been trouble free really. The server isn't a bad spec, although it is an older server, and it runs other things as well. Mike.

I know for a fact in one of our ict suites there are 4 computers currently not working, but I'm stubbonly waiting for the teacher in the classroom to report them to us. She hasn't even mentioned it in passing yet. We do have a helpdesk, and it is used quite well. Almost 600 calls since the beginning of September, which is not a bad work rate. This doesn't include the ones that never made it to the helpdesk, although I do try and retrospectively log these just to keep track of them. Mike

We have 340 Students, and around 500 machines! We're an academy with a small roll at the moment, every department has a trolley of 28 laptops, (English Maths and Science have 2) that's 13 trollys in total, and 4 ICT suites plus various others around the school. I'm pretty sure we're in the minority in having more than one PC per student. Mike.

Students in our school are currently restricted so they can only send e-mail to teachers, and not to each other and not to places outside the school. Our business studies teacher would like the students in her group to be able to receive e-mail from a couple of specific outside e-mail addresses. Is there an easy way of achieveing this? After a brief look, I can't work out what I would need to change to make this happen. Our setup is a pretty standard MS exchange 2003, and the students use outloook web access for accessing their e-mail. Many thanks, Mike

We do small bits of cabling ourselves, where it's only a couple of network points of simelar in house. Anything where it's long runs of cable, or more than a few new points we get an outside company to come in and do it for us. The problem we have with this building is it's a PITA to run cable round, and as a result we have a lot of local wiring cabinets in rooms, where it's easier to run a single wire as an uplink then cable the rest of the room to the local cabinet. Often works out cheaper on the installation as well. Mike.

Never did receive my prize for winning that competition *sniff sniff*

We do this with all our staff machines. I have a totally seperate section of AD called 'Not On RM' which has policy inheritance blocked, I then defined all my own policies for this section of the network. As long as you have sufficient CAL's for Server 2003 then there's no problem as you're not running any of the RM software on the clients, so no extra licenses should be necessary from RM. Mike.

I'm not certain if it is now, but the LDAP authentication in E-Portal used to be an add-on that you had to purchase

We have quite good hardware on our wireless network here, 41 Cisco 1200 series access points, 1 per classroom, old but funtional. Generally they work quite well, but unfortunitely at the moment they're running WEP security with a stupidly easy to guess wireless key, so obviously I'm looking to change this. Roaming the school with net stumbler I notice there are a lot of areas where I can see a lot of overlapping between access points, so I'm also looking to optimize the coverage as well as improve the security. I already know it's best to use channels 1, 6 and 11 to keep the channels totally seperate, but what about adjusting the signal strength to prevent too much leakage of signal outside the area the AP is serving, does anyone have any experience of doing this? Experimenting with an access point in our offce, i've had it down to 5mw and still got a strong signal at 54MBs from a reasonable distance, but I'm un-sure if this would work in a classroom and still give 30 laptops a decent connection? Also what about disabling the lower connection speeds to prevent clients connecting at too slower rate, would this also work to keep everything working a bit quicker?? Any advice, opinions or comments appreciated. Mike.

You can set the advanced security permissions to deny writing of attributes to files and folders, this way if they try and change the read-only or hidden boxes, it will just come up with an access denied message. Unfortunitely this would most likely have to be done manually for each students share. You may be able to create an XCACLS script to do it for you, but I'm not sure about this. Mike.

Quite probably. Brand new PC so we're keeping an eye on it before raising a support call. It's been ok for a week and was fine when I reset it, so it could have been a one off, time will tell! Mike.

http://www.curiousplaces.co.uk/images/ForumPhotos/edugeek/error2.jpg It seemed to dislike Nova T6. Mike.

as far as I'm aware there are just two targets; By Summer 2008 the DSCF target was access to a personalised online learning space with the potential to support an e-portfolio. The second target is summer 2010, which is access to a full learning platform using ‘single sign-on’ interoperability. This part of the becta site Personalising learning contains more information on the different options available. It is my understanding that your LEA is supposed to have put provision in place for schools to meet the first target, whether that be funding for a platform hosted in school, or an external service hosted by the LEA that the school can subscribe to, so it would be worth contacting your LEA to see what they have put in place. Mike.

I use FOTO.com United Kingdom : Photo printing, Digital photo developing for my personal printing, and we're just about to use them for a load of prints at the school. Excellent quality and quick turn around as well as being good value! Mike.