LosOjos

We're planning to do this next year at the school as a cross curricular project, with D&T fabricating the cab, graphic design producing some decals and the Comp Sci students setting up the Pi and writing a few scripts. I'm tinkering with some RGB LED strips over the summer, want to control them via GPIO on the Pi. We could just plug them in to a power source and let them cycle colours, but it'd be so much cooler (and more educational!) for the kids to write scripts to control them

If you'd managed to burn >1,000 calories by lying in bed sweating, you'd probably have died of dehydration...

There have been some pretty bad breaches over the years. I am involved (not so much any more, but at one time) with a group called the Icebox on flickr. It's a really tough critique group, but some of the togs there are incredible. Anyway, there was a long running thread where members would post up breaches they'd been subject to or if they spotted another members' photo in the wild. There were all sorts of breaches, from major blogs (1mil+ subscribers) stealing shots, to TV advertising campaigns, all the way up to a Polish supermarket using someone's family photo to decorate their entire outside window! Most of them got resolved in the end, but the moral really is that if you put a photo online, you have to accept it may get stolen, then you have to weigh up whether it's worth pursuing it or just moving on. Obviously in the cases with big firms, it's usually fairly easy to get them to pay up, but when it's some small blog who pleads naivety (or even gets downright hostile towards you) when you contact them, it's not really worth the expense to chase them for what will amount to a few $$$ payout in my opinion... Here's the thread if you're interested [WARNING: contains some NSFW content/language]: https://www.flickr.com/groups/theicebox/discuss/72157628114209623/

Yeah you could, but then the photo looks carp anyway (in my opinion of course!) so why bother? To each their own, but I'm not trying to earn a living off my photos anyway that said, if I found someone was using them to make a fortune (i.e. selling prints), then I'd pursue it further as breach of copyright.

You can set your own copyright on images but it's up to you to police it. I used to do a check every week or so on my most popular images using Google Image Search and Tineye. Did find a guy using one of mine once, charged him £20 to licence it for use in his blog (he was using it in a WP template, so was earning money from it). Have had others simply add a credit or me. Ultimately, once you put something online, you've got to accept if someone wants it, they'll likely steal it and it'll be very difficult to do anything about it. If I were a professional photographer, I wouldn't put anything online. As an amateur, so be it; it's not actually doing me any harm if someone wants to pretend they took my photos.

Don't know what's so surprising - most of us talk s**t all day!

Seeing as how it makes the skin ultra sensitive to UV light, is this actually an example of something you should only stick where the sun don't shine?

It's not really a fair comparison, Free Spotify - iTunes. Personally, I thought Spotify was really good on subscription. That said, on my ageing Android phone, Deezer app works better and has almost everything Spotify has, plus much better generated playlists, which I liked for finding new music. Haven't used iTunes so can't comment there. What I would say is that there are dozens of streaming services, almost all offer a free trial and have varied catalogues. Depending on the style of music you listen to, you may well find one service has much more to your taste than the next. Try them all!

Are you sure that's a fair deal? They're only ~£550 new, so assuming your monitor cost approx half of that at £275 and you're paying £300 on top - you just paid £575 for a second hand one...

You can order from any Amazon site, but you have to set up separate Amazon accounts for each site. Had to do this myself a couple of years ago because my OH insisted on a very particular mouse that wasn't available on any UK site that I could find, so ended up buying from Amazon.es - I still get the occasional promo in Spanish from them

OK, product in question: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vilros-Raspberry-Pi---Complete-Cable--WiFi/dp/B00T53135O/ref=sr_1_2?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1436962606&sr=1-2&keywords=raspberry+pi+2 On Amazon, they're claiming it was £129.99, now £49.99 On the site you linked, they list the highest price as £59.99: Vilros Raspberry Pi 2 -- Model B (1GB)--Complete Starter Kit--Includes--Clear Case--8GB Kingston Micros SD Card--HDMI Cable--WiFi adapter (B00T53135O) | Amazon price tracker / tracking, Amazon price history charts, Amazon price watches, Amazon price Is this even legal?

They're (as usual) being rather devious about the actual amount of discount you receive. There's a Raspberry Pi starter kit doing the rounds on Twitter for instance that claims to be reduced from £130 to just £50, but in actual fact I ordered the exact same kit a little over a month ago for £60. It's still a discount, and still a great price for the kit you get, but I do think it's incredibly immoral to do this.

BBC micro:bit Register Your School Go to the website, fill in the form and all being well you'll receive your shipment of micro:bits in September October

Is that to be installed on local machine or a server? I'm looking to put it on a server really so all her devices will be filtered Googled my answer like I should have done. Looks good! Will probably be using an RPi2, but if that proves to be too slow for the task, this will be a good fall back. Thanks!

Well I'm afraid to say, this is the first time I've ever heard of it! Thank you for posting, will make sure to educate my daughter to keep well clear.

I noticed the other day that you can now bypass Family Safety with any local admin password (used to have to be the password of a nominated parent account). Renders it useless for me - I trust my daughter is quite capable of having admin access to her PC, I just want to filter what she's subjected to online. Will be rolling my own proxy server for this reason over the holidays.

