LosOjos

Game sharing only works when you aren't both playing. So, if B wants to play your games, they can do so indefinitely as long as you're not in a game. As soon as you start a game, B gets a grace period (15 minutes I believe) before they're kicked out of the game. It doesn't have to be the same game either; they could be playing your copy of NV while you're playing Grid, and they'd still get booted. Works great for me though, my daughter has access to my library pretty much any time she likes as I only usually play when she's in bed anyway. OH gets to try games out and then she'll usually buy them if she likes them. Of course now Valve finally offer refunds, she can do that on her own account but before the refund policy kicked in it was a great way of her finding new games she liked before she bought them (as I have an enormous library of games I never play!)

I'd have hung fire on that - pretty sure I picked up Legendary edition last summer for £5... as a general rule, I don't buy anything that's not in the flash sale/daily deal until the last day of the sale.

Just echoing others rally, I follow the same system as @bobsmith, this gives you a really tidy way of tracking progress. However, this falls down in sixth form, where it's common for students to resit years. The problem arises when a student resits, says, AS English, and the resultsets are already populated from their previous term in Y12. As @MattMitchell says, when reporting you can filter by date and resultset, however you can't do this in templates (just in case it's been a while since you looked at SIMS, templates are where you set up your data entry sheets). My way around this is to change things slightly in sixth form, so rather than having 'Y12 Autumn' & 'Y13 Autumn', I have 'KS5 Autumn 14/15' You're right that you can end up with a lot of resultsets in SIMS this way, but it's not really an issue in practise - better to have dozens of descriptive identifiers than rely solely on date ranges IMO - it makes looking at historical data much simpler.

I'd do the import as you have, then add in my own columns at the end for each type of Parental Consent and use a MATCH to check if they have that one. For example: [table=width: 800] [tr] [td]Forename[/td] [td]Surname[/td] [td]Reg[/td] [td]Parental Consent[/td] [td]Parental Consent[/td] [td]Parental Consent[/td] [td]Internet Access[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Student[/td] [td]One[/td] [td]7D[/td] [td]Internet Access[/td] [td]Photograph Student[/td] [td]School Visit[/td] [td]=IF(ISERROR(MATCH(G$1,$D2:$F2,0)),"No","Yes")[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Student[/td] [td]Two[/td] [td]7A[/td] [td]Photograph Student[/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td]=IF(ISERROR(MATCH(G$1,$D3:$F3,0)),"No","Yes")[/td] [/tr] [/table] That IF/MATCH combo would populate the end cell with "Yes" if that student has Internet Access permission, so the result would look like this: [table=width: 800] [tr] [td]Forename[/td] [td]Surname[/td] [td]Reg[/td] [td]Parental Consent[/td] [td]Parental Consent[/td] [td]Parental Consent[/td] [td]Internet Access[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Student[/td] [td]One[/td] [td]7D[/td] [td]Internet Access[/td] [td]Photograph Student[/td] [td]School Visit[/td] [td]Yes[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Student[/td] [td]Two[/td] [td]7A[/td] [td]Photograph Student[/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td]No[/td] [/tr] [/table] EDIT: altered it to use ISERROR, as I just remembered MATCH throws an error rather than a 0 if not found

It's an optical illusion: a fine grain structure gives the illusion of a sharper image. So by showing an image with zero grain, followed by one with a fine grain effect, your eye sees more definition and associates that with sharpness. I'm sure I've used all sorts of incorrect terminology there, but open up Photoshop/GIMP and play with the sharpness tool and you'll see what I mean

If you click on the cell, there'll be a small square bottom right corner, click and drag it (or double click it) and it'll update the formula on each row. Get row 1 right and Excel will do the rest EDIT: also, you can use an ampersand as a shorthand way of implying concatenation, i.e. =LEFT(B2,1)&B2&C2

Yeah when you create an Individual Report (essentially SIMS' version of a mail merge), you select an aspect and resultset, and SIMS pulls the matching result for the current student from that. You can also use date ranges, with the added qualifier of 'latest', 'first' or 'best' result over that date range. If you can get away with resultsets though, I find them much more manageable personally. An added benefit to resultsets is you can lock them, so once you have set up all your data entry sheets you can lock/unlock result sets to prevent teachers entering data in to the wrong column or overwriting old data once it's complete. To do that using date range fields, you'd have to manually lock each column (this involves opening the template, finding the column, then ticking 'lock' for every template - very time consuming!)

