shadowx

After sitting in lessons yesterday (Want to become a teacher once I finish my OU degree) it struck me that kids just dont see the point and I'm sure it's the same in every subject, so how can ICT become relevant to kids? I grant them the fact that ICT is boring in school, lessons yesterday consisted of searching for houses on the net and putting their details into a spreadsheet along with identifying which demographic that house would appeal to. From that information they then had to make a slideshow to advertise the houses using the information they had found. That, ideally, teaches the kids how to research, filter information and then take the relevant information and store it in an appropriate format for a purpose. But the kids didn't see the point and I can understand why but surely there must be something that teachers and to an extent support staff, can do to make ICT more relevant. Anyone have any ideas?

Ooooooo IIS more secure than Apache... Just as well that you're in Wales and I cycle to work In fairness, using IIS if you're using ASP makes sense, using a windows server and then running WAMP is just... (IMHO) stupid. We run RDWeb and Exchange web access but they both have their own servers which publish their front own IIS front ends via TMG (And for security the TMG connection is further port forwarded through our smoothwall box) With regards to the secutiy between Apache and IIS I would strongly disagree based purely on the track record of Microsoft, but that's an entirely different thread!

Out of interest... Why do you use IIS?!

Christ no... I would never ever ever ever use a front facing IIS server given a choice! We use an ubuntu headless server running the Apache server with PHP5 and MySQL. Job done. On that we host our WP install. I've also got a little 1U unit running the same sort of setup, Ubuntu server headless, Apache, PHP5, SQL, Webmin (Web based management of updates, Samba shares, configs etc...) and some experimental stuff we were playing with like Ruby. Linux is the only way to host a website... There's a reason that even Microsoft use Apache servers on some of their sites....

Lol ...

I think even diverting to spam is too much to be honest, I am tempted to make a rule that just deletes all facebook emails, they shouldn't be using it anyway. We can always setup a facebook-allowed group in case for some reason they need facebook as part of coursework (Media did that once I think... no idea why though)

Thats the other option but it just seems so.....stupid really... And thinking about it, while the email account is technically the school's "property" the facebook account isn't so if they were to use their school email I wonder where we stand legally when it comes to deleting their email when they leave the school... Hmmm An interesting point, I have no idea how it works to be honest, whether or not you have to authorise an email address before you can send updates or whether, like you said, you can only use the registered address. May have to dig some more on that front, thanks!

Ah ok thanks, so you can only send updates to FB using ONE email account and not two or more? In which case like you say, it's unlikely they would want to use their school email address as the "primary" way to update facebook, although it's possible... Looks like we will setup a simple exchange rule to get rid of facebook emails to a) be on the safe side and b) stop them thinking they can get one over on us

I do have facebook but I have 9 friends, 3 of which are family so forgive any stupid questions here... There were a few emails coming from facebook to student email addresses, after a google I have learned that you can update FB status/photos etc.. by emailing your personal email update address. My question is, could you reasonably use purely email to use facebook? Obviously we have the FB urls blocked and what not but could these students be receiving email updates via their school address then sending off status updates by email too and thus be using facebook? This would only really work if you could have two email addresses registered to facebook, their personal one for signing in etc.. and their school one for receiving update emails. Any insight?

Clever... at first I was all like "That looks like a shop to me, I can tell from some of the pixels" Then I was all "Dude, sweet!"

This could go back and forward over and over again, however in your example consider WHY you as the driver doing 90 would hit the guy in front. Because YOU didn't keep YOUR distance. Nothing to do with speed, if the distance is correct for the speed and conditions then a situation like that wouldn't even come up. The other scenario is a little kid running out in front of the car when you are doing 40 in a 30 zone in which case that speed (40) is inappropriate for the situation, you could even be doing a legal speed (30) outside a crowded school and kill someone. It's not the speed's fault it's the drivers fault for not considering the conditions and situation. At the correct speed most, if not all "accidents" would be avoided or mitigated to the point of no injury/damage. There is a time and a place for speed, an empty motorway in good conditions why not give it some and do 90 for a minute? It would make you a much safer driver in the long run than the person who never goes over 70 since you'll have that experience and you wont have the desire to keep doing it. I have done speeds that would get me a driving ban on the bike. Right or wrong, that's up to you. Will I do it again? No, why? Because I've done it and got the T-shirt! I now know what it feels like, how the bike moves and reacts, how *I* react so the next time I am doing 80 overtaking some twit in the middle lane I know how to handle the machine. Speed can get you into trouble just as easily as it can get you out of trouble! I can see this thread devolving into something less constructive but let's see how it goes. As I said, *shrug* people have their own opinions.

