Iain.Faulkner

Same reasons as the others for us. We did have a scenario where we used laptops up until about 12 months ago. We've now gone down the workstation route and we're having so few problems in comparison. The main issue though, which I don't think has been mentioned, is that we don't have any problems with Sims.net being able to find the shared drive it requires. With the laptops option, when a user unplugs their network cable to go to another room when they plug back in, the correct drive wouldn't become available until the user manually accessed the drive prior to opening up sims.net (unless of course you have full site coverage of wireless then this wouldn't ever be a problem).

Thanks again Ric and Grumbledook :-)

Thanks for that Ric. Having re-read the email, the phrase being used is "subject specific pupil use of ICT". My interpretation of this is that the school want to provide our staff with ideas on how they can get students using ICT within specifici subjects, ie they want someone to stand at the front and fire off ideas at them. Any further thoughts?

Hi everyone, I've been asked to source some sort of training to promote the use of Cross Curricular ICT within school. Unfortunately, with me being from a non-teaching background, my knowledge on this subject area is very weak (although my role is heading towards being responsible for this area, at the moment I am just starting out and don't really know where I am going with it) and as a result I am looking at bringing somebody in to provide this training. Has anyone done something similar in the past? Is there a company who you've used to provide this type of training before? Any suggestions you can offer on this will be greatly appreciated. Iain

Agreed :-) although I do prefer the one in Manchester as it's longer and wider :-)

I've been to Alton Towers a few times, plus skiing at the Xscape in Leeds and Chillfactor in Manchester. I was even allowed to organise the annual school ski trip to the United States :-)

The kids at my last school used to call me "Neo" due to the long black leather jacket I used to wear every day around school, I found it hilarious, don't the kids know that Neo doesn't wear a long black leather jacket in the Matrix? :-) For a while I was Peter Kay as well, but that soon fizzled out.

It was an amazing evening for golf, I even had to put on Sun cream :-) Not quite as good as my previous 5/6 rounds though, but still pleased. Sadly though that'll be the last golf I play until next week :-( possibly even for 9 days!! I've played a couple of times where i've topped the ball so much that it's thundered into the ground and catapulted itself backwards, meaning I've actually had a minus yardage for that shot!!

Golf tonight :-) Working on getting the handicap down, currently playing off 25 but based on last weekend I'm playing to about 21 :-) Plus I'm off on a golfing weekend to Scotland in a couple of weeks so I need as much practice as I can get!!

We've gone down the same route as Alexsanger and tmcd35 in terms of spec. The guys at Stone are very helpful (we dealt with a guy called Jake, he was extremely helpful). This is Stone's bread and butter, and I would think they will certainly be very competitive and be able to customise their machines where you need them to (ie to adjust specs or to reduce/increase price where necessary). We bought ours from Ergo though in the end, same specs, 5 year warranties (although I think it's 3 as standard) and they came in at less than £400 per machine including monitor. Again very helpful, support has always been first class. They've even provided us with a buffer stock of spare parts for our machines, so that if we have a fault we can do the swap ourselves and post back the faulty item, rather than having to wait up to 24 hours for an engineer to come on site.

Hi Dan, Although I know that this won't be a great deal of help, we were in exactly the same position as you last September, the different profiles being used for the same user caused no end of problems for us. Unfortunately, the only way we could find to resolve it was to get our network using the same OS in the same areas (meaning our users would normally only access one OS as you've already mentioned) and as a result would only need one roaming profile. As it stands, we've actually now been able to get one OS out across the whole school and we've pretty much eradicated any problems completely (except for those staff who have laptops which won't run anything newer than XP).

A fair point, however the main reason we changed to this setup is that it gives them exactly the same username as they use for Sam Learning, something we actually use quite a lot (meaning it's one less thing for them to forget). In addition, it is something that they cannot forget, we've not had one instance yet where a student has forgotten their date of birth or initials (had we gone down the route of admission numbers etc, the crossover could well have been a logistical nightmare given the number of students who forget their password on a daily basis). Similarly, do students aged between 11-16 have bank accounts that allow them online access?? (being a kind of half stepfather to a 10 year old I know he hasn't got this kind banl account and I can't imagine that it changes once he turns 11). This may be a fair point for the 15/16 year olds as by then they may have part time jobs which pay directly into a bank account but that can't be the case for those aged 11-14 as even those that have paper rounds will be paid cash in hand. Even then though those bank accounts that do give online access require you to use a card reader in order to access the account so are pretty secure. To be honest these are things we did consider, but we fault that the risk was pretty minor.

