IrritableTech

We're seeing much higher CPU utilisation after the spring upgrade. Thanks for the info @Rawns, I might well vote for the CR.

I think if the staff themselves create a private list and add the school to it, they can see the account more easily (switching to the list) but won't show up as following. Or, they could just view the account every so often.

Their proposal includes a help desk. The seven pounds per account covers their costs to provide this service. I've been told.

Thanks synaesthesia. It's good to know you're seeing good results with FTTC too.

I've got a meeting with schools broadband at the end of the week to thrash out what they can offer my schools. Their pre-sales has been very good. They are also very competitively priced, and seem flexible in what they offer. I'll be honest, I'm yet to be convinced by the FTTC technology they suggest for primary schools, but have heard some positive feedback from users. It is very cost effective as long as it can cope with demand. They have recently announced a price cut on fibres after the BT/ofcom ruling and have past that saving on immediately to customers (I think I'm right in saying that). Their standard packages include hosted fortinet and lightspeed, which are both interesting products and offer a double whammy if you are happy with black and white list filtering. We are looking at other providers along side schools broadband, but we hope to have a decision on our future solution fairly soon.

I'm afraid not. You could protect your tweets, but as soon as you approve a new follower, they can see all your other followers. The best option is to recommend that staff add the school twitter account to a private list. That way they can 'follow' fairly easily, but real followers can not see their accounts. I've not heard of many parent contacting teacher issues, sadly it's often parents finding out too much about teacher issues. Teachers need to ensure their accounts are open to scrutiny.

Tumblr is another option.

Self hosted WP allows you to publish from email without any additional plugins. Not sure about wordpress.com (but I bet it does).

I too had an early vodafone PAYG phone. I think it was an Alcatel, which was analogue (so no texts). I upgraded the battery to a higher capacity (thicker) version for more talk time. It had a big pull out ariel, no SIM card and was blue.

I've got an old version... http://db.tt/J8bcSGGk

A handy starter for what you're after...? iPad Acceptable Use Policy However I think we're all getting a bit bogged down in policies. It's confusing pupils, staff and even those who write the things (me included). Rather than an AUP, an internet policy, a behaviour (ICT) policy, an iPAD policy etc. etc. I'd suggest we need a simple, straight forward responsible use policy. It's about respecting the equipment, others and yourself. It's about being nice; it's about being positive. It's about being responsible for your actions.

We've used comms-express and fruity cables in the past. Fruity cables do as small as 25cm Cat5e cables for 29p+VAT which are handy when you set your cabinets out like this... patch switch patch patch switch patch etc.

Eek. Just checked... my certificate expires in 11 days!

We got a free 2 year certificate from SSL Certificates SSL Wildcard SSL Free Certificates SSL Server Certificate 256 bits for our ruckus system. We created a dns record for wifi.school.local and generated a certificate request. They come back pretty quickly. It is a bit of a pain getting the certificate into the ruckus box, due to needing additional certificates (SSL Certificate Authority low-cost, fully-validated 38$ SSL and 276$ Wildcard Certificates) but it is do-able. Perhaps someone knows a better authority?

Super news @GrumbleDook. You're always one to go the extra mile, and one of the people who make edugeek what it is. So pleased you won.

I have two twitter accounts. I hope I've managed to keep both professional. I tweet under this name in relation to education, technology and esafety, and under my real name for tweets about food, family, dogs and the like. My work related account (although it is not affiliated to any place of work) has far more followers than my personal one. However the people that follow me professionally are probably not all that interested in my personal life, and vice versa.

Funding must be aligned with ambition. I like what your school is trying to achieve however I'd have to ask the question "how many byod devices, in reality, are going to be sharing with the projector in a room?" If the answer is loads, you need some investment to realise the learning potential. If the answer is one or two every now and then... I'd suggest pupil owned devices sharing to whiteboards will get limited use, and any BYOD scheme should be device agnostic. Before you can successfully access the learning potential of BYOD, you need to get your infrastructure sorted. It's Bring Your Own Device, not Bring Your Own Apple. I actually prefer Prof Stephen Heppell's term "Bring a Browser". Students could collaborate on Google Docs using their own devices (not just apples), and easily show their work from the windows pc at the front of class. Dropbox, wallwisher, evernote, sketch, prezi etc.... all browser tools. That's where a BYOD scheme really starts to take off. I'd separate the two schemes. iPads for teachers is a very different scheme to pupils bringing in devices. For more thoughts on BYOD in schools, take a look at my blog. This is a good starting point... BYOD: Wifi, Network, Internet, Proxies | IrritableTech

Not sure @elsiegee40 I'll ask the man who pays the bill and let you know. Sorry for late reply.

We've been using makewav.es at our High School for a little bit. Our student reporters use it to blog about special school events. We're probably not using it fully to be honest. Edmodo is a nice looking platform which seems to be exciting teachers. I've set up a profile myself, and it does seem to have some nice features. I'm sure these types of services will end up replacing VLEs in many schools before long.

If OCR are handling this... does anyone know how many schools run the GCSE computing course? I guess my real question is, on average, how many will each school get?

Fantastic. Looking forward to Apple giving the go ahead. Thanks for the hard work which obviously must have gone into this.

Sounds like you've got the virtual setup you need. Our (virtual) sims server only has a 100GB OS drive, and a 60GB Data. It's currently only using 15GBs of the data drive so 300GBs might be a bit of overkill? I'd throw 16GB of RAM at mine, if I had it spare.

Thanks... Downloading now.

Ok, firstly I'd suggest you think about your policy or guidance. The Head needs to decide (perhaps along with your knowledge of the platform) what is suitable to publish, and if you are happy with communicating (or following) pupils, staff and parents. I'd suggest DM's are not permitted. Teachers guidelines explain that all communication should be transparent and open to scrutiny. We have set up Twitter accounts for every department. @schoolEnglish @schoolMaths etc. Some departments use it regularly (and really well), others not at all. In each department they have decided who has access (usually the most twitter/web savvy). Our main school twitter account doesn't get used as much as I'd like (I think it looks bad when the latest tweet is three months ago). But once your departments get going, it's not hard for the main account to find things to retweet. It's best to make it clear to your followers what type of account you are using. If it's a broadcast account, say so, or you risk people asking questions that nobody replies too. Hope that helps. Forgot to mention this link... http://irte.eu/fe Alan has some excellent thoughts on twitter use for teachers.

I had a nexus 7 and an iPad mini side by side (for about ten minutes) so was able to do a quick compare... 10 Minute Review: Apple iPad Mini vs. Google Nexus 7 « Irritable Tech I have to say, I prefer the apple. One big reason was the aspect ratio. The nexus' 16:10 screen accompanied with its software home/back button makes the device less comfortable to use, for me. It just doesn't sit comfortably with todays images and websites. I think I'm more embedded in the apple ecosystem (especially now I received a mini as a Christmas present!). I think the iOS apps are just better. Google hasn't seemed to persuade app devs to create decent tablet versions of phone apps in the same way as apple has. I do think Chrome beats Safari as a stock browser though. We've got one nexus here at school and it has suffered from a not powering up issue. I've had two mini's in my hands, and neither has had any issue.