palmer_eldritch

Indeed so, Geoff. It all reminds me of a job interview at a school I went to several years ago, in which the advertised position was for an English/IT teacher and ended up being for a Special Needs co-odinator. "If we offered you the job, would you accept?"

Ah, how is Bartholomew school these days? I did my PGCE practice there. Is Bill Berry still the head?

Exactly. So long as there's a bum on the right seat, who gives a toss what they're actually doing ?

Not a job ad, so apologies if I've posted in an incorrect forum. I have been reading the job description for an IT network manager post at a school. The usual enormous list of 'essential' personal qualities and duties was there and I was on the verge of just getting on with the application form, when I noticed the following in the 'Professional Duties' section; • Establish and maintain effective relationships with pupils • Contribute to pupils’ learning by demonstrating or advising on the proper use of equipment and materials, as requested by the teacher • Act as a personal tutor for a group of pupils • Act as a ‘cover tutor’ in relation to ICT lessons • Provide general support for pupils during unstructured situations Now, I know education is renowned for abusing the 'any other duties commensurate with the position' clause, but this seems to me to be taking the piss. Is anyone out there in the position of being a network manager and an 'unofficial' teacher / tutor as well ? Btw, no teaching qualification is required in the above job, 'experience in management of pupils' is 'desirable'. How do you do it? (This is of course assuming they will be able to find the time to read this post in the first place )

Quite. In my experience it's very obvious when a stude's plagiarised - their work suddenly makes sense!

More news on the price of this (I'm talking to myself here, obviously ), apparently it's an annual fee of £400 plus 41p per student on roll, with a month's free trial.

The teacher concerned here has just told me the cost - for a college of approx. 2000 students it's £1100. Also, on the web site they have a list of what I assume is current users - this includes 'all colleges and universities in the UK'. Interesting.

We're having a demo / sales pitch for it here at the end of the month, apparently. I'm attending in a 'technical capacity', so we shall see. The demo videos on the site have quite humourous voiceovers, I know that much.

Anyone make use of this anti-plagiarism thingy, turnitin.com? Is it recommended?

'User Comments Updated October 5, 2008' Oh, I get it...

'y duz shcool have 2 be so long' 'WHY IS SCHOOL LIKE 8 HOURS?' 'why do you learn math if you enver relaly use it?' The answer is simple - RateMyStudents.co.uk, unless someone's already done that.

Its nothing sensitive, it doesn't really NEED to be done, its just to keep it looking 'simple' for the IT Coordinator when I show them

Of course! [slaps forehead] Cheers.

Does anyone know of a calendar applet for a web page which does the following; shows the current month shows in bold / underlined days with information assigned to them, which are clickable to show the info - similar to the calendars on blogs which show days with posts. has or can be resized to a width of 150px has customisable colour(s) and fonts

If you have a backlog of jobs, put time estimates on that as a start to show your head. Then add the routine jobs you need to do. It'll soon add up. What did your last OFSTED say about how IT is used where you are? Any mention of room for improvement could also be used to persuade.

http://moodle.org Has quite taken off where I am - unlike a lot of other past IT 'solutions'.

We use selectamark here and haven't had any thefts (touch wood and all that) of whole machines / monitors. The last thing we had was a pair of nerks pinching RAM sticks but we got them with a portable webcam.

http://www.cynicalbastards.com/ubs/index.html

Nothing so high-powered Geoff, I'm afraid. I was setting up an email server and was called away about something else (as one is). When I got back the box had been hacked. syslog showed that they'd tried downloading a few things but ended up locking the whole thing up. Well worthwhile...

Leave that senior manager talk at the door.

Yes, it was a few years ago now - forgot to mention that! Blame intrigue for kicking off the MS / *nix argument. Some people have no thread discipline All he needs to do is mention Apple and he's covered pretty much every major IT schism there is.

:idea:

Unless you're running Mandrake 8 - had one of those last half-an-hour before it was brought down.

Well, to keep the lid off the can of worms for a bit longer - I use DW all the time for web design / development and think it's great, on the whole. However, I stay away from most of the 'features' for setting up database connections and the like because the code you get is pretty nasty IMHO. 4guysfrom rolla, webmonkey and devshed have some good guides about the dynamic stuff.

Not as it stands here at the moment, no. That kind of decision is out of my hands, though....