geekgirl

I hope you don't mind but I was in this position looking for a new VLE for our school in January 2015. I did a lot of research and have attached my research to this post. I hope it helps! We were with It's Learning and in the end we went with Firefly. VLE Platforms 2.docx

Does any know if there are any free Plagirism checker software out there for Teachers? We have purchased Firefly but it doesn't come with a free Plagirism checker.

Hi, We have had so many issues with Yosemite (10.10.5) after upgrading from Mountain Lion (10.8.5). We have had constant Sibelius issues after upgrading from 6 to 8 like couldn't activate Licence Server at first from the upgrade, couldn't active the Licence on client machines, after successfully activating Licences we then got an error a week later on the client machines, Sibelius running extremely slow when opening, when trying to open past projects saved on network drives and extremely slow when trying to save projects to networked drives. Constant crashing of the software when trying to save to network drives. Binding issues - clients will not bind to mac server, if you manually input all the details in Directory Utility it works fine and pulls through the settings fine but not through SSL. It seems to have a real problem with SSL. We have also reported issues of slowness on Yosemite regarding mounted Network Drives, Finder takes ages to open folders in Netowrk Drives from programs such as Logic Pro X, Sibelius, Garage Band, iMovie etc... Just to let everyone know really and wondering if any one else has experienced these slow issues?

Hi, We have had so many issues with Sibelius 8 on Yosemite (10.10.5) after upgrading from Sibelius 6. Sibelius issues have been non stop: 1. Couldn't activate Licence Server at first from the upgrade and had a remote call with Avid who resolved the issue. 2. Couldn't active the Licence on client machines and had a remote call with Avid who sent me instructions to active each client machine manually in Terminal - not ideal but had to be done. 3. After successfully activating Licences we then got an error a week later on the client machines stating a License issue "The Licence Server is not responding. Sibelius will save your work and close". The seat number was stuck on 39 when we had 15 clients using the licences (25 used of 40). Another call to Avid (19 minutes on hold before speaking to an actual person) where they just de-actived and re-activated the License Server. 4. Sibelius running extremely slow when opening, when trying to open past projects saved on network drives and extremely slow when trying to save projects to networked drives. Constant crashing of the software when trying to save. Another call to Avid who admitted that there is an issue with Yosemite (10.10) which does crash Sibelius but they are "investigating". Remoted on to see slow issue and then sent an email with instructions on how to "Speed up Sibelius" (How to speed up Sibelius) - no mention of version 8 in this document... Just to let everyone know really and wondering if any one else has experienced these issues?

Do not go with Hosted SIMS! Everything is bad about hosted. Here is some bad past experiences I've had: Sometimes they don't do the update at all. We waited and waited for the latest upgrade to be deployed but they didn't do it. Several months later if they actually do the update they will do it automatically so they do not notify you that they are going to do it - it will roll out the update to staff machines at really inconvenient times. I had the head of Year 11 inputting some quite important assessment grades for the whole year to meet a deadline when they rolled out the upgrade, it kicked them out of sims and upgraded. Something then went wrong with the upgrade on his machine so we got an earful from them. We didn't know they had rolled it out until we called them to log the case as we thought it was a one off. It hadn't saved any of the grades which added more aggro. If you have a report with your own Macros it launches the reports in to a hosted Word in the browser which doesn't allow you to change settings to run Macros. Also pivot tables don't work on the hosted Word/Excel. First 50 users are free but after that you have to pay for £70 per new user, you have to have one contact on site to request the new users but if that person is on holiday no one else can request a new user until they are back and you are paying £70 for someone to go into System Manager, add a new user and assign permissions which means 40 seconds of work = £70. The support service isn't great either, the main service desk don't have the permission to resolve hosted tickets, they have be escalated by email to the "Hosted Team" who take their sweet time getting back to you about it. InTouch sometimes just crashes for no reason and some days it doesn't work at all. Most free schools went over to hosted to "save costs" regretted the change as the service was awful and cost them more. Hope that helps!

