PiqueABoo

Same for me and another affected county. Looks like the penny finally dropped about *.sch.uk.

The DfE press release says: "set up with BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT and supported by industry experts such as Microsoft, Facebook, BT and IBM." [ The CAS computing curriculum had endorsements from BCS, Microsoft, Google and Intellect (some industry group)]

Dunno if it will work. Graduates to be offered £20,000 to train as computer science teachers The education secretary, Michael Gove, announced on Friday that current information and communications technology teacher training courses will be axed from next year. Instead, ministers will offer scholarships worth £20,000 to attract high-achieving graduates to train as computer science teachers. .. The government also announced that about 500 existing teachers with an ICT background would receive training to teach computer science. This bit is a complete fail though: Gove: "If we want our country to produce the next Sir Tim Berners-Lee – creator of the internet"

Just catching up with this thread. Can't believe it got diverted into generic equality blather so quickly without anyone linking *THE* video. Slackers ;b http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA

Haven't had any noticeable problems with it since last century and that was a subtle interaction with MS Proxy firewall client. The key point is supporting opportunistic TLS (STARTTLS), because regardless of the risks of interception it ticks a security box that a lot of the public sector and probably the ICO really wants ticked these days. If you sort out your end then everything to/from the government will use it, and the same is probably true for LA systems etc. Live@Edu/Office365 has also done it since they added Forefront.

I did wonder about that, but would they invent an insider to *support* the BBC? If not then we have an implicit suggestion that if the BBC manglement were innocent of suppressing burning truth, there would be some meeting minutes in some filing cabinet somewhere detailing everything they hadn't done i.e. it's crocky unfair burden (of proof) territory.

"A BBC insider said there was no proof that bosses had never lent on anyone to drop the Newsnight report."

I've had my hands on some DTS 'free' laptops and Panaroma told it exactly the way that one happened. My disappointment is that even though Panorama spelt out what happened V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W-L-Y W-I-T-H P-R-E-T-T-Y P-I-CT-U-R-E-S some folk here still don't understand the relatively simple plot.

So does anyone have their finger on the pulse of what's happening here because I'm struggling to reconcile some aspects? At heart we appear to have traditional-ish vs. progressive education, and most things lately can be seen in terms of weakening the pillars of progressive e.g. unqualified teachers won't be brainwashed with progressive during training, privatised schools will undermine the progressive torch carrying unions, similarly minded LEA advisor sections are decimated or bypassed via new-academies and so on. So far so plausible, but the reason I'm asking is that I just tripped over a DT article on the Sats results with the headline: Thousands of boys 'at least four years behind in reading' which is more or less how they do most of these stories i.e. it's another variant of Ofsted Wilshaw's "every child.. above average", these disadvantaged kids are being failed by the rubbish school system blather, blather. But that isn't the 'elitist' thing that every other Leftie keeps accusing them of, is it? Sure it's softening up the teachers ready for Wilshaw-wannabees clutching Sadistic Managlement[tm] manuals, but they've nevertheless defined much of their mission as the same old task of dragging lowest performers up to the floor-levels. Cynic that I am I think the power of education is finite, that they've set themselves up for failure and given the relatively hostile methodology, that will be used against them for a long time. But they're not that stupid surely, so what's the get-out? Or, and it seems very unlikely, are Gove et al genuinely convinced they've got the solution? :: puzzled ::

If that's not the On the Origin of Species sub-title defeat, I want my money back. Appearances might be deceiving but Dawkins has independently struck me as being a teensy bit vicious in recent years, plus with the country seemingly getting crockier by the year I'm not so sure we should be kicking the local Christians, some of whom genuinely do possess a little traditional, unselfish virtue (see most hospices for instance).

Definitely worth a look. I'm a bit out of touch (Cakewalk last century), but DD initially on a notating mission found and got me to install MuseScore over the summer and it seems quite good.

