SteveBentley

The counter argument is that if you don't do it, somebody else will do it on your behalf and you'll have no control at all.

The voice recognition in Windows 7 is surprisingly good - I set it up for a colleague who has a broken arm and can't type much and I wasn't expecting much, but it actually works. With my Yorkshire accent and her Brummie accent.

If control means "delete all negative comments on sight", I'd disagree. If you mean "engage with them and turn a negative into a positive one" then you might be onto something. I would personally only delete if it's clearly spam or using offensive language, identifies an individual or has some safeguarding or privacy issue. If it's anything else then I'd be looking to engage with the poster and address their concerns. As I said in the thread about Twitter the other week, having a social media presence needs resources throwing at it in terms of somebody to keep an eye on comments and get an appropriate answer, and it really ought to be somebody with sufficient seniority to speak on behalf of the organisation.

I'd go further - the government/NHS should fund the air ambulances rather than leaving them reliant on charity donations. Charity should be for added extras, and the air ambulances have shown time and time again that they are essential for life saving.

Apparently somebody threw a pound coin onto the pitch at Ibrox. Police are investigating whether it was a missile or a takeover bid.

If you're doing monitoring it has to be for everybody (or at least a whole group of similar employees) so you don't leave the door open to a claim of victimisation or similar.

Nope, it's a well documented problem. Some people think it's a miscalibrated temp sensor inside the unit, others think the charger supplied is dodgy.

Let's hope it works better than some of their previous efforts - persuading my Archos 101 to charge is fun (it needs a certain ambient temperature to charge which is higher than I generally like the house to be, so I either have to turn up the heating or leave the Archos on top of the Sky box, which runs a little warm)

Is there no video footage of the one that broke being tested?

There's a lot to be said for paring down the curriculum to the bits that are actually going to be useful and abolishing homework full stop.

Make the slide that has the video on it hidden (right click in the slide sorter). On every other slide, make a button or link (doesn't have to be obtrusive - make it semi-transparent) that links to the hidden slide. Set your slideshow up in the usual way. The hidden slide will be skipped (make sure that slide isn't set to advance on timer). When it's time for the video, click the link. After the video, move to the next slide in the usual way (remembering that clicking on top of the video might start it to play again!) and you're back to the looping slideshow.

Maybe S needs to learn what Windows+L is for?

The term shareware has morphed somewhat - back in the day it used to be that developers would release something as shareware with a license that meant that you could use it indefintely but if you found it useful you were expected to pay for it. Shareware has come to mean something more akin to trialware in more recent years, with features or the entire application being disabled after 30 days.

Is it not the definition of shareware and freeware that you can distribute the software?

Focus isn't especially cheap to insure or tax though? Curve ball time: You can get an 08 plate Prius for about 6.5k which costs £20 a year to tax.

Look for a book called "The Curry Secret" by Kris Dhillon, that covers the way restaurants make curries where they're all made by adapting a common base. Of course no two takeaways do a tikka masala the same so it's going to be difficult to get it just right.

Just so long as you also remember the bit about not using the compressed air on the projector while it's on/hot!

With your proxy/smoothwall box/other kit needed to talk to the outside world going up in flames?

The usual Twitter widgets are done client side, they request a bit of JavaScript from Twitter's servers and that gets displayed as part of the page much like taking an image from a remote server. You might be able to get a server side version that uses a bit of PHP or ASP or some other server side language (that is appropriate to what your server supports and how your site has been developed) to request the feed and display it, so that as far as the client computers are concerned everything is coming from your own (whitelisted) website.

But that only works if your SLT are sufficiently familiar with Twitter and the expected conventions of Twitter (eg if I send a reasonable question to an organisation on Twitter I expect to at least be acknowledged, if not responded to). If they don't know how Twitter works they're going to make the wrong decisions.

In which case I don't think the school is in a position to have a presence on Twitter, given that an @ mention can be construed to be an FoI request (and remember that FoI requests don't have to explicitly state that they are under FoI). If you don't have the resources to deal with those enquiries, you don't have the resources to operate a Twitter account.

Arguably the same thing. If somebody asks a question through Twitter they expect a reply through Twitter. If you don't feel it's appropriate to reply that way (because they want to discuss something that isn't appropriate in public or that you can't do in 140 chars) then reply asking them to get in touch in a different way or stating that you'll be in touch (if you can identify the person, often you can't). Interestingly the ICO's opinion is that a tweet can be a valid FoI request My view is that you either commit to fully engage with Twitter or don't bother.

Because ignoring feedback, comments, questions and complaints from stakeholders is a good professional way of doing business?

It's a conversation, not a broadcast. If you're not going to engage, you have no business being on Twitter, IMO. However, iff you are doing an automated feed from a blog or RSS, make sure your profile clearly states that it's unattended and you're not monitoring @replies, and give a link to a web page stating your preferred method of contact. Other advice - whoever is going to look after the official account should get a personal account and run that for a few weeks first just to get a feel for how Twitter works, and make their mistakes and faux pas there rather than on behalf of the school.

But isn't it better to examine these things in a more realistic context? So rather than an exam saying "explain why x" have coursework that allows students to show that they understand x and how it can be applied practically in something approaching the real world?