AMLinington

Yet another example of declining standards in schools. How can you command the respect of your pupils when they're using your first name? Referring to your teachers as Mr/Mrs/Miss Surname is an HONORIFIC. It denotes respect and authority. I personally didn't care whether my students called me Miss Lightfoot or Mrs Lightfoot (although the misprinted name badge of 'Mr Lightfoot' was a step too far) as long as they spoke to me with the respect appropriate to a person of authority in the classroom. Eurgh. Guardianistas. If the feminists are that bothered by 'Miss' then why don't we revert to calling all teachers 'Teacher'. 'Excuse me Teacher, please assist me.' There are historical and social precedents (I may be incorrect but aren't Jewish and Muslim religious leaders or social leaders referred to as 'Teacher' as an honorific?), it's gender neutral, respectful and descriptive of the persons role. Perfect. It even works with Surnames so teachers can be referred to as 'Teacher Jones' or 'Teacher Smith'. More than one teacher with the same surname might be complicated but no more so than currently where two teachers are the same gender and have the same surname. Teacher A Jones and Teacher B Jones are still acceptable.

I thought exactly the same thing when I saw this thread. I don't think it's made much of a difference to Lindsay Lohan has it? I don't get his fame. I definitely don't get the 'Beliebers'. Someone he admires and respects needs to step in and flatten his ego then support him in a rehabilitative sort of way to change his image and curb his behaviour. But that won't happen so in the meantime lets all watch in slow motion as the car crash of his life heads towards the inevitable drug-related conclusion.

MMMMmmmm Chips and Mayonnaise

Have you included an arabic language on your staircase? Useful and subtly inclusive. Win win all round.

That translator you linked says it transmutes Latin into plqaD. Latin for mind your head is complicated because, well, Latin. 'Be careful of your head' translates to 'Diligenter de capite vestro' Mind your head seems to translate to animum tuum which translates back to 'your mind' so this doesn't really work. Sadly I have no knowledge of Latin grammar and syntax so I'm relying on Google Translate.

I'm deeply proud to be 0% Northern. Honestly going north of the M25 terrifies me. Wild country that is.

Not without locking down every single outgoing port (you shouldnt need to open 80 and 443 because that goes through the proxy). The trouble with applications - Skype and iMessages seem to be the worst at this, is that they ask you to punch big fat holes in your port blocking. So it's a no-win situation. Your school wants Skype so you open all the ports it says it needs, then VPN and proxy bypass software sneak out that window (for example). Software like VPNexpress won't go through the proxy anyway because it uses higher port ranges so blocking VPN applications is literally down to firewall and if you have any ports open for the subnet they're coming from then you start getting issues. I'd suggest your best course of action would be to subnet the LAN the pupils are using and lock down every single outgoing port. If this isn't feasible due to things like 'Skype' being required then I'm not sure what else to suggest. Under the 'Blocked services' in your default and applied port rules is 'VPN/Tunneling' ticked?

Because purple aliens don't wear hats.

Valid point. I'm sure I'll be the same.

It always annoyed me as a child when my mother would discipline my sister or I and when we'd ask 'why?' the result was 'because I said so' or 'because you're not allowed'. I wish she'd explained better WHY we're not allowed. If she'd said 'you're not allowed to touch this because it is a dangerous thing and might hurt you' or 'because it's too heavy for you to lift if it falls over'. Understanding the potential consequences is as important in discipline as explaining why a behaviour is wrong. How many stories do we see of kids told they can't do something only to defy their parents, do the thing, and get hurt? I tried to take this approach when I was teaching. I'd converse with the disruptive pupil and try to explain why larking about around Bunsen burners was a bad idea. Whether by that stage they CARED was another matter, but due diligence and all that.

LOL yeah, he started out so optimistic and got more cynical as time went on. It's quite funny.

I don't think it matters if the child is 3 years or 3 months. Linking cause and consequence at an early age doesn't hurt. It is consistent. So as the child develops they understand better what you are saying but the action you are performing is familiar. So rather than 'suddenly' change your tactic, the child experiences a consistent behaviour from you which they grow to understand better. A 2yo hits their sibling with a toy, you take the toy away. Where is the harm in explaining that you took it away because they are using it in the wrong way? The kid might not understand the whole 'consequence' concept but the end result is the same - child + toy = misbehaviour = child - toy? We use this behaviour on pets - I know my Cat doesn't understand that scratching my new suite is a bad thing but he does understand that it results in a bop on the bum from a nerf dart and links the behaviour to the nerf gun. He starts scratching, we pick up the nerf gun, he runs away.