In principle there will be a separate consultation "this year" on "school accountability". For some reason I am expecting that to say EBacc goes in the league tables, but if we're really (lottery winner) lucky it might address the systematic corruption of education they have caused. Have you wanted that for anything else in the last decade? The system is not a direct democracy and in a representative democracy like ours this is just an insignificant etiquette complaint i.e. they, same as previous goverments, would go through the box-ticking motions, find interesting ways to dismiss any credible objections and then still do exactly what they wanted. English GCSE results, Ofqual & Gove: Interest in that lasted for a few days, briefly picked up for Gove at the Select Committee which seemed to think it was a lesser priority than their egos re. not being told X first, and has pretty much been dead ever since for everyone besides the victims and whoever-it-is that might take some legal action. EBacc: Same kind of story - tons of shallow and essentially nature vs. nurture, progressive v. traditional bleating, then the rest of the world's useless twitter-sized attention spans moved on to the latest analysis of Kate's chest or whatever it was on the front page the next day. I've read quite a bit of research over the years. When it exists (rare) educational research on big issues is often pretty dire, often seems to be designed to deliver the outcome they wanted, probably doesn't relate to this country/culture, and typically has fundamental perspective problems i.e. exclusively deals in the one-size-fits-all view of the entire country from the moon. Oh and no one looks for or reads it before opining... and sadly that extends to some of the apparent heavweights in this area who for the most part will be the only ones debating because that's essentially their job (and we've heard it all before).

Will look later, but imagine that's similar in drift (and possibly more accessible) to this ~50 year-old quote from one of my favourite books: Extensive psychological testing has shown that the mysterious quality called 'creative imagination' seems to exist in all people but is severely diminished by the time an individual reaches the age of six. The environment of school ('You mustn't do this!' 'You mustn't do that!' 'You call that a drawing of your mother ? Why, your mother only has two legs.' 'Nice girls don't do things like that!') sets up a whole screen of blocks in the mind of the child that later inhibits his ability to ideate freely. Creativity in various guises is the area where we encourage DD by far the most at home, essentially an attempt to preserve a slowly diminishing quality that most kids seem to have lots of at birth - it just doesn't mix well with mass education.

Sounds nice but I'm not sure what 'proper debate' means and I'm convinced that the type of people who would contribute have been sounding off all my (long-ish) life. The fundamental problem assuming you can get past the massive volume of seriously uninformed assertions[1], is that there are some very seriously polarised opinions on nearly every conceivable aspect i.e. the best outcome you could hope for is some lovely fluffy meaningless compromise that gets us nowhere, much the same as now in a sector dripping with dishonest, unpragmatic, 100% guaranteed inoffensive tat like "every child should reach their full potential in a system fit to meet the challenges of the 21st century" and so on. [1] Go skim one of the Daily Mail or Guardian threads on this to get the picture.

Making stuff.. a la Blue Peter with some lightly attached dry academic excuse. I suppose some teachers might be capable of sucking the life out of it, but here that is very definitely part of the 'fun'.

DD of high ability, now in Y5 was neglected for years so I'll take anything that throws a little genuine attention at her "needs and potential" as opposed to the what the school needs to look good in the bleeping league tables. The latter have led to some, if not most of the worst aspects of the system and although Gove did suggest the accountability/performance aspect were on the table for consultation I won't hold my breath... Not sure I like the "full EBacc" combination which feels jack-of-all-trades. Some folk can be absolutely brilliant at arts, bad at science/maths and vice versa but I'm not sure many HR depts are smart enough to grok that. Have you seen a primary timetable? Numeracy, Literacy, Numeracy, Literacy, Numeracy, Literacy.. you need a magnifying glass to spot the rest. It's already appallingly narrow, too narrow unless you have an exceptionally imaginative teacher, and that's because of the bleeping SATS, teachers must raise attainment by at least 2/3 level, league table idiocy. That you're apparently seeing lots of below average kids where you are is not a reason to limit all the average+ in England kids to what would be a rather pathetic "education" at what we keep hearing is such a critical time in terms of setting future trajectories etc. Note that one of the current key-words (via OECD) is "equity", which is very roughly about accommodating and meeting the specific needs of specific individuals i.e. not treating them all like the lowest common denominator.

Haven't looked at it's effect so don't know if it works, but the set-msoluser cmdlet has a StrongPasswordRequired switch in addition to the one I was setting to $true (PasswordNeverExpires).

