brad82

Hi All, One of our sixth formers is trying to push to get a school radio set up. I've been set the task by the powers that be to try get a quote on a decent studio priced up. I've got quite a bit of experience in studio work previously so that's something I'm rather well versed in, so im looking to do that all on my own steam. They've come across Myriad V4 to use as the playout software but the price of a licence is making my budget ache, upwards of £3k for the licence! I've only got a budget of £6k to work with to transform my dingy old office into a studio so as always trying to claw back pennies where I can. I was wondering if any of you guys have a similar set up in your school and what you use? One of the media academies down the road from us does but their team are very protective over what they use.. grr! Cheers!

I will still be around when 12.04 hits, so ill upgrade to that when it hits the release, then leave it at that until the next LTS.. I just happened to have an image of another ready to deploy LAMP stack laying around so I deployed that as I'm lazy! Also cheers David - I shall have a read tomorrow when I'm back in front of PuTTY!

Ill have a look into it, cheers mate

Hi All, I have been managing unix web servers for a long time now, however I'm deploying a Baccalaureate Portfolio web app I've developed for us into the network. Im running it on a Ubuntu 11.10 server, and I'm having problems with the Samba shares (first time I've used samba).. Ive set up a simple share in samba.conf [baccData] comment = Bacc Admin Access path = /baccdata browsable = yes guest ok = yes read only = no create mask = 0755 I need to somehow configure this on a AD OU basis, so the students have no access to this share, but the admin and SMT OUs do. I have absolutely no idea how to go about doing this, and all my googling turned up zilch. I tried binding Samba to AD in Webmin but that just spat its dummy out at me. If anyone has any pointers, or even links to an article that will give me some sort of idea what I'm doing that would be greatly appreciatedn- again linux isn't anything new to me, so if I have a small clue what to do I should be able to figure the rest out for myself! Cheers

We have a lot of CAM kit in the technology department (the use of it is another rant all together though). We have a LaserPro Explorer II and it gets hammered by the Year 11s attempting to finish their GCSE final project in time.. Its an absolute headache to set up, but once its working Techsoft 2D Design (V2) and it work like an absolute treat! We use it to do a lot of in-house engraving too, the vast majority of the door signs are done on our cutter and all staff have key fobs with their staff codes on which we did with the machine.. Plus I love the smell it makes (probably not good to be sniffing the fumes of it but it gets me through the day!)

I personally haven't seen any solutions that will let you do this. I have seen 3rd party applications that manage the multi monitor set ups a bit better than the standard windows ones, but I don't know if any will provide what you are looking for. Also, if the card in the PC is a standard consumer one (that isn't one of the very new generations), its unlikely that it will support using all 3 ports - the vast majority of consumer cards that I've ever encountered only support 2 displays at any one time. What is the card in his PC at the moment?

Xibo, and spend the money you saved on a player on a nice Public Display like an NEC or a Samsung Public Display. It makes a world of difference to the end product.

Some are trained, the ones that aren't seem to be the ones that have picked them up just by playing with them (admittedly this appears to be the NQTs!).. I find that the guys that have been trained seem very reluctant to use them. We don't even get them using them as whiteboards, they don't even pick up the pens! I spent a good few weeks ensuring all the boards were up to scratch, repairing damaged ones etc. I even received a request from a staff member to explicitly fix her board (IO Board had been ripped out by a student tripping on the cable, but lets keep that quiet from management!), yet again I have not seen that board used since it was repaired. The SMART boards were installed before I arrived, I would personally use Promethean every time, hence why maths has them.

In my opinion blocking phones is just silly in this day in age. 95% of your students will own one, and 85% of your students will bring it to school no matter what. My school just implements a 1 week confiscation policy. If a teacher sees a student texting during a lesson the phone is confiscated for a week with no questions. Works pretty well, also teaches our kids how to touchtype on their blackberries, hopefully most of them wont learn this art though and will stare down into their lap for the majority of the lesson. Classic tell tale sign! I personally dont see that in this day in age you can outlaw phones. Kids are just too attached/used to them these days - the most you can do (sans going down the illegal blocker, or superbly awesome faraday cage route) is train your staff to be vigilant and get the SMT on board with making some sort of confiscation policy mandatory. As most behaviour things go, its down to how reluctant your staff are at enforcing the rules. You will get 1 and 2 that are more with the students but hey ho, thats what we deal with on a daily basis no?

Hi All, Just a little survey... A while ago we were pressured by the SMT to install IWBs in most rooms. There is at least 3 IWBs between each department, and maths are fully kitted out with Promethean Boards (the rest are Smart). Maths tend to use theirs every day, credit where its due! However I never see any other members of staff using theirs other than a projection screen. Are your experiences similar, or do your staff use IWBs to their full potential? We are a secondary school, I notice primary do tend to use them much more. Cheers!

With all the Science Departments junk I dread to even look at what size ours is running at.. All I know is that with the shiny new Equilogic SAN we shan't be running out of space any time soon!

Would like to add that from experience no platform is going to make your staff/students web designers, to put it bluntly if someone with an eye for design doesnt hand the design to them and they fill in the content 99% of the time I've found what you are going to get back is something that looks like its from the 1990s. Especially with frog where the creator of the content may start with a blank canvas if they so wish.

We have some JavaScript my colleague whipped up for OneLAN, but its just some JavaScript in the top most layer overlapping the rest of the content. It wouldnt surprise me if he did just use the Dynamic Drive snippet!

