Jamman960

We've been using Logitech Dialog 220's, they're cheap as chips and seem sturdy enough... if they last more than a year its a bonus so far ours seem to be lasting (2 terms and counting, used by students between y2 & 8)

A large proportion of adults would probably be upset by this if they didn't know what was going on let alone kids of that age Sounding an alarm(hope it wasn't the actual fire alarm...) and adding that level of realism really is going too far. surely we're not getting the whole story here...

We've previously used mailmerged word templates to handle our reporting - I had it down to a tee before we switched to profiles, the main advantage was collation - before we'd have 1 word document for each class/subject, as each student has reports for upto 17 subjects it could take 20mins or more to collate a single report. We expected teachers to write around 190 words per pupil, print and pass the printed pages to the pupils form tutor who would then put the pages from subject teachers into the correct order, proof read and then pass the completed set to the head for further proof reading at which point many get returned(he's pretty picky about grammar etc). Now that we have profiles we expect the teachers to enter upto 190 words per pupil, once the deadline has been reached form tutors proof read the reports and pass a printed copy to the head for further proof reading(he'd do it on screen but found looking at the screen for that long difficult)

Is there not a licensing issue here also though - haven't downloaded gamemaker lite but the sites terms and conditions state the content is for personal use only... surely schools should be purchasing Gamemaker Pro? By installing the software they're agreeing to support it, while we'll hapily install and spend time setting up free software without any guarenteed support I can kind of see why MSP's would refuse, especially when a supported version is availible.

Have searched support net but still can't find anything and its not even on the roadmaps, was told about it yesterday directly by Capita reps though.

you havent "accidentally" unplugged it have you? had my first email at 8:09 followed by a few others

We had a trial of ClarionCall, the web interface is a bit clunky but it offers Email, Text and Voicemail(staff call a central number, record a message and all parents in the group get a text to say theres a voicemail from the school waiting for them). I found ParentMail sales to be very pushy and their product limited - as an independent school we really didn't see having the schools name at the top of every email in bold, size 30 text with a red/green background to be all that professional. When I looked into it all SchoolPost came out very well for us on the email side, not sure how hot they were on text messaging though as the head pulled funding at the last minute If your using sims and can wait until the summer they are releasing a module called "InTouch", from what I heard yesterday at the SE UG meeting. it sounds pretty impressive - there was mention of being able to trigger messages to be sent to parents based on events within sims.

looks like a very sensationalised article send a few of the readers into the schools that have and need that level of CCTV and I'd bet they'd think more need to be installed! I guess in a very loose way schools are a bit like prisons, a good percentage of secondary age pupils really don't want to be there and often think they can get away with vandalism, violence among other things that they wouldn't do outside school because the police are often not involved until an incident is deemed serious enough.

The problem with protests is that everyone rushes out the day before to buy enough petrol to last them a month even the threat of protest is often enough.

Thanks guys, sorry for not replying sooner - hadn't spotted the replies Having done far too much research(including gathering visibility stats from a local airport's weather station) we've decided FSO with an RF backup is the way to go, as the distance is only around 220m in a suburban area fog shouldn't be too much of an issue, from what I can gather it wouldn't even be an issue at the airport with the exception of around 5-10 working hours each year. Its just a case of finding the right company for the install now. We looked into wired options first including BT/NTL and Fibre via the sewers(H20 Networks). The best option availible was fibre via the railway line behind our sites, I went as far as asking Network Rail but found the price rising very quickly, especially as they'd need to close the line they also said that vandals often attack any cables they can get hold of and any repairs would need to be paid for by us again. I'd expect the initial cost to be £15k minimum with any repairs costing another £7k easily.

This can also be done by right clicking a picture, going to properties and selecting compress - you then get the option to compress all if needed. Very useful... especially when a certain teacher hands you a memory stick 2 mins before an assembly expecting their 30-40 page ppt with 3mb photos on each page to run smoothly luckily its pretty fast at compressing them also!