Progress8 has become pretty fundamentally flawed too though - the difference in boundaries between the bottom (half a grade) and top (1.5 grades) means that a child going from a B -> A* appears to be making the same progress as a child going from a G -> D - not exactly a level playing field! I should point out here that the original quote is a little out of context; it wasn't in relation to national expectations but foe that class's targets, obviously teachers should be aiming for 100% of their students to be on target. I know that rarely happens, but it should be the aim

Not quite - you can either import the grades by date or resultset. If you import them with their date (no resultset), then to find them again you set date ranges when filtering in reports/individual reports/assessment templates. The benefit is, when any grade is entered, it doesn't overwrite any previous grades (so long as it's entered on a different day) If you import to resultsets, your filtering gets much easier because you have that resultset as a point of reference. However, as only one grade can exist for a student in a given aspect and resultset, then any other grades entered in to that aspect and resultset would be overwritten. However, it is that pairing that's important - you can have multiple aspects each holding a different result against the same resultset for different pupils. For example, I have 3 aspects; English Estimate, Maths Estimate and Science Estimate. I then have a resultset, Autumn. An export of my results might look like this: Johnny - English Estimate - Autumn - C Susan - English Estimate - Autumn - B Joe - English Estimate - Autumn - C Johnny - Maths Estimate - Autumn - B Susan - Maths Estimate - Autumn - B Joe - Maths Estimate - Autumn - A Johnny - Science Estimate - Autumn - C Susan - Science Estimate - Autumn - D Joe - Science Estimate - Autumn - C Notice I'm using the same resultset for each, but different aspects. It's not the only way to arrange things, but I find it best personally to think of an aspect as your identifier (i.e. what kind of grade is it?), a resultset as a time stamp (when was it taken?). Now, if someone were to enter a new grade for English for Johnny under the same resultset, then the old result would be overwritten, as SIMS isn't interested in the actual date the result was entered, only the resultset it was entered in to. I hope this makes sense!

"To be safe from the dreaded ofsted and anyone else who wants to chuck their tuppence in, you want to be on or above the national average." There's the rub - by definition, ~50% of schools are constantly failing. This particular sound bite was based on class targets and what % the teacher should aim for to be making expected progress - 100%, of course!

It sounds like you do a bit of programming, right? If so, the simplest way I can think to do this is to write a script to export your SQL data in to an XML document you can then import back in to SIMS. You'll need to do some mapping between the results in your DB and the aspect they need to go in to. Export some arbitrary results from SIMS (Routines > Data Out > Assessment > Export) to get a feel for the format of the XML document. Alternatively, it's a case of dumping it all in a spreadsheet and using the SIMS import tool, manually mapping every column to an aspect and date - doable if you've only got a few aspects and dates (and are happy to merge data points by, say month or term) but if there's a lot of data, it'd be an absolutely mammoth undertaking. EDIT: also, you don't have to use resultsets in SIMS, you can just put in results by date, however that can make reporting on them a bit trickier. If you do associate with a resultset, then that resultset can only hold one result per student, per aspect, so you'd need to decide on a way of merging date ranges (by term sounds like a logical way to go if that's about the regularity of your data)

Don't tell John Romero that! Yeah, it's well and truly time ICT became about CS again and not MS Office. When I did GCSE ICT, I was already a keen [though not 'good'] programmer, so for the open project I made a Maths Tutor program in VB that included a variety of mathematical tools with tips, examples and quizzes. I was really proud of it and my Maths teacher thought it was fantastic. The person I sat next to saved a Word document as HTML and called it a website. Guess which of us got an A? Hint: it wasn't me. I think this transition period is going to be really tough; apart from the fact there's a severe lack of teachers with CS knowledge, there are even fewer who are interested in teaching CS. A lot of them didn't even start out wanting to teach ICT! Add to that the fact programmers can earn a hell of a lot more money than teachers, and you've got a problem. I think there either needs to be a drive in to CS teaching (maybe the government could cover the cost of teacher training for CS undergrads?) or schools need to start looking for retired programmers who would be happy to come in a couple of hours a week and either deliver lessons or just aide the teaching staff. We could also do with more companies with a vested interest in CS to provide teacher training like Raspberry Pi foundation are doing. I've said from day one that I think CS on the curriculum is an excellent leap forward, but it's also clear that, as usual, it's been implemented by people with no clue. "Hey, ICT teachers, how about teaching a totally different subject with no training? Oh and there's no money to send you on any courses, and while we're at it as the school's budget has been cut you're losing half your colleagues. Go!" The whole idea is doomed to fail if something isn't done soon and I genuinely believe that will be at the country's peril. Some argue that they're doing just fine with no CS knowledge and I get that, but we don't teach just solely with the intention of kids getting a career in the subject. CS knowledge can help in all sorts of fields, the ability to write simple algorithms or code can help in just about any office job. We rely on ICT services more and more every year and if we're not producing technologies, we're still going to be consuming them and that's not going to help our economy.