We used OpenHive's reporting program i2. We were told at the start of June that Captia were closing down OpenHive so we have to find another reporting system (we have Profiles but Staff didn't like it but that seems to be the only option for Sep 2015 at the moment). I heard Captia are making quite a few people redundant. It seems the people they are making redundant are the staff that had been developing a few of the OpenHive projects originally before Synextrics or Captia took over, they were sold over to Synextrics who pretty much left them to get on with things but when Captia brought them over they started to interfere with those projects. The original project owners who are being made redundant asked if they could buy back their own projects from Captia like i2 or the VLE project but Captia said no which didn't help the whole situation. Rumor is that SIMS in the future is either going to up date Profiles and integrate i2 into SIMS for SIMS 8. Another rumor is they they are going to develop their own VLE that migrates straight from SIMS. Makes sense when they won't allow the OpenHive staff to buy back their own projects. Back to the point we are going to use Office 365 SharePoint teamed with Firefly - our SMT loved both. We are going to give all our users 365 email address with cloud storage. Prep work is starting this summer.

OCR have some fun school projects that you can do: (Computing/Computer Science - Raspberry Pi - OCR) . My favourite projects are: Traffic Lights (http://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/129940-recipe-card-traffic-lights.pdf) Singing Jelly Baby (http://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/125881-recipe-card-singing-jelly-baby.pdf)

I noticed my machine was pinging out over 4000 requests a day after the network. I was recommended Wireshark (https://www.wireshark.org/) by a colleague of mine. It monitors packets being sent over the network and can tell you what program is using for which ports. You can filter the requests and find what is pinging across the network. I'd check your anti-virus to make sure you haven't got anything that could be pushing packets out - I know the annoying "Conduit Search" program does this. Mine was LanSchool Tech Console that was broadcasting these packets, spoke to LanSchool but they said it shouldn't be broadcasting that much so I'm going to re-build my machine when I have time so see if that helps.

Well that's our issue. We don't want our students access to the stock apps. I wanted to make sure that the information about Jailbreaking was correct. Such a pain! It strange that Apple haven't bothered to think about Education in terms of MDM. They try to advertise these "great products" to schools but do a half assed job of it. The Apple Configurator is fine for Business use but still not there for Education which is a shame because it is a good program. Definitely a gap in the market there! Android devices with Secure Lock may be better for our environment but I'm just not sure on Android. I was a big fan for a while but after several virus', the OS breaking constantly, 100s of updates I had enough. Moved over to Apple, the restrictions of how could develop Apps was a good thing but it's still missing key features in Education. Any one has experience with AirWatch by VMWear or is that pretty much the same as Meraki?

Hi, Not sure if I'm in the right forum but I've been requested to look at MDM for iPads in the school. I've had a play with Apple Configurator with Meraki but feel that they do not lock down the apps and settings enough. The member of staff who requested this mentioned they would only like the iPads to be able to switch between Safari, iBooks and Kindle apps. They did not want any of the stock apps like Calendar, Contacts, Clock, Settings displayed. The staff member liked both products but felt that both products do not offer what they wanted for the devices currently. I feel that the Apple Platform is not quite there yet for the Education environment. Is there any MDM's out that that could manage this? Happy to trial. Thanks!

Have you tried looking at Meraki MDM Systems Manager (https://meraki.cisco.com/)? I've been using the product since it started. A good little free trial (I've had mine for 3 years!) to help with iPads in terms of profiles, restrictions and locating the devices. More info here on initial setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbq6d5v7xRc I use it side by side with Apple Configurator.

This confused me as well because I noticed it brough up "No Result for RESOUREID-1234". When you click on the Document Links and the new page opens up scroll the the bottom of the page, then on the right hand side under Documents there should be a PDF link.

Hi, I'm a complete newbie to Profiles in SIMS. I have to set up a session for two math classes with a comment box underneath the normal grades. The previous year set up by previous colleague is still there in the Session Manager but it doesn't give me any idea how it was setup. Does anyone have any documentation that might help? Or a video floating around about how Profiles work? I've tried to go onto the Captia Support website (SupportNet) today to see if there is more information but it seems to be down. I've check their youtube channel bu there isn't any how to videos. Thanks!

I'm a Techy from a Independent School in Surrey. I'll be there on Friday.

The Mag Pi Magazine is a free resource: The MagPi. Our robotics teachers read this magazine for projects and information for the Pi. OCR have some good resources for teachers: http://www.ocr.org.uk/qualifications/by-subject/computing/raspberry-pi/ I was recommended a Pi by a few of the teachers as I was interested in how they work. Got one for Christmas, got it all setup and running but at the moment don't have the time to plan a project yet. Perhaps when I get some holiday I'll do some more work with it.