Think I ought to get a couple of medals for finding one: “Since the Olympics started we’ve had a lot of women coming to us with pictures of Jessica Ennis saying they want to have a torso similar to hers, but they have said they need a bit of extra help because they struggle to get down to those levels with just a couple of gym sessions a week. “The day after she won gold the next morning the phones went crazy and we had over 20 bookings for [some brand of liposuction] and they all said they wanted to have a tummy like Jessica Ennis and they wanted to have it done as soon as we could fit them in.” There is another outcome, a rather large volume of witless rhetoric about school sports - read enough of that and you might end up wanting to scrap sport in schools and replace it with two hour of Credible Debating per day i.e. lessons where folk are taught to avoid: a) Restating received opinion i.e. will be trained to check what reality actually looks like before they suggest their fixes, b) Extrapolating from their very blinkered view to the rest-of-the-world, c) Expecting the rest-of-the-world to do or not do something, because they personally do or don't like something. Best comment I've read is that we should also make Steve Ovett a 'legacy ambassador' and have him and Coe compete.

In principle Office365 will eventually end up with this: Office 2013 Public Preview: SkyDrive Pro

Yup, although I'd call that scary too. It was ever so good at sad/awful for most of the movie.. didn't stop me jumping at the end though, probably made it higher. They're apparently remaking it with Chloe Moretz which is.. ughh.. I dunno.. losing the 70 kitsch wouldn't hurt, but Sissy Spacek was awesome in that role.

Using Sprogette-O-Vision which includes reasonable knowledge of ~1/3 of the class (mostly girls though): They're half-way through KS2 and for the last year or two housepoints, stickers & certs have had very little currency with them unless they're awarded for a proper achievment, including winning. If they're not doing it in outside-school clubs they create their own in play and they appear to cope just fine with competition... provided it's scrupulously fair, there's nothing too significant at stake, that "taking part" is genuinely a reward to them. I doubt this is unusual. The 'culture' thing does chime with me. Not all, but Primaries around here do seem rubbish, apathetic, at taking part in inter-school anything, not just sport. That School Games postcode search I mentioned, has at best 25% of the quite large number of Primary schools within 10 miles of me registered (it will be worse because the search has a 100 results limit which the unregistered total hit). Secondaries with their dedicated staff have around 60% signed up. The irksome thing about the Primary scenario is that, should they be genuinely burried under real work, I'm sure most would find parents willing and capable of sorting out some of this stuff.

Can't. Underlining that the Olympics really is a *business*, the IOC allegedly just got that particular view removed

Cameron displaced economic non-growth and said his bit today. One with a fair few teacher's comments (Guardian): David Cameron defends move to scrap compulsory targets for school sport Didn't spot any "I work N (=lots) hours per weeks" which felt compelled to add "for M (<< 48) weeks per year" so all this maths focus is clearly doomed.. still I supposed if it worked, everyone would understand probability, stop doing the lottery and given the loss of funding we'd get Eurovision SC rankings in the Olympics. I've got some sympathies but it's interesting how many teacher+friends apparently don't entirely grok the job contracts, or don't care to contemplate how those jobs/salaries/annual hours measure up to many others. Still it is the Guardian..

Doubt it works if you grew up first with the routine gore that followed later, but I recall at a relatively tender, impressionable age trying to practice building walls in my mind.. just-in-case.. having watched the original Village of the Damned. Crisply cut blonde hair, expressionless faces, glowing eyes and so on, preyed on my mind for months, if not years... those kids were believable monsters and scared me sh^H^H *lots*. Edit: Carrie bothered me a bit later/older - not least the end (being the first film I'd seen with one of those endings).

Just found more press here and there today, a lot being grumpy about the relevant funding cuts and demise of School Sport Partnerships. Looking on their enter-postcode web page there aren't many schools around here registered for the School Games, including Sprogette's which like many also managed to completely ignore some county school sport stuff (with quite a few U11 categories) a few months ago. But anyway, I found this assertion in a press article along the way: "No Olympics host country has ever seen an increase in sports participation after the Games."