Going over 70 literally saved my life on the bike when some twazzock doing 65 in the middle lane decided to overtake and came (and I mean this quite literally) half way into my lane while I was sitting next to him. If my bike were limited to 70mph regardless then I would be dead. Speed does not kill, speed has NEVER killed. Dangerous and irresponsible drivers (particularly those that don't know the limits of their vehicle and themselves) kill people. Speed != dangerous driving. /rant I am looking at insuring a car this month once I (hopefully) pass my test, I have had bikes for over 2 years now, completely clean (touch wood) and it's going to cost me a bomb to get insurance. I've looked at these safe driver schemes and what not but at the end of the day it's not worth it for me...

Thanks for the linky, to be honest from the content of that thread alone I'm not really considering Lightspeed, basic URL filtering is old hat now, we don't whitelist here anyway, we run a blacklist system with Smoothwall's content analysis picking off the bad stuff (Need to check if Dan's guardian can do that.. hmm...) Thanks though! Edit: LMFAO!!! I wasn't going to turn this into a smoothwall bashing thread but they've just made me literally lol now... Long story short, rebooting the UTM caused an unrecoverable disk error, Smoothwall sent out a new appliance and got it delivered from Germany next-day (we pay £400/year for that kinda service) Anyhoo, unit turns up but as part of registraton it needs a license/serial code, we dont want to start a new license so phone them to request details etc... That takes 3-4 hours before they actually get back to us (nice, in this time we have no net, no emails, no public sites etc...) get all that sent through over the phone but then get told that we can't run through the wizard based install ourself and that if we do it will effectively cancel our £500/year support contract. Instead we are told we need a proper engineer to install the unit. Now, let me clarify. "installing the unit" consists of plugging in a USB keyboard, network leads and a VGA monitor, running through a wizard based GUI to get the first NIC up and then using a web GUI to assign other networks to NICs and then setup filtering. It took us a total of about an hour (3 of us working simultaneously) to get the unit setup to provide email, basic public site and full internal filtering. Smoothwall would charge "around £1,000" for that... A THOUSAND POUND? Are you absolutely mad SW? Srs now, our renewal is up in April and I can assure you that you won't get a penny Absolutely laughable. Not only that but in order to get an engineer send out our account manager needed to know what settings we want etc... then she could contact the engineer and book a date for him to come out. So Smoothwall's solution to an install is for us to pay over £1,000 and wait perhaps a week or more for an engineer. Nice one. Absolutely hilarious. Back on tangent, by coincidence the NM had a phone demo with Bloxx this morning, anyone have any feedback positive/negative on bloxx? I know we still need a firewall which will sort out in-house but from a filtering side of things is Bloxx any good? They seem to through around terms like "TrueView" but to me it just seems like clever use of weighted phrases which any other system can do anyway?

Up until now we have used Smoothwall here but the tides are changing and with a renewal in April we are looking at moving away. So now we are looking for alternatives. We are looking at two main options, one is to use TMG as our filtering and Smoothwall Express as our firewall. We are absolutely determined never to use a microsoft product as our public facing firewall so TMG will handle only internet filtering while Smoothwall Express will handle firewalling and DMZ. Another option is to set up our own linux box with Squid (for proxy) and Dan's Guardian (for filtering) which is pretty damn close to what Smoothwall use (Might even be the same setup with a price tag for all I know) A third option is to use Smoothwall Express for firewall and buy into something like Bloxx, however ideally we want an in house system that we control fully and the fact we already have TMG means that the first two options are free (which also means that if it goes t*** up we can just restore a full disk backup and have the net back within hours, not days. Has anyone else setup their own semi-custom solutions like these or can recommend anything we might have missed?

It's not something we are looking at here (yet) however it's probably on the horizon, with me and the NM both Linux fanbois we will almost undoubtedly go the route of using ubuntu VMs possibly locked down so that changes made to the VM are reset on reboot (There is a commercial name for this type of system, something like deep freeze?) Anyhoo... The VMs wouldn't need access to the network or to the net, all you would need to do is map a windows share (Let's say V:\) to something like "\home\Python" and that way kids can shuttle stuff back and forward. I would imagine that there would be a way to map the virtual \home\python to a path like "H:\Username\PythonFolder" so that the kid's can save all their python stuff to their windows profile and have it auto-map when they launch a VM. But that's getting off the track, long and short is to install ubuntu VMs on each physical machine, set the VMs up to revert ALL changes on reboot, isolate them from the network (Disable/remove the networking services on the ubuntu install or disable and lock settings in the VM software) and sort out a solution for transferring files between network and VM (Usb sticks would technically work since most VM host softwares can take ownership of USB devices at the click of a button or, like I said, mapped virtual drives). If you really want it on the cheap lookup VirtualBox, cross platform, free VM solution.

whenever I get prices for toners I get a "remanufactured" and an original price. So far I have got the refill everyime. These are all HPlaser toner cartridges and I have only had one problem in the course of two years where the "compatible" (IE fake, as opposed to refilled) toner has the wrong sort of attachment so the printer was unable to spin the drum and hence wouldn't print. Pointed it out to our supplier who replaced them with working models. We now use both colour and black remanufactured toners and I wouldn't hesitate to order more. They work out around 30-40% cheaper for us.