^ This. I never watch Eurovision. Even if the terrible music wasn't bad enough (although Dana International's entry the year she won was pretty catchy) the voting is so rigged and political that the whole thing is meaningless. I actively don't care and will go out of my way to watch anything else.

Sadly these 'get around your web filtering' applications pupils use are written to use/scan multiple outgoing ports and use whichever one they find unblocked and all too often you have a port unblocked for, say, an application update service or something and these applications jump on it. So it pays to keep outgoing stuff like that on a different subnet to the main LAN then you can set port rules by source. I will pass your feedback re: the manual on to our new Technical Author as I know we are looking at the manual as a long term ongoing project so user feedback in addition to the observations of @ibpalle, me and the support team is always helpful. Don't be afraid to pop it onto uservoice either - anything related to the product is helpful. Personally I'm campaigning for popup helplets like you see on those insurance comparison websites but that's just one suggestion amongst many.

These are all excellent suggestions - particularly the one about the date/time when running reports. The project @ibpalle and I were working on should be released later this year. It won't address all of these points but it's a stepping stone towards it. Sometimes you have to change the fundamentals before you can make it pretty and we're working hard on getting the functionality there. It would really help if you could take the time to pop your feedback into our UserVoice page as this is used by our product managers to build project scopes and user stories that our UI designer will use to build a user-friendly UI Reporting: Hot (54 ideas)

In terms of reporting one of the biggest challenges you would have faced was performance simply because the SQL system that was in the original product couldn't cope with the increase in scale of traffic flow and reporting needs. We've released a massive change to the reporting system that totally changes how it indexes and the result is much much faster reporting. The aim was to make this as seamless and 'invisible' as possible so it is possible you may not even have noticed it happening. Now we have resolved the 'back end' situation with running reports we can address the front end usability and this is work in progress. I have personally been involved in the first phase of the reporting revamp and @ibpalle and I are really excited about what's coming. We expect there will be a number of small revisions as time goes on to better adapt the reporting system for the needs of our customers. As far as the layer 7 module goes, this should fit in seamlessly with your port rules and be configured under the Networking > Outgoing > Ports, find the port rule you want to edit and click 'Edit' on the 'Blocked Services' entry. This will take you to an 'Edit Services' screen where you can use the Layer 7 content to block services. It is not possible to allow services based on these as the problem is identifying them. The way it works is to perform deep packet inspection and often traffic can only be categorised once an initial handshake has been processed. So your client might say hello to a P2P service but can't then send or receive traffic. The inbuilt Manual accessed using the 'Help' or '?' buttons has configuration information for this under the title 'Managing Blocked Services'. App traffic doesn't always behave in a standard way and add into that complications from HTTPS and you have a bit of a minefield. A big part of effectively filtering mobile devices is Authentication. If you're using captive portal then apps aren't ever going to play nice with it because captive portals are browser based and most apps don't interface with the browser at all. The next snag you hit with apps is SNI - they aren't browser based so the applications have to be written to support SNI and lots of them aren't which is a problem when trying to intercept HTTPS. A lot of traffic goes out over HTTPS these days so a lot of this is going to be damage limitation. Private VPNs are a firewall issue more than a filtering one so it might be worth bringing down an iron curtain and blocking all outgoing traffic on all ports then taking each request as it comes. The Smoothwall Support forum on this board is a peer support forum rather than an official support channel - our support engineers cannot prioritise posts on Edugeek over support tickets so if you are experiencing an issue with your Smoothwall product we always recommend that you log a support ticket in line with your Support agreement rather than relying on an engineer seeing your post as many simply are not able to spend time on this board.

Not as far as I'm aware. User agent definition is a bit hit and miss because it can be spoofed

We believe there has been a workaround implemented in the Smoothwall back end to resolve this. Please make sure your Smoothwall is fully up to date. But we believe this shouldn't be an issue for you. Have you tested an iPad on your network yet?

Zone bridging? I'm having some trouble working out what you're looking for but @ibpalle suggested Zone Bridging

Haunting and beautiful I actually really like this version. Well worth a listen and make sure you listen to the end.

