Linfit

We are a Frog school and I would highly recommend it. It is very versatile, is developing rapidly, and the tech support is very good. The fact that the server is 'ours' and is in our server room was a real plus for us and should be a major selling point for anyone with even a slightly dodgy or slow internet connection. I have run several traning sessions for staff and they amazed at how quickly they can put together quite sophisticated content after just a couple of hours training. BUT - its all about the planning, the ability to embed the VLE development into the schools overall development, and practical and serious backing from SMT. Without that, any VLE is a waste of time, and Frog in particular, because what you are getting is in effect a set of building blocks to create your own system rather than an off the shelf solution; it needs time, resources, and a serious commitment to get anywhere, not just the SMT signing off on the cost and then moving on to the next thing. Its taken us two and a half years to make real progress, and in the last year things have come on a great deal, but we have a keen Head and an SMT member whose main focus is the development of e-learning.

I'm not sure from the context of your post exactly what you are asking. Are you using a word template to display data from Assessment Manager ? If so, you can put anything into the template that is defined as an aspect in AM, (and some other stuff as well). Perhaps the underlying issue that not all the relevant data is in AM to start with ?

We cabled and fitted desktop machines on the teachers desk in every classroom when we introduced computerised registration here 5 years ago. Best thing we ever did. All our classrooms now have IWB's, many have video players (lots of teachers have libraries of tapes that they cannot/willnot get converted to DVD) etc connected up, and having everything permanetly wired in is so much easier and more reliable. It really has produced a culture change here as staff see kit is reliable and so use it more; now if we were to take the desktops away there would be an outcry. Our staff all have access to upload/download files from home using our VLE (Frog) and we use roaming profiles for staff. They also do have a laptop issued to them, but these are rarely used to 'teach' as such. I am absolutely certain that the extra initial investment in setting up the infrastructure is more than offset by increased reliability, longevity of kit and ease of use.

One that may be significant is that Cover 7 will now deal correctly with exams; it takes exam rooms that have been scheduled and roomed and they appear in Cover and can be covered by appropriate staff. This was the key feature missing from the first release. There does seem to have been fewer issues than usual on Supportnet for this release; but I can't speak from direct experience because our LA support unit havn't authorised the download yet - they are being ultra cautious with this one it seems....

He worked at our place for several years until last summer, and I believe tried at least twice previously to get on; he was close the year before and had clearance from our previous head to do it. The kids are already worked up about it; I think some of the postings on the BBC site might already be from them; oh we are in for a fun few weeks.... As to how he will do, well I'll leave everyone to draw their own conclusions.

The main "Cover Arrangements" window takes up a large area of the screen, and you want it to, so that you can see the timelines across the day. It's very useful to unpin the available staff window, (which by default occupies only a narrow strip on the right hand side of the screen and shows only a list of staff available for cover) and open it to its full extent on the second screen. You can then see all the details about staff, covers done, their timetable for the day etc, and you get more screen space for the main window. We also unpin the "Manage bookings" screen in the same way. Its best with wide screen monitors as this allows you to see the timeline for the whole day on the screen and limits scrolling around. It really does make the software much easier to use as you can see all the relevant information on the screens at once.

The general response to Cover 7 seems to have been mixed, but this is mainly due to the complete change it represents from Nova-T4. If you are not currently using NovaT for cover many of the 'issues' some schools seem to have had relating to changing over will not apply. Using Cover 7 requires you to work in a particular way, because it links to personnel for course and absence reporting and keeps records of all staff employed on site, including all supply staff, to make sure when the Workforce Census kicks in next year for all schools, the data can be easily extracted, much as PLASC does for pupil data. It has some very good features (integration with other SIMS modules, cover recorded by the minute, and many others) and some really irritating ones (the present version doesn't do exams, although an upgrade scheduled for the May release will include this). Most complaints have focused on the printing and reporting side, which were quite buggy at first, but have improved. We were a field trial school, so have been using it live for almost exactly a year. PM me if you want any more detailed info.

