budgester

At the moodlemoot this year, there was an excellent presentation where a school set up every student with a course of there own and as a teacher of there own course. They then used this course as an ePortfolio.

Incremental training from the NM to the Techs, as you are training them make sure they document how to do things, then question them on it to make sure they understand, then if they balls it up don't fix it immediately but sit with the person who ballsed it up and work through resolving the problem with them. Make the think/sweat earn there money. Then hopefully the same mistake will not happen again, sometimes this can feel like swimming through treacle, but you are gaining management skills along with a more competent group of staff.

Sounds like you need to do an appraisal for him :-) And a little chat, explaining the situation and how things would stand if you had to go about disciplining him, and the fact that he is withholding the passwords. I would start by getting him to put all passwords in a sealed envelope that can stored in the firesafe, just in case he gets taking down a dark alley and doesn't make it into work. Also your gonna need to do a weekly/monthly password check with this document to make sure he doesn't change them without updating that doc in the firesafe. If he refuses to do this, which I would consider is a reasonable task, then I would issue a verbale warning, (of course clear this with your line manager first)

Yer it's true. It should give me some more time to implement some of my more pie in the sky ideas :-) I really hope I get someone good, I really don't want some numpty keep bothering me all the time about the MIS system.

I think that the first thing that any of the OSS MIS systems really need to do is have the ability to import CTF/XML files. Once this is done, then it can be run in parallel with an existing MIS system, with regular data transfers. Scripted to happen over night would do. Next for data interoperability, timetable data needs to be transferable in an open format i.e. XML/CTF. Then we can start looking at integrating some of the things that we all want to do, such as room booking without having to duplicate data entry. My biggest annoyance with the current crop of MIS systems is that I can't script any of the regular jobs that I want to do, e.g. running reports, even the fact that I have to download and unzip exam results manually, surely this is why things like SOAP and XML-RPC where invented. Rant over, maybe more to come. Regards Budgester.

Same here, just using the latest driver and studio. And this is on promethean boards and TDS boards. (Which are the same thing)

And of course you can always use the web interface for cups, located on port 631 on your server. i.e. http://printeserver:631/

Hi, We have all promethean boards in our school, however we have had a few teachers join us this year from schools that use SMART boards. Does anyone know if it is possible to convert flipcharts between the two systems. Regards Budgester

Damn, I got OS/Warp. I didn't think I was that scary.

Budgy is fine. Now would I ever do anything so nasty as offloading the drudgery to someone else ? To be honest it is more of a case of someone having the time sit down and look at the process' in the school and work them into CMIS so that Daily/Weekly/Monthly etc... reports can be generated for things like attendance, assesment etc etc. So lots of working with Departments/Faculties/SLT so we can get to the point where people actually know where the school is performing. And of course I enjoy the fun linux stuff, but I also like my hair. We don't really believe that we will find someone with CMIS experience across all the areas. I personally don't believe that you need experience in a package to use it well. You just have to be able to learn and figure things out.

You know when you go D'oh and slap your forehead as if you've done something stupid ? It'll be that one. ;-) I suppose i should have changed my sig to CMIS the smack in the face that SIMS users have been begging for, but I despise CMIS and SIMS equally so it wouldn't really work on the humour front. Love you all Budgester

No CMIS experience needed, full training will be given, you just need to be able to stand using and supporting a school MIS system everyday.

To be honest I'll jsut be glad to get rid of supporting CMIS to someone else.

Salary scale: SO2 £27,084 - £28,578 http://www.chace.enfield.sch.uk/drupal/?q=node/35

Well the first thing to be done is to try and get a structure in place I would have thought.

Can you connect it up to a display out side the room, so that it shows who has got the room booked ? So no one else can sneak in. Yer, that would be cool, a web page for each room, maybe auto refreshing then we could set up a kiosk type machine on one of our old PC's and point it to the page for that room.

BINGO !!!

My old home linux box went down, an epia via died on me, a while back, now this had an ubuntu 5.10 install on it, that had been upgraded to 6.06. So i pulled the disk and threw it into a pentium 4 2ghz dell pc, so a fair difference in hardware, and the linux install just came up and worked with all the relevant drivers. Yup stick with the stock i386 kernel and life will be wonderfull, all your dreams will come true and you will win the lottery. Well ok maybe I went a bit over the top there, but "It will just work™"

I can vouch for the System Rescue CD. I ended up using it to ghost a bunch of machines to the RM Smart Build Level as the gig nics (agere) in the pc's did not have a dos driver available, and it's not in the main kernel yet so couldn't get it to boot linux across the network either. Just follow the intructions and all will fine and loverly

I know that one very well. My advice is to charge them £100 per day. If they act shocked tell them to get a quote for a consultant. They'll pay. I would say a minimum of £200 a day. If you can find out how much they pay a day for a Cover teacher. At £100 a day your only gonna cover your costs, if your doing consulting you have to be aware of the fact that you have to sort out your own tax, NI, professional insurance, invoicing, unpaid holidays etc. Personally I would go more for a rate per hour say £35 with a miminmum 2 hours, if you make yourself to cheap you will be earning less than if you were working there full time and they had all the paper work aggravation. If you go in at a high price you can always offer discounts. If you go in to low it becomes difficult to raise your rates at a later date. And for some weird reason people will feel that you are more likely to do a better job if you are expensive. Yup, that 18 months of running my own outfit was the most profitable I ever was, but just couldn't get my head into the marketing/sales/accounting stuff, and I got stuffed by my accountant and a agency I did some work for. Me bitter nah. Regards Budgester

Debian, Squirrelmail, Exim and Cyrus IMAP here. All running on a 700mhz Pentium with 256meg of ram. It keeps up with anything I can throw at it.

Ever looked at an O'reilly manual ? Sounds like you've kept an open mind about this. Probably go around baiting people that do have skills with linux or unix or other silly OS'es And this differs from any other solution that you have described above in what way ? I really hope you keep good backups.

Give me nmap any day :-)

Who needs sky, I've not even had a TV for 7 years.

@Ric_ Yeh SysAid (again ): With IRM being LAMP you'd assume it would work on a wide client base. Can't find it on thier webbie tho' so that one remains a mystery. I found no reference of any other H/W::S/W inventory tools on any of the other systems webbies. Yup, we need to update the documentation. Currently IRM works on OS - Windows, *nix, Mac. Web Server - Apache IIS, basically anything with php support DB - Currently on MySQL :-( We are in the process of connecting up with OCS Inventory.