dunc

That couldn't be any more perfect. Thank you

Afternoon all, Our school's Acceptable Use Policy and E-Safety Policy both dictate that students are not allowed to access personal e-mails unless given express permission. As such, the usual suspects (Google, Hotmail/Live, Yahoo etc.) are blocked by category on our Smoothwall proxy. However, we now want to start using Google Apps for Education on our school domain. Is there a way that I can unblock the relevant URLs but then stop students from logging in with any domain other than @ourschool.org? Thanks in advance.

Hmmm, interesting. We do use Policy Central Enterprise. I wonder if that's causing the problems? It appears to only occur in the actual SMART Notebook software. I'm aiming to do some more diagnosis after school today. Does anyone have any other suggestions for me to try while I'm there?

Hi all, We're having a bit of a nightmare with some of our SMARTBoards around school. Two issues at hand. Firstly, seemingly at random, there is huge lag on writing in SMART Notebook (latest version as of writing). When the user writes, the ink appears ~5 seconds later. When we first encountered this problem we removed every bit of SMART software on the machine, ensured all machine drivers were up to date etc. then reinstalled the latest version of SMART Notebook and drivers. We also tried going back to an earlier set of drivers (but using the latest version of Notebook). That seemed to relieve the problem but it's still occasionally there. Secondly, the loading time for SMART Notebook when it's first used after logging on is massive. We're talking a minimum of 90 seconds on Core 2 Duo machines with 2Gb RAM. I can see posts like this but there appears to be no solutions. We've got three boards/machines doing it around school at the moment. Has anyone had similar problems? More importantly, has anyone come up with a solution!? Cheers!

Perfect, cheers LO

Hi all, I'm looking for a script which is hopefully relatively straightforward. I'd like to run CommandReporter.exe every day (via scheduled task) and have it produce me an XML file which I can then manipulate with PHP. I'd like the script, if possible, to produce the following information: Staff Firstname Surname Subject? Role? Student Firstname Surname UPN Intake Year Registration Group Gender Flags (SEN, FSM etc) Does anyone have such a script currently working that I might be able to have a look at? I've fiddled with CommandReporter.exe before, albeit some time ago. If I remember correctly, I had to send it some parameters in the form of an XML file? Thanks in advance, Duncan

Hi all, As part of a reward system, I'm looking to (preferably) source or (if needed) purchase some educational games for our students. Specifically I'm looking for KS3, 4 and 5 especially in Numeracy and Literacy. They would need to be fully enclosed within the .SWF file (i.e. no linked dictionaries) as the VLE's Flash embedding capabilities aren't the greatest. Does anyone know where I might be able to find such resources? I've done a few scans on Google but the amount of malware websites returned somewhat frightens me! Thanks in advance,

Wow, what a noob Thanks very much Richard!

Hi again chris, I've set up my attendance report; found CommandReporter.exe; run the line you gave me and it works insofar as the XML is displayed in my CMD window, but it doesn't generate an XML file. The exact line I was using: C:\Program Files\SIMS\SIMS .net>CommandReporter.exe /user:Duncan.Wraight /passwo rd:password /report:"100% Attendance" /output: "g:\test.xml"

Thanks for the help gents. E-mail system was down all day yesterday so I didn't realise I had so many replies I'll look into the PM you sent jinn, and the solution you've suggested chris - many thanks.

Hi all, Looking to develop a system (using PHP, which I'm confident with) which queries the SIMS database to retrieve attendance information. Does anyone have any suggestions as to where I can start? A tutorial, or the like? Or is it simply a case of finding the DB that SIMS is running on, getting a username&password, and querying it as you would with any other DB? Cheers, Duncan

That's exactly where we're at, and I agree on all counts. The Executive Director of the Trust and I are meeting with Frog directors in Halifax on Tuesday, so hopefully I'll be able to get some resolution. I'll be printing your post off too, to show that we're not the only school in the same position. It worries me immensely that other schools are having exactly the same problem... but don't realise. If you don't ask the right questions, it's easy to be misled into thinking that "everything is fine" because Frog is "safe and secure".

Well, all computer use is monitored, yes. Any time a student types a word that's flagged on our "bad word list" into a computer at school, Policy Central logs it and takes a screenshot. That obviously includes all documents in "My Documents", including file names and so on. Similarly, we don't track student books, but we expect to actually see them - if there's swearing on a student's book or planner when handed in, the teacher would deal with that as they deemed fit. Using the same analogy, Frog is like a blind teacher because we can't see what's going on at all unless we somehow know about it in the first place (back to students reporting each other). It would be a laborious process to add 400 students as a Head of Year's friend, but one I'd be willing to go through if it would prove beneficial. Unfortunately, the Head of Year would only be able to see status updates (only the person that sends and receives a wall post can see that) and then they'd have to trawl through a potentially unlimited number of status updates on a daily basis, with no facility to search for certain words. This would appear in the Head of Year's "Personal Feed" (similar to Facebook feed, but muuuuuch smaller), which I believe carries a limited number of entries - around 20 or so, per day.

Yeah, of course, but then again if you use Securus or similar on the school computers, then you're doing what I'm wanting to do on Frog. I just can't see how it's safe in any way to have students accessing a VLE without someone being able to monitor its usage.

Just at one school, we have security cameras covering all student accessible outdoor areas, and at lunch time we tend to have 6 members of staff patrolling said areas. Virtually, on Frog, we can't do that. Would you let students into a play area completely unsupervised with zero forms of monitoring? Probably not. Thanks for your suggestion of Securus - Policy Central does the same thing, but as you point out, activity outside of school would go completely unnoticed.

Hi all, First post here. I've completely run out of ideas. I'm a VLE Manager for five schools in Northumberland. 3000 students, 800 members of staff. Before I was appointed, the Trust decided to purchase Frog. I've spent the past 6 months project planning and developing, getting the staff on. So on, so forth. I've put off getting the students on to the platform because contrary to what I'm telling staff/students, Frog has zero ability to monitor student behaviour. It's OK in terms of checking a user's history - nothing can be deleted from the platform, an individual user's e-mail/status update/wall post history can be seen/deleted. Discussion Forums aren't such a big deal either. However, if Student X decides to swear on the social networking aspect of the platform, or decides to bully Student Y, I won't know about it unless a friend of Student X reports him. Only a user's friends can see their social networking activities on the platform - even though I'm a moderator. Partially due to our catchment area, partially due to school ethos, this simply won't work. We can't, in any way, rely on students reporting each other. Suggestions to date have been... Close the social networking - possible, but this is my absolute last line of defence, as I want to use these features to engage our students Set up a proxy to filter POST/GET data - not possible with our current network infrastructure Use our existing monitoring software (Policy Central) to scan the network - will be doing that during the day, but the number of false positives is absolutely vast and it doesn't cover Frog access outside of our schools Run a PHP script on the MySQL database - I could do that easily and effectively, but I have no access to the Frogserver's MySQL DBs. We would have to sign a waiver for that, which would mean Frog offering limited support and possibly manual platform updates. So, I'm wondering if anyone else has any ideas? I was thinking along the lines of a website scanner, but I'm not even sure what that is! I think I've got a search engine robot in my head. Something which follows links and checks each page's source code for a list of bad words. That would suffice! Hmm, I wonder if we could embed Google Analytics then use that... Thanks in advance.