This is a good place to start Unfortunately, I've never used iSAMS so can't even begin to advise but you can bet there'll be someone here who has

Every school will be different... your assessment/monitoring probably isn't going to change a huge amount at the class level, if you look at the back of that earlier document, you can see the new 1-9 grades mapped to existing A*-G grades. Just set up a gradeset that accepts 1-9 (or even a marks-integer aspect limited to 9) and then staff can enter data in to that just as they would have done an 'old' GCSE grade. Don't stress - it's essentially just a lick of paint

I wrote a script for someone a while back that would dynamically set the date, perhaps that'll get you started? http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/66215-sims-net-reporting.html#post593543

I'm afraid I don't follow - why can't you use Report Sections to create a page/section for each subject?

Yes that's correct. They take just as long to run, but you can at least leave it unattended then print them quite quickly in the morning using that script. EDIT: for an example, one year group (approx 300 students) of full subject reports (page per subject) takes about 9 hours to run here EDIT2: sorry, lots of edits another way to cut down run time is to minimize the use of graphics in your reports and to make sure that any you do use have been compressed (select image, go to 'Format' toolbar and select 'Compress Pictures')

I export all mine to a folder overnight, then print them in the morning using this script (save with .vbs extension, drag folder containing reports on to script to print them all): '========================================================================== ' ' NAME: WordXMLPrint.vbs ' ' AUTHOR: Jim Williams ' DATE : 30/04/2007 ' ' COMMENT: Batch prints Word XML files. ' HOW TO USE: Drag a folder containing the XML files onto the script. '========================================================================== Option Explicit Dim Arg 'Script argument Dim FSO 'File System Object Dim oFol 'Folder object Dim oFil 'File object Dim oFils 'Files Dim myWord 'Word object Dim filePath 'Path to file (need for Word to open the file) 'Check arguments If WScript.Arguments.Length < 1 Then MsgBox "Drag a folder containing Word XML files onto this script", vbOKOnly, "Error!" WScript.Quit End If Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Arg = WScript.Arguments(0) If FSO.FolderExists(Arg) = False Then MsgBox "Drag and drop a folder onto this script to print the contents." Set FSO = Nothing WScript.Quit End If Set myWord = CreateObject("Word.Application") myWord.Visible = True 'Get folder informaton Set oFol = FSO.GetFolder(Arg) Set oFils = oFol.Files For Each oFil in oFils '-- enumerate files in the folder using For/Each. Each oFil is a File object. If FSO.GetFileName(oFil) <> "IndRepBaseTemplate.dot" Then filePath = oFil myWord.Documents.Open filePath, False, True, False, , , False, , , 8, , True myWord.PrintOut False myWord.Documents.Close False End If Next myWord.Application.Quit False Set myWord = Nothing Set oFils = Nothing Set oFol = Nothing MsgBox "Complete!", vbOKOnly, "Printing done" It'll use whatever printer is currently set as default in Windows, plus the default settings associated with it.

If you decide to have another crack at it, feel free to PM me any issues and I'll do what I can to help. It's one of those things I created for myself and thought might be useful to others and as such hasn't seen any testing beyond my own machine, so problems are almost inevitable!

If you mean in terms of Progress 8 - there is only a single target for Progress 8, and that's the final P8 score. This is why I talk about this target as a 'minimum' - it's a level that they must average in all their qualifying subjects to have a positive P8 score. This is why you can't just use this and say "there's your target" - use it as an informer, not a target on it's own. KS2 Fine Level is the average of Reading and Maths (apart from current Y10, where it's English + Maths) Have a good read through that linked document, work through the examples, run some of your own data to see how it looks. It's going to be crucial you have a good grasp on that in the coming years. Unfortunately, nobody can give you definitive answers yet (as you'll notice there's lots of "we plan to", "we intend yo", "we will inform" in that document, the only official one that exists!) but the more we understand now, the more able we'll be to adapt to changes. I advise lots of coffee and a quiet room

On P29 of the linked document (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/415486/Progress_8_school_performance_measure.pdf) it shows the expected Progress 8 score based on KS2 fine level (average of English Reading + Maths). As Progress 8 is based on 10 'buckets', dividing this score by 10 gives rough indication of a minimum grade (there are various rules around what counts for each bucket, with English being doubled if Lit is also taken, Maths being doubled, and the remaining 6 being made up of 3 EBACC subjects and any 3 other subjects (including further EBACC if the student took them) Now you really, really have to be careful with this; this 'minimum' is based on on the student achieving that level in all their qualifying subjects, and them filling all criteria for the 10 'buckets'. There is also the problem that Progress 8 changes every year, and as we're heading in to our first year of Progress 8, these will get higher. There's no doubt about this in my mind; they're based currently on curriculum models that didn't require the various EBACC subjects being run, didn't require Lit be sat (you don't have to, but you will not then qualify for one of the ten buckets) and so as schools adapt to this new curriculum model, the scores can only get higher. So for an example, a student coming in with a KS2 fine level of 4.5 is expected to have a P8 score of 46.37. Dividing by 10 we get 4.6 - which has to be rounded up to 5 to ensure the student would have a positive P8 if they achieved this in all subjects. So your student's mimumum is a 5. Again, be very careful as this is likely to rise dramatically in the next few years. It's all a bit vague and unhelpful I know, but that's the nature of moving to a totally new model. Do what you can, but I'd say that for your Y9 and below it's essential you target considerably higher than current P8 suggests. EDIT: for all the reasons mentioned above, Fischer is still going to be a better indicator of where you should be targeting your students for the foreseeable future I think, but it's also going to be essential to understand how Attainment 8 and Progress 8 work, as these will be used to judge schools from now on. Make sure your analysis shows you are aware of where you stand based on current Progress 8 estimates, I think any school failing to do so from next year will be had over the coals by OFSTED (only opinion, but it makes sense!)