omeydog

Maybe I am missing something here........but surely with new laptops come new power supplies!!!

I am thankful that we only have two cabs in the whole school - plus a patchpanel for the admin system.

NO - NO - NO The IT equipment in schools exists to serve the education of children - whether by assisting teachers to do their job or to help with directly educating children in the classroom or as a means to provide students with core ICT skills....... For far too long, staff and students have been the slave of the IT setup - it must be the other way round because the minute that IT makes life more difficult rather than easier, is the minute we need to order a skip to dump all those computers into so we can use the space and resources they take up for better purposes. As IT professionals it is our responsibility to make technology as accessible as possible and to ensure that the teachers in the front line of delivering education have the confidence and skills to use IT in appropiate means - that also means that we need to ensure that what we are delivering meets the actual need and not some hyperthetical need that we percieve........

Definately running DHCP on the school network and the home networks in both of our houses.........

All our staff laptops (except the head's and child protection officer's - both for confidentiality reasons) are on the school domain so 'My Documents' gets backed up as part of the user's profile. When staff go away from the school network (we do let them out of the building occasionally!) they get a little warning from Windows that their profile is not available but they know how to live with that....... All of the user profiles are also copied to a backup server on a daily basis - the backup server is physically located at the opposite end of the school building to protect against fire etc. Each weekend the entire contents of the backup server are automatically uploaded to a remote FTP server.

That's great for new buildings...... But I have spent over a week putting in new cable runs for new desktop machines - and our building is not exactly old as it was built 12 years ago. For fixed machines it has to be wired networking every time - but laptops and PDAs are, by nature, portable - so wireless makes lots of sense to me. h

We are just looking at buying PDAs for all our Year 6 pupils...... If you have a few dozen I think we could find a very good use for them!!!

Toshibas and Dell have been the most robust. You must be joking....... Besides working as ICT Technician in a Primary School, I also install Espresso, KnowledgeBox and a few other products in schools across the country. The number of times I open a lap trolley and find a pile of Toshiba laptops with keys missing, cracked screens, and other damage! In the school I work at we have always had Toshiba laptops (even the head's has a key missing!) but have just invested in a batch of Lenovo laptops - they have not been subjected to children yet but certainly seem more robust. Also my personal laptop is Lenovo and I am very pleased wit the build quality. On the subject of wireless - how can any school survive without it??? We have 10 access points spread across 13 classrooms, a meeting room and ICT Suite and never have any significant connectivity problems. The biggest issue we have is the wireless switch being turned off on a laptop.

You are to blame for not doing anything about it!!! First holiday (last Easter) I was in post, I upgraded the 10Mb Hub (no I haven't left a zero off!!!) that served the main building with a 1Gb switch and fitted a second 1Gb switch to our ICT Suite. Unfortunately I could not find a source of short enough patch cables so soon got very good at putting CAT5 plugs on!