This thread is denigrating into a flame war. I think most of the points that have been seized upon and griefed are down to semantics. 'Kids aren't afraid of teachers anymore'. Being 'afraid' in an educational context can mean lots of different things. You're making an argument out of semantics. Being afraid of a teacher could simply be that you as a pupil had a sufficient 'fear' of the consequences of bad behaviour that you didn't misbehave. Different teachers do this in different ways. Some by shouting and being 'verbally abusive' (if you want to call it that). I had a primary school teacher who was an absolutely horrible woman who would shout and embarrass me when I did something wrong. Other teachers don't NEED to shout. They've demonstrated their commitment to a punishment by following through on it - example. Mrs E was my year 3 teacher. I LOVED her. She was a BRILLIANT teacher who really engaged me and I did really well in her class. She never had to shout at me to get me to be afraid to misbehave though. I was afraid of letting her down and disappointing her because I LIKED her and wanted her approval. So if I did something 'naughty' she'd make it clear how disappointed she was. So yes I was 'afraid' but not because she actually frightened me. She would also have regular meetings with my mother and I really was 'afraid' of my mothers disapproval because 'back in the day' my mum was quite scary and my sister and I were always 'well disciplined' without needing to be spanked. So if I 'stepped out of line' I knew it would get back to my mum and I'd suffer the consequences (again, semantics, 'suffering the consequences' at the age of 7 was being banned from the TV or excluded from a fun activity or similar). The point @abillybob makes about a child learning the difference between right and wrong is a good one - the lines are so blurred and I'm sorry to say that with each passing generation, there are less parents that 'care' about what their children are up to so these children grow up with poorly defined boundaries and so in turn poorly define the boundaries for their own children. So if a child gets away with violent and threatening behaviour at home what self-check do they have to keep this behaviour under control at school? They don't. The parent doesn't care so the child gets away with it at home and at school because the parent doesn't support the school in setting appropriate boundaries. Perhaps the answer is to take all children away from their parents before they can be 'damaged' or influenced by the parent and put them all into a state run facility to be taught right and wrong according to nationally defined standards to 'reset' the deterioration of moral values in society? Blah blah disclaimer, this is an extreme (and slightly sarcastic) example don't flame me. I agree something has to be done to reverse the declining trend but it's not an easy problem to fix. Perhaps a stint in the armed forces at 16 might give kids a bit of perspective? Re-instigate national service? I don't know. I'm just putting ideas out there. As are others in the thread. Don't attack them for it. I once knew a boy who was brought up in a strong, affluent family unit. They had a lovely house, nice holidays. The younger brother and sister were lovely but the eldest boy (who always appeared polite and quiet) was troubled by bullying at school. He dropped out of school and began working at a supermarket where somehow he ended up getting caught stealing from the tills. He only stole because he didn't want to ask his parents for money as they'd have questioned him on what he was using it for. Either way he got done for it and fired. Something snapped in his head and he murdered his Dad and tried to kill his Mum. When they asked him why he said he did it to spare them the shame. When pressed further it transpired that he had a 'revenge list' and planned to kill the bullies that 'ruined his life' then kill whoever it was at the supermarket that got him into trouble. He knew it would shame his family so he decided it would be best to spare them that and kill them first. So not all murders are because the victim is hated. I think it's wrong to even speculate on abuse. Until the facts of the matter are released it would be respectful to the family and the victim to keep such speculation in check. As a victim of bullying myself I once lost control of my hurt and rage and threw a chair at a girl in maths class then had a breakdown in the stationary cupboard. Sometimes these things happen because someone is desperate and cornered and in a horrible, deep dark place and puberty is a cauldron of lava as it is. Perhaps what we are seeing here is simply a case of a pupil pushed to breaking point by factor or factors unknown, who snapped and made a horrible, tragic mistake that even now he may be sitting in his cell sobbing over. A lot of things happen in the 'heat of the moment' that you wish you could undo when you've had time to calm down. This is a tragic case and when more details of the circumstances have been released then we are in a better position to posit our thoughts on them but until then everything is speculative. Everyone has a right to be safe in their working environment and it is doubly tragic that in the pursuit of her teaching vocation (and believe me, you have to be committed to teach) this teacher lost her life to an injury inflicted by a pupil (I'll refrain from speculating on the hows and whys), and that the pupil was in such a condition as to be able to inflict such an injury in the first place at the tender age of 15.

