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Certainly Phil, here are a few of the comments made recently: - People keep moving whole detention slots, we need to be able to lock this down so that they can only add students onto a detention and not create a new one, move an existing one, or delete it entirely! - The system for adding a student onto a detention slot (and we currently have 5 of them every day!) should be more fluent, or even automatic… - Lesson Monitor has its own reporting menu – can Behaviour not have its own menu to report on, rather than having to go and find the report from the list of all the created reports, including the behaviour reports, rather than looking for a specific report. - When you remove a location, type etc. from the drop down menus, this should no longer be available for selection. Some staff who have previously used a now obsolete type are still able to pick this old one up. - Achievement and Behaviour should be displayed as a student field within Assessment Manager, as an additional student field - We need to be able to highlight different detention types in different colours – i.e. – ‘C3 – Detention’ in red, ‘C4 – Detention’ in blue - Teaching Staff are finding that the detentions systems is so ineffective that they are not bothering to add them to the database which causes problems in tackling poor behaviour. - The system for allocating behaviour rewards is also poor and not intuitive. It should be a simple process for staff to allocate these. Just a few of the comments we received. In terms of the house issue, when a teacher begins to log a behaviour incident part of that process is to add in the student's house. If the teacher does not know this prior to starting the logging of the incident there is no way for them to obtain the information other than to either log into another session or to close down the incident and enter it again. This is resulting in them not logging incidents due to the time taken to log each one.

I'm just putting this one out there to see if anyone has any opinions on how this works. We did a survey of our teaching staff who are the ones who have to log behaviour incidents on a day to day basis. They indicate that the system is not fluid and very time consuming to log incidents and if you have a house system you are unable to register their house details without first having to go back out into student search and find which house they are in. Logging detentions is no less easy either in that in order to log a detention they have to hit an extra button in order to add a detention and then it is not that fluid in terms of booking said detention. Are there any schools out there that believe that their teachers are happy with this module and are able to demonstrate this to me either via a remote link or by personal visit. We are on the cusp of moving back to the IRIS behaviour management system as this was far more intuitive and indeed more automated that the current SIMS Behaviour. I submitted a change request to Capita based on the issues we were having but have heard nothing, are they worth their salt? Anyone moved away from SIMS altogether, how did the transition go and was it costly? many thanks Chris

Good looking post with a decent salary. Not long left though so hurry up and get your apps in.

I don't know anything about the school but I can tell from their Learning Gateway link that they are running SIMS. The website looks as though it needs an overhaul also.

Heard about this software today that can detect whether you are talking to a child or to an adult via MSN, facebook etc, could be a good add-in to "ways to help protect yourself" type conversation with students/parents.

Heard about this on the radio today (ChildDefence) a software or phone App that can detect whether it is a child or adult that you are conversing with via MSN, facebook etc.

We currently run MOSS for our VLE with the SIMS Learning Gateway attached to this for parental engagement. It seems to work really well for us. Can I ask if there are any other users out there whether they have any indifferent experiences of the Behaviour/Achievement element of SLG. We moved from IRIS to SIMS behaviour last year and would like to gauge what people's thoughts are on how you think it works within your own systems. Many thanks in advance. Chris

Hi Just wondering if any of you Net Support School users have a basic tutorial that you use for teachers that you would be happy for me to use. Many Thanks Chris

Would you mind letting me know which school this was at, as I would like to see if they still have it and how much use they get out of it now.

This is the way we plan on doing it, takes all the worry out of it. The only concern then is the collation of the data as it is stored on memory sticks. All this creation of new accounts and folders for storage seems over the top but hats off to those that have the time for this.

I think what he has there is fine and it should run on that spec quite easily. Mine has dual 3.0 GHz Xeons with 4Gb of RAM. I don't think it has anything to do with the servers at all. Like I said in my previous post prior to the August update things were running swimmingly now, the server seems to be drowning in these constant refreshes. I have asked staff to remove them from their home page and it has let up a little and crashing seems to have died down. Additionally you can open up the SQL Client Utility and move all the disabled protocols across to the right and tick the "enable Shared Memory" box and this seems to help a little also. I'm running my laptop on Windows 7 with the above configured and no widgets on the dash and it is working really well.

Another addition to this list could be to get people to close down the widgets that appear on the home page of SIMS.net. We have found that these widgets are refreshing data constantly and if you imagine the number of connected workstations to your SIMS database during the course of the day and they are all refreshing then yes there is going to be some slow down. This has happened for us since the last upgrade of SIMS.net and I know it has affected quite a few schools. I'm hoping to use this as leverage to buy a new server though so it has it's benefits in the short term!!