We looked quite hard at what would happen if we lost physical access to the server room and various parts of the campus and did the following: Data backups that go off site every night. These are on portable drives, and include an AD backup. A parallel SIMS server (running on a laptop) that also goes off site every night. A spare server stored offsite, set up and ready to go. We used a server which we had decommisisoned from being a DC and set it up with a copy of the backup software, all the bits and bobs but with no AD. In extremis, we could get a basic network running using this spare server and the laptop, using staff laptops as clients, which would preserve usernames etc. We are talking about dire emergency here, having to operate in the car park or something like that. The bits and bobs to do this are not that expensive, and it does provide peace of mind. We also set up a little baby DC in our office (which is about as far away from the server room as we can get in our building). We built this machine using a mini-ITX board; these fit in a 1U case and can be mounted in a standard comms cabinet if you get a short one - a good solution for putting a discrete DC somewhere in an obscure backwater well away from the server room. Its set up with DHCP and DNS and of course replicates, so would serve as an emergency DC on its own if required.

We are a one site set up and we use a Netgear NAS box to do incremental back ups each day and a full back up once a week. It might be worth looking at upgrading your copy of Backup Exec with some of the money so that you can do encrypted back-ups, which would allow you to take them off site. We have two removable drives which take a full backup every week, and we alternate them off site, they are small enough to take home in a bag. We are backing up 460GB each weekend and rising by about 3GB a week, but the hardware didn't cost us much. We take the approach of having multiple backups on relatively cheap hardware in different places rather than a mega backup rack mounted solution; YMMV.

Encrypted hard drive - it needs a usb key to boot it.

We have a cheap and cheerful solution. We have a decent laptop with a parallel SIMS install running on it on 2003 server. As part of our backup routine the sims database files are copied each night to various places on our network. First thing in the morning we plug the laptop into the network and a scheduled task uses dbattach to attach the copy of the database into the parallel system. The laptop goes home with myself or my network manager every night. This gives us a fuly working SIMS server that can be set up off site if needs be; in desperation we could quickly build an ad-hoc network with staff laptops to get several people into the system; obviously we would lose a days changes but this is a small price to pay if you are planning for a major disaster where you do not have access to the site or any of the computers in it. In the bag with the laptops is a small switch and a car power supply and various leads, and we reckon we could run SIMS in the car park for several hours if needs be. Its not instant fallover, but it cost a few hundred pounds for the hardware and the additional licences on our Schools Agreement.

Yes ! The most dismal attempt at a piece of software ever, and if you are a test centre you HAVE to use it. But it must rank equally with its partner in crime the Edexcel-online website; a truly awful and at best intermittent experience designed by....well designed by nobody really, and thats the problem.

Just finished the course at college. Not done the exam yet; task for the summer when I have some time. If you follow the proper CISCO approved course you can do a short on-line exam the end which entitles you to a voucher which gets you a discount on the main exam fee. Don't know what the fees are at the moment, and they may be cheaper if you are enrolled on an approved college course; there are discounts and such available.

Irfanview, without a doubt. It has a minimal footprint on your computer and is very easy to use. One of the best bits of freeware ever.

You can take the CCNA whenever you want. You need to find a local testing centre that will take you, pay the fee and turn up. There are lists of testing centres on the CISCO website.

The boards themselves tend not to fail. We have Cambridge Boards, various models, and some are now 5+ years old. We do have power supplies fail from time to time but have only had to replace boards when they have been physically damaged. (One had a kid throw a stool at it and it didn't survive that). The projectors are much more of an issue and these seem to last about three years before they start to deteriorate: you can keep them going longer but we get reduced brightness, weird colour variations (Hitachi ones like to go purple) I think because the optics get fried by the constant exposure to heat. Most classrooms are very hostile environments for projectors: exposed to tons of dust, left on too long, turned off too quickly, physically exposed. I'm amazed they last as long as they do.

We now only buy black keyboards. These don't show the dirt as much so there are fewer complaints from pupils about them ! We don't have a regular cleaning program except for projectors where we do the filters and brush the dust out every term. Other kit only gets cleaned if it comes into the office for some other reason or if it is so bad it gets commented upon. The foaming cleaner mentioned in earlier posts is the stuff - it will clean cases and keyboards brilliantly, and we use whiteboard cleaner to get biro and ink off. I find staff computers often get into the worst state. Some of the keyboards in offices get really filthy, but people tend not to notice how disgusting they get until its pointed out to them.