The problem we have here is that lessons are an hour long and we have no double periods so given that it would take the kids 5-10 minutes at the start and the same again at the end to connect/disconnect everything it wastes nearly a third of the lesson time and just isn't worth it. It's a good point that the Pis can be left "unlocked" and place responsibility on the kids and I really like that idea... Speaking to the head of IT he is saying that there is a fair chance Python will be included in the GCSE in a couple of years in which case I love the idea of having either VMs or linux terminals that are "unlocked" if the kids stuff up their user account I will delete it and they start from scratch. Being Linux there is very very little chance of them ever gaining root access or accessing any files other than their own HOME directory so I would feel comfortable leaving them relatively policy free but with Windoze you can't afford that chance, even with pure staff only machines the user accounts need to locked down to prevent accidental damage like viruses and the like. With a properly locked down computer most user introduced viruses are limited to the local user folder and their home folder(s) but if you were to allow greater freedom you risk the chance of an accidental virus infecting the C drive or other local user folders and hence spreading.

Something one of the other techs here worked out is that Windows will also scan the local profiles on bootup for some reason causing the Please Wait issue, solution is to delete or trim the local profiles down. We have also found that unplugging the network lead during bootup and plugging it back in once we get past the Please Wait screen seems to make it very quick but that's obviously not a solution in a work/school environment. There was, I believe, a hotfix from MS for the issue but I'm not 100% that it works that well...

Taking them home is an interesting idea, it does save the hassle of trying to get the kids to install Python and what not at home and gives them a stable and repeatable environment to code in. The idea of cross curricular involvement is good but in reality at least in this school that never happens which is a real shame really. Personally I would rather they learned something on the Arduino, no need for a screen/keyboard etc... ust put a battery into it or connect it via USB for power and it will run the scripts, the only problem with the arduino is the fact that you need to either make your own breadboards or fiddle about with wires.

I see that Google are teaming up with Raspberry to ship out thousands of Pis to schools for free: 15,000 Raspberry Pis for UK schools – thanks Google! | Raspberry Pi But why? Why should a school want/need/use them? Yes it's cool (in a nerdy way) to have a computer in the palm of your hand and see it in the bare bones but realisticly what does it offer me? Everyone is touting it as THE way to get kids into programming and banging on about how little Timmy got a Pi for christmas and wrote his own web server by the new year but seriously... Isn't it just a stripped down debian install? And if so can't I just install an ubuntu VM on classroom machines and install Pytho plus the IDE and then kids can use that? AFAIK the Pi comes with python and the IDE and all of these wonderful little programs are just Python programs, in which case there's nothing new here. Python is ages old and the Pi just sticks it in a small restrictive box that has to be taken out at the start of a lesson, plugged into power, peripherals, memory, screen etc.. before it can be even used so why would I go through all of that? There is a chance that I will be taking on a more classroom/teaching role at some point and I am a firm believer that kids these days do not get an education in ICT they get an education in how to use the buttons in MS office and that's it so ANY way of getting more computer science into their heads is something I would love to push to the school but why would I suggest Pi's? Anyone use them/have answers?

Every iPhone I've seen has signal problems! Every single one on all different networks. 3 friends all replaced blackberries (which are turd anyway) with iPhones and all had lack of signal!

My aunt had a couple of guys in suits knock on her door a couple of weeks ago who flashed her IDs and asked to come in all officially. One went upstairs while the other explained that their signal boosters were blocking out signal for the whole area. She was pretty shaken and said she wished she hadn't opened the door to which their reply was "We would've busted it down anyway, we've got a warrant to enter". Nothing ultimately came of it since she was (conscientiously) innocent, she had no idea they were illegal as you can pick them up all over the place but yeh... moral of the story is that if you don't want ofcom kicking your door down get an "official" one or more importantly, don't get an iPhone