Hi I notice someone put a post up about getting it to work on a windows domain/vanilla network did you provide some instruction or confirmation as to whether it works on there also? If not could you provide some detail please, very interested in this. Thanks Chris

Not sure how easy it would be for you but for us it was very simple. Our head just told the LA that we didn't want their 'service' any longer and we researched the best option for the school and purchased it. It has taken around 60 days for completion but will be connected next friday. In the meantime we have been using a bonded adsl solution which has been just fine and much cheaper than the LA offering. In fact prior to the bonded we were on a standard business DSL line paying £29 a month and the connection was faster than that of the LA. Good luck Cost for us was £12600 plus £1750 for BT to relay some fibre that was unserviceable.

Have any of you guys got this working for your email accounts? I'm wondering whether there is an issue with the fact that I have a restriction on staff not being able to email staff. My thoughts on the configuration were that the app would use the sender account ( I created one specifically for the aupinformant) to send the detail to whoever was specified as the recipient. At present this is not working for me. Looks as though it is the perfect solution for the task. Pity we cannot prevent the person who declines the policy from accessing the internet on the fly.

Just tried this on mine and having issues with it popping up at every logon even if accepted.

I agree and would like to see the prompt appear every time a user does not accept the policy. At present when the user does not accept the policy the next time they log on they can access the internet without issue.

It works well for me also.

Are you using vnc for yourself so that you can access workstations remotely or is it for a different solution? If you are using it for accessing workstations for maintenance you can use GENSORTIUM full service web agency - Windows Remote Control Programs This is a free product and you can access all your workstations from it, you don't need a client installed and therefore don't need to worry about the VNC icon in the systray. It is best used from a workstation or a non DC, click on find hosts and it will detect all online workstations on your network, click on one and you can access it straight away. If you have any machines with existing vnc installations you will need to remove this first as it will cause issues with connectivity. Other than I've been using it for a couple of years now with no real problem. On occasion you can not immediately reconnect to a machine you have disconnected from, this is only because it places a vnctemp folder at the root of c and it won't allow a connection to it until that has gone but this doesn't happen often.

and install Windows 3.1 wonderful operating system and file manager is wonderful. No really though, Vista is not up to the job in a school environment (my opinion only of course) in its current form. It provides us with no added features that are provided by Windows XP in terms of student teacher interaction. I had it at home (Ultimate) and after around 6 weeks of playing with it I got both bored and frustrated with it and have gone back to XP. At work I have two machines attached to a windows 2008 server to continue testing and determining whether there is any real benefit and at present there is not.

As we haven't rolled out Vista to the whole school yet. Tried a few but Group Policy was very intermittent/hit and miss with Vista. Will try and run W2k8 in a test environment for six months before unleashing it on the lovely little monsters....and the students!!! We have 14 servers running 2k3 handsomely at present as well as one on xserve and three on linux...will revisit later in the year

We have just moved into a brand new school which needed a major refit of computer equipment. The school was built as a PFI project and had been planned years in advance. Much of the furniture was quite narrow and so we decided to opt for an all-in-one solution. After much deliberation and many quotes and trials we decided on the AIO from SCL Online. From the onset SCL were extremely helpful providing us with a demonstration unit to test prior to our move. Delivery was absolutely spot on time and having bought in excess o 250 workstations we wanted to be sure the equipment was good. All but one or two were perfect and the one or two were only loose cabling that had moved in transit. The after sales service is also very good with a very good turn round for queries or issues relating to problems experienced... not that we have any. The product is robust, cool, nice looking and most importantly performs as you would want. SCL get a big thumbs up from me.... in fact we have just ordered another 74 machines for front of classroom teacher use.

This is all well and good that the SLT want to go all Linux because they don't want to pay the licensing fees which btw are exhorbitant. However I have to ask the question, who are they doing this for the school or the students. Seems to me like they are penny pinching in order to preserve their precious budget. Some Linux would be good in a school as would a decent quantity of Apple products but as the predominent OS out there is windows then you will be doing the students a disservice by introducing this solution. I am all form cross platform usage but try and look at the bigger picture of what the "students" will actually be using when they hit the big wide world and apply a comparitive ratio of technology to the school. PS are there any good sites that give guidance on Linux as I have rarely used it but use it for our web filtering.

Anyone know how to prevent simultaneous logins? I am looking to prevent Archie Scribbs from letting his mate Bobby Scoggins log in using his credentials (names are fictitious to protect the guilty). I know this can be done using third party software, wondered if anyone had done this by using either a script or something within group policy before?

Is there a Richmond in Lancashire? North Yorkshire and Surrey I think and this one looks pretty much like darn sarf!!