stevenr

Frog is new for us and in the process of being built. We've bought it to involve parents more, provide online reporting, etc. It might replace Moodle, long term, but we've got alot of time and effort invested in our Moodle - we've been using it for a while now. I'll try to expand on details if there's specific questions.

I'm moving on, so my job is becoming available. It's a lovely school with lots of good colleagues and (mostly) great students. I've enjoyed the 4 years I've been there. Details Here - Scroll down past the Biology job. Closes 1st November 2010. Feel free to ask if you've any questions about the job. Cheers, Steven

Hi, Sorry if this has been asked before, but I couldn't find anything on the non-technical side if things. I've been asked to do some research into what other schools do. I'd like to offer 6th form students here the ability to use their own laptops/netbooks on the school's wireless network (with a captive portal, specific ESSID+VLAN, MAC authentication, firewall zone/policies, transparent proxy to enforce the usual filtering policies and only allowing them internet access, no fileserver/printing/other access). I'm happy with the technical side of things. The 6th form students ask for access, but I'm not allowed to let them use it yet. So, do you provide guest-style wireless access? If so, who do you allow guest-style access to? What access do you provide them with? What devices do you permit? Are they required to register in some fashion? Are they required to meet certain criteria before being permitted access? (Such as having some AV software installed, registering their MAC address with the IT support team or similar). Thanks in advance, Steven

We rolled out our first yeargroup of 1:1 devices (netbooks in our case) in September, including insurance covering fire, theft and accidental damage. So far we've had around 20 claims (out of 117 devices). None of these were theft. All of them were for split water bottle in bag or dropped bag/netbook and cracked the screen. Some students have had to claim twice (though we do the actual work to file a claim, etc). We've had a couple of claims rejected due to students being negligent or very careless. Worth it? Very much so. We've continued to bundle insurance with the next set of netbooks that we gave out this week. Both sets of devices were provided to us by a company called Lanway (who also did the imaging and provide the warranty service). The insurance is provided by Compucover. Cheers, Steven

We install "IE7Pro" for internet explorer (it does work with IE8) and the foxyproxy firefox extension on our netbooks. Both seem to work very well. They then have one locked down account. We've also started doing this for teaching staff laptops.

Hi, I'm hoping to replace our old admin PCs with a thin client/terminal services system. The accounts office use RM Finance. Has anyone got any experience with using RM Finance in a terminal services environment? Any gotchas/problems? Thanks, StevenR

We're running SIMS .net Steven

We currently use a system called Simply Click. It allows staff to send messages to students/parents, as well as students -> staff and parents ->staff. It's also a sort of portal, with the school calendar, etc. We're less than happy with it due to the number of outages it seems to suffer, as well as it being rather buggy and a bit on the expensive side. So we're looking for something better... This is the sort of thing it's used for: - Parents reporting absent students. - Admin team sending out the PDF school newsletter. - General announcements to all parents/students or sub groups (All year 9 parents for example) - Individual student-teacher communication (questions about coursework, deadlines, etc) - Students using it to transfer work home. - Other individual parent<->staff messaging. - Creation of private groups to allow staff to create say, "10R Chemistry" to send messages just to students of one class It allows us to restrict who can send to which group (students can't send messages to parents for example). I've looked at parentmail, but it seems to only be one way (school -> home). With email alone there's the issue of tracking 800ish parental email addresses. The messaging bit is the thing we're struggling to find at the moment. The portal functions would probably fit onto a CMS like joomla/drupal. Any suggestions of products/services? Thanks in advance, StevenR