You would probably want to do some more googling and research in order to write a simple and reliable guide but the basic steps are pretty simple, firstly get yourself a linux distro, for a simple server I think Ubuntu is your best bet, get one of the "LTS" versions which are Long Term Support, IE they release updates for longer. Get that onto a DVD and whack it in the server drive. The rest is fairly straight forward, setting time zones etc... the important bit is going to be the partitioning. I dont know if you have used *nix before so I will assume you havent, just skip over this lot if you know what you're doing! Essentially I would set it up to keep all the important folders separate so you will need something like the following: ROOT Partition (Like the C Drive) Mount Point: / Type: EXT4 Size: Anywhere from 10-20gb or smaller if space is short Primary/Logical: Primary Swap partition (Like a pagefile) Mount Point: N/A Type: N/A (I think) Size: Equal to or double your RAM size Primary/Logical: Logical Home partition (Like My Documents) Mount: /home Type: EXT4 Size: 5-10gb, largely irrelevant so smaller if space is short. It wont get used on a server anyway Primary/Logical: Logical Var Partition (Variable data - Will hold the website files etc... so this needs to be big) Mount: /var Type: EXT4 Size: Everything left on the disk! Primary/Logical: Primary In terms of how to carry out the partitioning try this guide: Manual disk partitioning guide for Linux Mint 11 It will look slightly different but same interface behind the theme. Essentially by setting the VAR partition separately if the ROOT partition gets corrupted for some reason or if you want to update the server install your VAR partition is completely isolated so you can just unmount it and do whatever you like, copy it off to a new server, update the distro then remount it etc... and your data is safe. If you want an on-disk backup you can just add another partition in there mounted at "/backup" and give it 20gb or so. Primary/Logical (IIRC) refers to a "physical" partition compared to a logical one, so for the important areas like root and VAR I go Primary, everything else can go logical. The SWAP partition will act as your pagefile taking lesser used data from RAM temporarily if needed. HOME is like my documents and is largely irrelevant, you want some space there for tinkering but not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. Just a useful place to act as a drop box for bringing in updates etc... I can't remember if the Ubuntu server installer gives you a GUI for networking, if not then try this guide for doing in the command-line: Ubuntu Networking Configuration Using Command Line|Ubuntu Geek Once you get the server install you want to get the Apache server in, then PHP5 and probably PHP5-CLI (Client line functions, useful for Cron jobs later I think) and then SQL, this guide should talk you through that nicely: Installing LAMP(Apache Web Server/PHP/MySQL) in Debian/Ubuntu – Bin-Blog Once that lot is up and running you should have a webserver ready to go. The only things after that configuring updates which I think by default are to notify you whenever you login but not to download until you give the command and to get used to the command line. It doesn't take long I promise Once you have the webserver running you should also install Webmin, it's a web interface for the server. Since linux is all flat-file configs (no registry etc...) Webmin actually lets you do really indepth things like change network configs, change file shares, restart services like Apache, re-configure things like PHP, Apache and loads more all from a webpage and probably more importantly it lets you check for and install updates without using the terminal. Linky: Webmin Try going through that on an old machine and see what works best for your situation, like has been said, that little setup would run on under a 1gb of ram and a 2ghz processor without issues. Apache is pretty rock solid when it comes to security, always be sensible and put it behind a firewall/in a DMZ and keep the updates fairly current. Linux has a utility called IP Tables which does what it says on the tin. It blocks or allows certain ports (or all ports) for certain IPs (or all IPs) allowing you to only allow port 80 traffic for example and blocking anything else. Linky: iptables - Debian Wiki IMHO any other web server like IIS is a child's toy and opens you up to a world of pain! Give it a play and if you get stuck PM one of the linux geeks here or make a forum post. As with everything do a bit of research and testing, I'm not saying my way is right but it works for me! EDIT: Seeing what dhicks has said about the Pi I would be tempted to test that setup. You can use the same instructions as I have posted here since you'd be plugging it into a hard drive anyway but as @dhicks said, you could actually set the server up for them, get them to buy a hard drive (or send your data over encrypted or something similar) and then you can keep a standardised setup. Ubuntu also offer a paid system called Landscape: http://www.ubuntu.com/business/systems-management/features which offers you the ability to remotely control updates and configs from across the net so if you wanted you could even retain complete control over the operating system and let your other guys control their own website data.

Impero can deploy MSI's. SCCM can too (Well, so they say). Impero is infinitely faster and more reliable, although more suited to single deployments EG if flash breaks and needs a re-install. We are on SCCM 2007, perhaps 12 is better. But 2007 is not worth the bandwith to download it let alone get it working

Doesnt matter, give it a few years and Ubuntu will have about 10 active users. Wont be upgrading my machine to any version of Ubuntu now, once I get bored enough I will switch to something else. Ubuntu sold out to Amazon and Gnome 3/Unity. Utter trash now, shame to say it but it's true