escalate ɛskəleɪt verb 1. increase rapidly. "the price of tickets escalated" synonyms: increase rapidly, soar, rocket, shoot up, mount, surge, spiral, grow rapidly, rise rapidly, climb, go up; 2. make or become more intense or serious. "the disturbance escalated into a full-scale riot" synonyms: grow, develop, mushroom, increase, be increased, be stepped up, build up, heighten, strengthen, intensify, accelerate, be extended, be enlarged, be magnified, be amplified "the dispute escalated into a sit-in" [sorry, couldn't resist!]

Hey, so long as they're all above average, right?

The clue is in the title

This is the problem, as soon as someone sufficiently technically minded sees quick bucks to be made from advertising, their chosen tech gets exploited. I hate to say it, but Android's open nature makes it particularly vulnerable to this - I hope they have the foresight to put measures in place to make it easy to filter out carp from GG, otherwise it'll become nothing more than a distracting ad train

Sorry to go slightly off topic, but it's things like this that make me think wearable tech is doomed. How long do we think something like Google Glass will be mainstream before you're constantly being bombarded with AR advertising?

OK so rather than giving you control over them directly, it learns your typical usage and issues commands itself? That sounds like a pretty cool addition to the system actually and judging by the API, could be rolled in to my DIY hub so that it can act on Nest's learned behaviour too. A plan is forming....

I don't, but it doesn't matter, you can drop this code in to a new module in a new workbook, then open the Edexcel book, open VBA and hit run

Well I was swaying towards NB, but now they have a new product called the Sphere, which is a big ugly thing I don't want in my home and they appear to have stopped support for the Block, plus I can't find anywhere that actually sells them. So that's scuppered that one! The more I read, the more I'm thinking of going all out DIY on it with a Raspberry Pi... so long as I choose components with a decent API, I should be good to go and this will allow me to have a truly bespoke system (the more apps I look at, the more I'm thinking I'd rather design it myself!) Good to know, thanks! I have been looking at Nest, weighing up the pros and cons - it's very expensive compared to less smart alternatives... didn't realise it could control other devices though, so that could be a major selling point... will read more in to that.

It's been a common issue with on board audio for as long as on board audio has been a thing. What you're hearing is interference from other components on the mobo - this is why different devices being plugged in will produce different characteristics of noise and in some cases you can "hear" the mouse moving (you can't really, you can hear the interference caused by the components processing the mouse movement) It's gotten much better over the years, but Realtek chips still seem to be quite bad for it. The startech panel I'm assuming connects to the mobo headers, so you'll have the same problem as it's still the mobo processing the audio, the panel just provides a more conveniently placed jack. Only real solution is to install a sound card. Doesn't need to be anything fancy, any cheap card should improve matters.

Rename it after it's downloaded? Many browsers append a number in brackets if duplicate file names are found, but SIMS will not see them in that case, so remove that part and you should be good to go. If you need to keep multiple downloads with the same name, change the numeric part of the CTF so that it's still a valid file name. e.g. if you had two files like this: 1234567_CTF_1020304_001.xml 1234567_CTF_1020304_001 (1).xml The first would import but the second wouldn't. To remedy this and keep both files, rename the second like so: 1234567_CTF_1020304_002.xml For future reference, CTF filenames are strictly in the format aaabbbb_CTF_cccdddd_eee.xml where: a = source LA number b = source DfE number c = destination LA number d = destination DfE number e = three digit, leading zero sequence number

True, but this particular news story is specifically about "requires improvement" schools being forced to become academies. The "Labour for the people, Tory for the corporation" attitude probably stems from Labour historically supporting unions and the working class and Tories privatising energy and transport. I'm not saying that's the right way to look at it; in fact I don't think it is, the Labour/Tory parties of today are barely indistinguishable, both watered down versions of their legacies and very little sets the two apart these days; but that's why the general public largely hold those views I think. To be fair, I think only one person mentioned the Tories in this thread, and that was tongue in cheek. More people have jumped up to say "Labour started it" than have said "it's the Tories fault" [in this thread].

A cut of the education budget. Exactly. Wilshaw and Gove have proven in the past they're lacking basic statistical comprehension though, so this is no surprise.

You don't Not all games work with pads on PC - notably the Mass Effect series. That's when you'd need a program like this (or one of the free alternatives already listed) if you wanted to use a pad with one of those games. Find solutions for problems, not problems for solutions.