I'll be there at Bett on Friday! Just applied to join the group

Thanks guys. It worked! Logged out of SIMS.net. Went into Regional Settings in Control Panel. The Regional Setting was set to English (USA) including the date, time and keyboard format. I changed it all back to English (United Kingdom). Logged back into SIMS.net, opened up Examinations and the marksheet. Edited the mark sheet, clicked on the "Data entry is complete" tick box and clicked on the blue tick to save. It saved fine. Thanks for your help.

I re-installed SIMS and that didn't work. Thanks for your replies! I'll check the Time date format and the Region settings in Control Panel. I'll post with an update.

Hi, Has anyone else had this error before? A member of staff was using SIMS Examinations Organiser Module, they opened up the marksheet they needed to enter data in, entered the data, clicked on "Data Entry is complete" tick box and ticked the blue tick to save the data to the marksheet. She then got this error: "Please correct any data which has failed the validation checks, usually shown in red". The things shown in red was the data she imputted and the Effective & Result Date. I noticed that the calendar next to Effective & Result Date was corrupt as it showed the date as 15/15/*BLANK*. I tried it on my own machine, opened up the marksheet, entered the data, clicked on "Data Entry is complete" tick box and ticked the blue tick to save the data to the marksheet. This worked fine and I noticed that my calender was the correct format of 15/15/2015. I called Capita about this, they asked me to copy the folder C:\Program Files\SIMS\SIMS.net from my machine. I was told to go to her machine which I did, rename her folder to SIMS.net.old and paste in my SIMS.net folder from my machine. I got her to log back into SIMS and this resolved the corrupted calender part but she is still getting the original error: "Please correct any data which has failed the validation checks, usually shown in red". So I called Captia back and told me that it is an environmental issue so has asked me to re-install SIMS on her machine so I am going to try that this morning to see if that will resolve the error. Has anyone else seen this before? Any ideas on what the error means? I tried to upload pictures but the Edugeek file uploader isn't working - I've reported it! Thanks.

I'm having this issue too. It doesn't upload the attachment at all. I go to attach it to the post but it doesn't attach the image in the post. I've tried attaching the two images in a zip file which also doens't attach to the post. I receive no error messages, they just don't appear. I thought it maybe because I was using Chrome so I switched to IE but it won't upload from both browsers. Can you help?

Have you got a RAID set up with two hard drives installed? The only time I've seen that is with RAID. We have a mirrored RAID set up on our Apple Server in our environment. When we boot into the boot option two HDs appear titled Macintosh HD because there are two drives. Then in Disk Utility in the OS the RAID only comes up with 1 partition. When one hard drive died (the one set to boot first) we got the no entry sign. The second drive booted fine. We replaced the first drive, re did the RAID in Disk Utility in Recovery mode and restored the OS from TimeMachine.

Thanks for the reply! I'll have a look into Munki.

Anyone got any documentation on Star Deploy? Can't find it anywhere online, website doesn't exist anymore and everything else I found refers to Munki. It was installed by a previous Manager on our Apple Server. I want to see how it works/is configured and if we still should use it. Thanks.

An update all at? Anyone experiencing issues still? I know the update 10.9.5 may of fixed certain issues eg SMB. We are looking to upgrade our Mac Mini server from Mountain Lion (10.8.5) to Mavericks (10.9.5) in the Christmas Holidays and then the 15 clients (currently 10.8.5). Is there anything we need to be looking out for so we can pre-empt? We don't want to upgrade to Yosemite (10.10) yet as we have heard some horror stories. Any known compatibility issues with this software at all: Server Software: Star Deploy Suite and Server App (which will have to be updated via App Store for £13.99). Client Software: Bootpicker (heard it works for some and not for others), Bootcamp, Garageband, Logic Express 9, PhotoScore Lite and Sibelius 6.

ADDINGTON HIGH SCHOOL – Technician (ICT Department) Advert Role: Technician (Curriculum and Resource Support - Level 2) ICT Department Location: Croydon Contract Type: Full Time: (36 hours per week) Contract Term: Initially until 31st August 2014 (renewal subject to annual funding) Start Date: November 2013 Closing Date: 4th October 2013 We are seeking to make the appointment for November 2013 and therefore require completed applications by Friday 4th October 2013. Short listing will take place on Monday 7th October 2013.ICT Technician Advert-September 2013.docxICT Technician Job Description (September 2013).docxApplication Form (Non Teaching Staff).doc