I doubt microsoft would see it like that unfourtunatly, I'd either try and figure out how many licences you may have(I'd presume most primaries would have very few pc's between 97 & 2000) or purchase office 2k7 licenses and use the downgrade rights.

Have a look at this: http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/Audio/vocoder/Freeware.htm (better link) Had a quick play with it when first released and it worked pretty well if I remember correctly. James

I used to work for an external company visiting various types of school all over the country often on a weekly/fortnightly or monthly basis, I believe the cost to the school worked out to about £200 per visit for 6-7 hours a time.

In my previous job a member of staff - usually the IT coordinator or head of IT at the schools I visited would gather a list togeather for me to carry out whenever I got there, many would also say take a look in the book if you get time etc - most of their list would have been sourced from the more important entrys in the book or whatever system they had internally. I'm now working for one of the schools I used to support on a fortnightly basis, I tell staff to email me or it dosen't get done, this works well on our prep site but the staff at our pre prep still try to catch me whenever I'm there but I'm sure I'll manage to convert them at some point

The cost of proper E1 connections (multiple ISDN channels) is similar if not more expensive over here however there are often cheaper alternatives available such as MPLS lines or fibre. We're more or less in the same boat, we finally have decent ADSL2+ lines in place but the uplink is still sub 1mbit we just can't justify the cost of a decent connection.

P4 3.0's aren't *that* bad surely? our IT suite is currently running similar machines fairly well although I am looking to replace them shortly I wouldn't consider it critical if we didn't have the budget - why not replace 1 suite now followed by the other next year? or are they starting to misbehave? As above £10k for 60 machines is going to leave you in the same position 1-3 years down the line whereas you could get 30 reasonable and possibly new machines - we've recently built C2D 2.8's with 2gb ram for around £350 each as part of a club.

I've found that its partly down to lazyness and also due to staff knowing that copying has a cost attached to it per page where as printing dosen't usually... other than the cost of toner which they often don't know anyway. We've also implimented print accounting via papercut, it immediatly helped us to spot the few teachers that were hammering our printers(paid for by the IT Dept at the time!) We plan in future to start billing departments based on figures from Papercut

Will have a look at your site at some point, I think I kind of get what your aiming for but don't quite understand why each school would have the answers posted on their own websites - I'm guessing your looking for in depth answers to test questions? ie "in 200 words or less explain moores law"? maybe it'd be better to have schools sign up, pick or post a question and then submit the answer to your website where the best answer is accepted?

If you currently or may in he future requre more SFP ports than a single switch offers(most only come with 2) having 2 24 port switches stacked togeather may be better as you'd get the extra SFP's without spending loads. As long as the swtiches are stackable you'll still have 1gbps+ speeds between them without using any of the uplinks. Stacking really becomes usefull when you've got 3 or more switches as they will work as 1 switch yet if any unit fails only the ports on that switch will be down and the others will route packets around it until fixed.

Has anyone got a FSO link in operation? and if so how reliable is it? Since joining the school in 2008 I've been looking into various ways to connect our two sites reliably and the head has now agreed to fund it. At the moment I'm looking at Free Space Optics(FSO) at gig speeds, the cost isn't all that bad compared to every other method of connecting at reasonable speeds.

I can see this kind of software being used in school or passed off as an anti-theft mechanism enabling the school to capture images of a laptop thief, I can't believe any school anywhere is stupid enough to try and enforce disapline at home though or use it on a regular basis without a good reason and without informing the laptop users

I had loads of problems getting this site to work last year, our ISA server was blocking parts of it for some reason. We couldn't log on and the stats on the front page didn't display. The mathletics site itself worked perfectly as always though. I'll check it when I pop into work later today, hopefully our setup continues to work with it, I had to keep going through the firewall logs to pin-point the issue and in the end sorted it out... would have documented it but I made so many little changes that I couldn't pinpoint which one solved it.

Only working 2 days next week... will be deploying a few machines, fine tuning my new dansguardian setup and ensuring some contractors don't screw up what should be a simple install(our head is VERY fussy when it comes to trunking )

If they did it any later most of them would be in bed