I would also suggest Zen. We have had a connection through them for many years, first as a direct customer and then at one step removed via our LA (we are Rochdale where Zen is based). They won't be the cheapest, but very very reliable and when you ring them you get dealt with by people who know what they are talking about. I believe they can provide quite a range of relevant filtering etc - when we had a direct link to them we certainly had a filtered feed.

We had webspace explorer (along with other CSE products) for two years. At that time (2004) it seemed a deceptively simple way of allowing pupils access to the network in a secure manner, and it was; it just didn't work. I recall frustrating phone calls to CSE, them blaming our LA network, our LA network guy trying to get info from them to do testing and them not responding, generally poor communications and documentation at all levels. Never did get it working reliably and for all users - in common with a number of their other products, and eventually ditched it. As I have mentioned on here before, getting involved with CSE was not one of my better decisions. Not had any dealings with them since 2006 and of course they could have smartened up their act of course, but I would not willingly use their products again. We use Frog as our VLE and it does remote access to network home folders as part of the basic system.

And yet another recomendation for MDaemon... We have been using it for over 6 years now without any issues at all. Easy to set up but with some nice features. You can use the web based interface (we have integrated that into our VLE) that comes with it, but it also works very well with Outlook: you don't need the (extra) Outlook connector if you just want basic functionality.

T4 is not going at the next upgrade. It will be around for some time yet but now that it is not used for cover is intended primarily as a convenient way of printing timetables and group lists. The current SIMS roadmap on SupportNet shows support for Nova as a reporting tool continuing until March 2011.

Without a doubt, cabling. Our building is a 1960's nightmare of shoddy building work and cheap shortcuts and it makes running cable hot, messy and time consuming. You get filthy all day afterwards, and there is all the detritus that falls from the ceiling void: often half eaten many months old sandwiches from the canteen that the kids stuff up there, although last time we had to run cable down our main corridor my tech lifted a ceiling tile and a dead (very dead) mouse fell on his head. Laughed so much I fell off the ladder.

As a rule you would use solid core UTP for cable runs (Comms Room to wallplates) and stranded cores for patch leads, which are likely to be flexed more in use. Other distinctions depend on preference and local rules - we always try to get the purple sheathed stuff as it makes it easy to identity our cables in the roof spaces.

We changed ours during the summer holidays. Panasonic hybrid digital/analogue system with 55 extensions running into 8 channels of an ISDN 30 line. Changed to pure VOIP. We spent a long time getting firms in and detailed quotes, and came to the conclusion that it was something we could do ourselves, but it would take some time to set up and there would be a steep initial learning cruve, so in the end we got a firm in to do it. We have had some issues with the firmware and configuration of the system, but the actual switchover from one system to the other took 10 mins and the general operation has been excellent. The company we went with did an audit of our network config and equipment to make sure there would be no issues and I would highly recommend this: it could save a lot of grief later. What I like about it is that the phones are totally within our control, completely integrated into the network, and the flexibility it gives you, especially if you are contemplating significant building work, is huge. We bought 75 IP phones and are now about to roll out 60 softphone installs for all the staff PC's in the classrooms, and this is a big plus; IP is by far the easiest way to get a phone on every teachers desk. I would also say that we saw a lot of companies and I was very disappointed with the flexibility and approach that many took: there were a surprising number who only dealt with one manufacturer, and so your requirements had to fit their systems specs; two firms said they only used Cisco kit and they would happily put us in a system if we replaced all our switches (30+) with Cisco ones, as they were the only ones they supported.........

If you need proof of GCSE/A level or Vocational quals awarded by the four big boards, Edexcel, AQA, OCR or WJEC, and you have lost the original certificates you need to apply to the exam boards concerned. Easiest way is to go to the relevant web site and follow links for students/parents - there is usually a section explaining what to do with a downloadable form. The AQA one is at: AQA Certificates Most boards will not provide replacement certificates but will provide statements of results for employers. They charge a fee for the service. Your school/college will be unable to help because even if they have results on file (we are only obliged to keep stuff 7 years and certificates only for 1 year) some employers will not accept anything except an exam board document; they seem to have become much stricter about this generally in the last few years, esp public sector.