Best of luck to you

We did something similar last summer, only real difference was we moved from classlink (viglen) to vanilla, however the process was very similar and we did consider moving to CC4 and having seen the demo and spoken to a number of other school's in our area we were exceedingly impressed by what it could offer unfortunately due to the cost of CC4 we were immediately priced out of that as an option however in reality we were always going to go down the Vanilla route (we wanted to go down a virtualisation path and at the time RM wouldn't entertain the idea). Ultimately we went for the Vanilla environment mainly due to the flexibility that it provided us. Having worked with Classlink in the school for 4/5 years, we wanted to learn more about our network and develop our skills. We are however quite fortunate in that there are three of us, and as part of the project we replaced all of our PC's as well (which has eliminated a number of the problems we used to encounter), and as a result we do have more time on our hands to allow us to manage our network. The company we used for most of this were Ergo based in Nottingham, can't speak highly enough of them. If you need any info on any of this, please ffel free to drop me a pm.

Woohoo!! Just got the confirmation email through, I've got tickets to Radio 1's Big Weekend on the Saturday!!

Don't know if this is any use or not Business support forums - Invalid Serial Number for Citrix on HP t5525

Best of luck...you'll be back :-) I thought the grass was greener in corporate IT about two years ago, and unfortunately it turned out as Eldergeek described it "Strict SLA's, demanding users, profit driven managers, spare part logistical nightmares and field engineers with attitude" not for me.....I got back into School's as quickly as I possibly could :-) Give me teachers and students any day.

I've got one of these... STAR WARS TREFOIL HOODY very cool.....very geeky :-)

Agreed again, I do like the new song and Fourth was a major disappointment. Have to admit I didn't know those were the first two songs Ashcroft penned, although I did know that History was written shortly before they started work on Urban Hymns hence the similar sound. At least it's not entirely made up then :-)

Pretty much Urban Hymns, but if you've never heard it then check out "History" off the Northern Soul album, that is absolutely stunning. I've seen Ashcroft on numerous occasions in many different sized and type of venue and he is truly phenomenal. A particular favourite was seeing him reform The Verve for V festival 2008, and being stood in the pouring rain listening to anthemic beauty at its finest (don't think I've made that word up :-) ) I agree entirely in that his solo stuff is very good and is criminally underrated.

I've now applied for the Radio 1 "Big Weekend" as well.....lineup isn't great plus most of the bands I'd want to see are playing V as well but hey ho, it's free and it's only a few miles from the caravan :-) And only a non festival musical note, I bought tickets for Richard Ashcroft and his new band (United Nations of Sound) in June :-) As long as he plays some of The Verve's back catalogue it will be immense :-)

I remember going for a look round here about 12 months ago when we were gathering ideas for our network replacement project, the place is truly stunning! Imagine a school where you can afford to spend in the region of £100k of equipment just on two Music Rooms!

I agree entirely.

It's an ongoing battle that we keep having, been going on as long as I've been at this school.

We're running Pcounter here, but believe it or not I've been told that I am not allowed to set quotas for staff or students as that would interfere with the learning process (!!). So all people on site are allowed to print as much off as they like. Couple of things I have set in Pcounter though, no more than one copy of any document and any documents of the same name going through at the same time are blocked as well. One nice little thing I've added as well, is to use the Pcounter "Document Name Pattern Matching" to block any documents containing the words "Document" and "Publication" as this forces everyone to save their work before printing. What we have found is that if people are printing out reams of waste, we can go back to their print history and pull up the name of the document they have printed (because they've been forced to save it) and use it as evidence for them to be charged for the waste that they have caused. Our students don't appear to have worked out that once the document has been saved, they can simply nip into their home drive and delete it once they've finished printing it out hundreds of times :-)