SteveBentley

Get one for every member of staff... just after enforcing a password policy that requires at least one number

I heard a (possibly apocryphal) story that there was a guy at the BBC (where they used to be really big on initials and acronyms) with a job title that was something along the lines of Engineering Inspector, Engineering Information Office, and would answer the phone "E.I.E.I.O."

The key part of this is the comment from the OCR BBC News - Ofqual head: End paper exams for digital generation And this is where the nail is hit firmly on the head. The real question should be "why are students still doing (so many) exams", not how can we transfer exams to a computer. The main reason for persisting with exams is a paranoia about plagiarism - and an invalid belief that exams are the only form of assessment which can't be plagiarised - and a sense of that's how it's always been done so it must be right. But exams are flawed because they take place in an artificial setting, take no account of differing learning styles. It's very much open to debate whether exams actually assess anything useful.

@Butuz the kids were scared of a Robin??

We had snow at the end of February last year.

If you don't have PRS (as a school) that means that nobody will be playing recorded music etc in the school at all?

I would have said that you might have been better trying to contact somebody directly involved via Twitter, in this day and age. But with the recent news re Gary Moore I suspect it's not going to on anybody's priority list to help with this at the moment. There may be one get-out -if you're doing a parody of the song (specifically of the song, not using the song to parody something else) you might be able to claim fair dealing. IANAL etc etc.

I suspect the Fiesta would be cheaper to insure.

I got some of the converters off Ebay. I then realised why they were so cheap http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2473/4037169922_d50a7ed462.jpg No substitute for a real macro lens, but if you're ok with a shallow depth of field they're good for the money. Example of a shot taken with them: http://www.p365.org/display_page/10-10-25.jpg

If you're up for a 365 day challenge, I can recommend (although I'm not exactly neutral) Welcome to Project365! which a friend and I built last new year time as a platform for 365 day projects. It's a bit more structured than doing it in Flickr but flexible enough that you can upload them any time you want, not just on the day you took it which is a restriction some sites make.

Interesting viewpoint. I increasingly use my 50mm f1.8 prime as a walkabout lens, I only really use my kit lens when I want a wider angle, or if it's something I can't physically get close enough to I'll break out my 100-300mm zoom. I find the depth of field and sharpness, plus the low light abilities of the prime far outweigh having to move to the right position to frame the shot how I want it.

This. I love my Sony. As to RAW vs JPEG, I like to shoot in RAW+JPEG. A 4Gb or 8Gb card costs peanuts these days, so having the flexibility of being able to go back and alter the levels, white balance at RAW stage (so before the JPEG compression artefacts) is a good thing to have.

I thought the whole point of the internet and how things were routed was that that kind of thing couldn't happen?

If you buy in cycles then you can standardise and be more efficient in imaging, and knowing of the foibles of a particular model of machine. If you're doing it on the fly then you get a random selection of machines, as sod's law decrees that whatever you bought last time is now obsolete and replaced by a new model with different drivers and issues.

Not sure what the edu version of gmail is like for management tools - do you have a VLE that has email functionality?

Going back to the barcode thing, the Google App Inventor has a control already set up for reading barcodes.

It looks like a Google Goggles API is in the pipeline, so it might not be as tricky to integrate as you think.

Thanks for those suggestions, both Ashot and Android Screencast look like they'll do it. Cheers Steve

Thanks for that - I'll see if the apps I want to demo will work on there. It would be nice to do it with a real phone though as I want to show stuff like Google Goggles. I meant to say in the first post - I've seen some methods that require the phone to be rooted; I'm not really up for doing that at this stage.

Does anybody have a method of displaying the output of an android phone (running 2.1) on a PC? I don't need to control it from the PC (although that would be nice if it were easy to do) but in order to do a demo on a projector I need to be able to get the phone output on the PC. Thanks for any advice

We had a flood in a room (courtesy of some cowboy plumbing on the floor above) and the water found the projector pole to be a convenient path to follow. Left the projector to dry out for weeks and (after testing by a sparky) it's back in use.

I was feeling quite smug at having bought several bottles of cheap plain water from asda before Christmas in anticipation of frozen pipes, which happenned

Another vote for WordPress here - I think I'm right in saying that you can export a site on the hosted free version and move it to a self-hosted version at a later date if you feel you're outgrowing the free version.

Of even more backbone is my MP Jason McCartney who voted against, despite being a Tory, having consulted with constituents. Probably won't have won him many friends in the Tory Whip's office but he's gained a lot of respect locally.

FIFA have the best judging panel money can buy. I think it's high time for a breakaway World Football Association, which will embrace assistive technology for referees and will go out of its way to demonstrate that it's above corruption. They're not playing fairly and we should take our ball home - we invented the game and we should run it properly. And charge a royalty to FIFA for using our rules. My $0.02 (albeit it tongue in cheek)