I can't imagine how terrified the other students in the class were to watch the attack happen. That sort of thing changes a person. It has to be said though that this tragic event has made me think a lot about some of the recent controversies in the news and alarmist rantings about the 'nanny state' and how bad CCTV in classrooms is I can't help but think that with the way things are going with the challenges teachers face in managing student behaviour and the reports of physical assault on teachers rising we are approaching a breaking point and we are going to have to rethink the entire classroom format because before long it won't be safe for pupils OR teachers. When you look at pupil behaviour in places like China where discipline is strict and in countries where having an education is a privilege, pupils WANT to be at school, work hard and pay attention. This is because their society and communities VALUE education. Education is not a valued thing in this country. Leaving the 'benefit scroungers' out of it for the moment, we have many pupils who work hard and get a degree only to end up unemployed or not working in their chosen sector. We hear from companies who interview these students and their degree is barely worth the paper it's written on because it has no practical use or experience. Perhaps we should re-examine the whole role of education in this country. Perhaps we should educate the 'basics' in primary and 'middle' school then offer more varied education pathways that are more focussed on the practical and vocational. Instead of doing A-levels in 'Chemistry' for example, perhaps we should educate in Science to an entry level then involve industry partners like Glaxo Smithkline in a more vocational pathway where the 'classroom learning' is combined with industry placement and shadowing so the pupil comes out at the end of X years with vocational Biochemistry qualifications and experience. So when they go off to university to study Pharmacology they a) know what the industry is actually like and b) have some practical 'lab time' experience so when they come out at the end they have real marketable skills to take to employers.

This too. I think most parents of 'innocent' kids who claim they'd have a problem with a teacher disciplining their child for something they apparently, allegedly 'didn't do' would be surprised and probably shocked to watch a fly-on-the-wall video of their child during school hours. Children lie to their parents. This is fact. 'No mum, I promise it wasn't me. I didn't do it'. No, maybe not directly but would you as a parent be happy to see your little darling braiding her friends hair instead of learning about Newton's laws of motion? Would you as a parent be happy to see a candid video of your son with his shirt untucked gobbing off to a teacher or using a marker pen he STOLE to draw penises on the desk instead of doing the assigned exercise on combustion? I'm certain you didn't buy your son a permanent marker as an appropriate school stationary item so clearly he came into possession of it via illicit means - either by taking it from home (which he knows he shouldn't be doing) or by stealing it from another student/teacher/stock cupboard. As a parent, instead of gobbing off to the teacher about how innocent your child is, you should be educating your child that this behaviour by others is affecting their education and empowering them to do something about it. If SOME of that class had completed the task I would have stated that only those with uncompleted tasks would be required at the detention. But since I asked them to show me their work on the way out the door and barely a single child had even bothered to start it, regardless of how innocent dear Sophia (pseudonym) was in chucking stuff about, she took advantage of the chaos to doss off. This was as much worthy of detention as anything else.

Exactly this. It's a recognised behaviour management technique we were taught about in teacher training. What happened was that the usual group of 4 disruptive students (2 of which were called Jack - make of that what you will) were playing up. This draws teacher attention away from the rest of the class. So the rest of the class were using the 'cover' of the disruption to ignore instructions, get up from their seats and wander around. Girls were playing about on their mobile phones, a couple of boys were tossing some beanbag ball thing about. There was so much generalised misbehaviour that in the end I put the whole class in detention because I simply couldn't proportionately punish each child depending on what % of the disruption he or she was involved in. The end result was that the task I had set the class was NOT completed by a SINGLE CHILD. Including the supposed 'innocent' girl. Therefore the bottom line was that I set a task, they chose to use the disruptive kids as an excuse not to do the task I set and to mess about so I set the whole class a lunchtime detention during which they would spend the time completing the task they failed to do. The point of the punishment was that they wasted the lesson time messing about, so I would use their 'free time' to complete the task. I thought this was a fairly reasonable and proportionate response actually.

Part of why I gave up on teaching - when I was a kid and we were properly disciplined and our parents were allowed to discipline properly there was very little of this 'feral yoof' culture. The problem is lack of appropriate and proportionate discipline. The punishments just aren't enough of a deterrent. Parents don't care and don't discipline their children. When I was a trainee teacher I gave a disruptive class a whole-class detention and one of the little darlings turned up with a letter from her mum saying she wouldn't be attending my detention because her daughter said she wasn't involved. The point was to punish the whole class for getting out of hand and taking advantage of disruptive kids to derail the lesson. You can't win against the 'my kid is innocent' mentality. Parents should be allowed to spank their children. There is a huge difference between a spank and a beating.