I usually do search the forum before hand, but its been a long week!

Thats probably karma for getting a blackberry in the first place (iPhone user here!). Give taking the case off, then placing it under a desk lamp (if you have one) for a few days, the heat should gently evaporate the water enough to remove it from the phone. Worked on the Gadget Show anyway

Hi all, I'm looking into mounting 1 (possibly 2, budget permitting!) PTZ camera in our main hall to provide the facility to record and/or stream lectures/productions out onto the school site and the digital signage around the campus. We were looking at using the Panasonic wv-ns202a PTZ IP Cameras we use for CCTV due to their ridiculously good optical zooms, however they just weren't suited to the purpose due to streaming lag. Does anyone have any experience with this? I know a few sites do indeed have these facilities in place. Obviously there are the solutions from Sony BRC Range that are basically camcorders in a PTZ housing, but unfortunately we dont have £3k to burn on a single item (hell its rare we have £3k to spend on anything.. blooming budget cuts, lol.). Bottom line: Looking to install remote cameras that will provide good-enough quality to view a person from around 20m away with very little lag. Would prefer to install an IP camera, however if your solutions have both composite out for the video and a separate control for the PTZ then so be it. Cheers guys

To all interested, I have had a Git repository set up for my inventory tracker - I need to update it to the latest revision when I get a chance next week, the current revision is broken, but keep an eye on this space! https://github.com/brad82/Open-Inventory-Tracker I'll make sure I let you guys know when it's ready to download and play with!

Like the majority, [YearJoinedInY7][First 5 Letters of Surname][initial] If there is James Bloggs and John Bloggs in one year then James will be 08bloggsJ and John 08jbloggs Staff are initial.surname, again of there are two staff members that are te same one will have initial.surname and the other [initial][surname] S.levett - levetts

Yep that's the same situation we were in with the iPads. Not to worry ill keep it on the cards as a possible solution, progresso sounds promising so I'll definitely keep that in mind. Typing each code became a bit clumsy after a while, even more so of a faff than trying to use a samsung galaxy tab to login to ePortal - if you ever want to challenge Job candidates that's definitely a good one! Cheers guys

I just whipped up a quick web application that uses PHP/MySQL to keep an inventory list. It can export the inventory to a CSV file when the auditors come round etc and provides enough reporting for our needs. I have no issues releasing it under a GPL licence for anyone to take a look at/use if they are interested. I found all the ones out there are far too complex for our needs, we simply wanted to store the item type, its smart water location, its asset management tag and serial number - none of the other fancy stuff other asset managers have. I designed it with a mobile theme in mind as usually I do the asset management on my iPhone when I've got the kit in front of me instead of going back to the office and trying to remember the serial number or read it off my hand!

Good point, never checked! We want to try to use iPads because they just turn on, no waiting around. I was hoping the PDA add-on gave us some sort of facility that renders the ePortal site in a PDA friendly style - unless its a native application for Windows PDA which would throw that solution in the bin... Well ePortal renders fine, however obviously double clicking on the iPad zooms the thing in, so when we go to click the check box to input a registration code it just zooms in on the box itself - which prevents the whole system from working Currently waiting on the guys from Serco to give us a ring back for a trial, just doing my homework before hand to check its actually worth even having the hassle of getting the trial in!

We've used frog for a while now, so far really happy with it. From an end user p.o.v. its ridiculously easy to use - we haven't found a student yet that hasn't been able to use the Frog Bricks to build their own profiles. Although I have past experience in web design and prefer to code sites myself, the "non-technical" staff can pick up the product and create and edit content on their department pages with only a few minutes walkthrough. Be prepared from the administration point of view to do some sitting down and playing - it takes quite a while to uncover all the bits and bobs you can do with it, but that goes without saying with any complex product. Our system was delivered by Frogtrade with their own box (which appears to be a rebranded Dell R710 so top quality gear!) and the support is pretty good. Being a *nix admin it would be nice to actually be able to access the CentOS running on the box which Frogtrade appear to like to keep under their paws, but with the support its never really been an issue. The email system that ships with frog is pretty good, nothing compared to Exchange but it will do for most environments. If you are looking to provide out-of-office connection to staff/students the "Secure Gateway" shipped with frog is excellent (A glorified Terminal Services Proxy) without the price of getting MS-TS licences in. Management is a doddle with the Toolkit, although be prepared to use IE - it will not run on any other browser. Also worth noting is it integrates really well with AD and CMIS to pull all our MIS data in which lets us publish all the students data to the parents via the parent portal we built with frog. Again one thing I would say is be prepared to spend quite a lot of time developing with frog, I find its something you really need to sit down and look at, not something you can really get your teeth into while popping in and out to go to a call out. There are a lot of features in frog we have yet to tinker with, really could do with sitting down and looking through it all in detail but for the past 2 years we have had it absolutely no complaints. Great bit of kit, highly recommend it if you can fit it in your budget.

Hi All, We are looking at integrating PDAs for use with the PE staff to mark roll call in the changing rooms. One of the solutions we are considering is using the PDA add-on for Facility that will let them use a native interface to mark the registers (we tried using the normal desktop version of ePortal and the iPads just spat their dummy out!) As I'm sure you guys know the add-on is quite pricey, so just looking to see if you guys have any experience using it and if there are any known problems before we go down the route of anther solution. Cheers!