gill

A few years ago we stuck some old apple logo stickers on a bunch of Dell computers. Several members of staff commented about how good it was to finally have Mac computers! Brilliant, we didn't even have to paint them white!

I have Sibelius 6.2 installed on a network and running on Win XP pcs. There are endless problems with student profiles becoming corrupted, not sure why. But most lessons end up with at least a couple of students having to have their profiles deleted in order to get playback. One student has a peculiar problem: she is creating a piece for 2 acoustic guitars, 2 violins and a cello. All instruments play back properly except the top guitar which plays back up to 3 semi-tones lower than written. The guitar is in standard E tuning and has not dropped to D. Any help very welcome.

There are two of us here! It's the tidiest IT office in the world!

All Done

Just been told our school is looking at copying the Isle of Man and going down the Apple Mac route and I wondered if there was anyone out there from the IOM who had experience of how well or otherwise this has worked. I'm always sceptical when I'm told that Macs never break down and that 4,400 Macs can be maintained by just 2 technicians. What are the benefits or problems of getting rid of a very reliable network of pcs and laptops (450 machines managed by 2 techies) and moving over to Macs? How does it save money unless of course the plan is to get rid of the technical support (me!) as these new machines won't ever break down! Any info gratefully received.

Unfortunately if you click on the hopgood eu test channel link on the website it comes up with Highly Inapropriate Adult Website. Just what you need when you work in a school!

We have just installed Netpresenter digital signage and it's great! Free Digital Signage by Netpresenter It's free for one display screen (you can buy it for multiple displays) and is very simple to use. You can import: photos, video clips, Youtube videos, flash animations, RSS feeds and type in messages. It's web based so you can access it from anywhere with an internet connection. Great if you get home and realise you've forgotten to update the messages. It takes about 2 minutes to install the software and half an hour to learn how to create and upload messages. Ideal if you have office staff who are a bit intimidated by ICT. We've experimented with Orange Valley and Xibo but this is much easier.

we're finding the same problem, being tied to the office to enable/disable accounts or trying to remember to get back to the office to set things up at the start of a session and most days we have at least one session taking place. I haven't found any software which can do this, does anyone else know of any?

That was a bit of a pain but I will try to come up with a way of doing it in a batch file. Fortunately some of our groups were quite small (20 students) but it would be a nightmare if you had 100s of kids! I'm sure there are lots of techies out there far cleverer than me who will find a better way of doing this but in the absence of any technical guidance from the exam boards I thought others might like to see how we tackled the problem.

Hope this helps if you're struggling to work out how to do this. Controlled Assessment Different exam boards have different requirements for each subject but in general students need the following: 1. Secure area to store coursework which is only accessible during the supervised session. 2. No access to shared areas or their existing network folder. Depending on the subject they may also need the following locked down or accessible: 1. Internet access 2. Ability to use a USB pen drive 3. Spell check How I did this In active directory I created: 1. A security group called Controlled Assessment and any student taking any controlled assessment was added to this group. 2. A security group called Controlled Assessment subject 200* (we added the year group as we have more than one year group taking part in controlled assessments) 3. An OU called Controlled Assessment 4. Within the Controlled assessment OU create OUs for each subject called Controlled Subject 200* I created the following GPOs. 1. A GPO for OU Controlled Assessment which applied to every student locking down the usual things like run command etc (you probably already have a GPO which does this) 2. A GPO to lock down internet access 3. A GPO to allow internet access and set browser settings 4. A GPO to lock down access to shared areas You can create as many GPOs as you need. I found it easier to create separate GPOs which I can reuse every year. Link the appropriate policy to the OU Controlled subject 200* e.g. Geography needs internet access but English doesn’t. Secure Storage I then created a course work shared area on X drive which was subdivided into year groups and controlled assessment subject groups. You’ll need to create a log on script so that students in the security groups you created and teachers can see X drive when they log on. User Accounts I created student user accounts, one per student per subject e.g. 06SmithAEnglish, and 06SmithAHistory etc Ensure they are members of OU Controlled Assessment and OU Controlled subject 200*. Add them to any other OUs which you may have set up on your network e.g. “All students” or “domain users” etc I gave them roaming profiles. I created a home folder for each student on X drive and used folder redirection to ensure their “My Documents” folder was set up in the right place. e.g. \\servername\course work$\2006\English Controlled Assessment I wanted teaching staff to have access to these folders so I un-ticked “grant the user exclusive rights to My Documents” Folder Permissions Set the folder permissions so that only those students (and teachers) taking English in Year group 2006 have access to the 2006\English Controlled Assessment folder on X drive Set permissions on individual student folders so that only the student and teacher have access to the folder. I then had to log on as each student save a test document and then log off. This created their “My Documents” folder. Set the permissions on this folder so that students and teachers have access. Then log back in and you should now be able to see the test document you created. The teacher should also be able to see the document created in the student’s folder on X drive. Getting the permissions right is critical so test them to make sure they are secure. Controlling access to the folders The easiest way of doing this is to enable all the accounts in AD at the start of the supervised session and disable them again at the end. You can also use the log on hours feature in AD but it only controls logging on it doesn’t force users to log off. Spell Check Don’t waste time trying to block spell check; we couldn’t make it work properly. Every time a user pressed F7 spell check worked! Students who are not permitted to use spell check should use WordPad to complete the assessment. Blocking Apps and pen drives I use Net Support software to allow or block individual apps like WordPad and to block USB pen drives. The software can also be used to block access to the internet.

We've had 4 out of 6 P3005n printers fail, some just two or three months out of warranty. We gave up trying to fix them and have consigned them to a skip. We have 70 printers here and I won't be buying HP ever again. The formatter board problem seems to be a known issue but HP is not interested. HP's latest printers seem to be rubbish, spread the word so that others don't waste their budgets on them. We're now trying Brother printers, fingers crossed!

We had a set of school owned laptops which were allowed home with internet access. Parents signed a revised AUP however I don't know if it was legally binding. We only had one problem in 3 years when we discovered porn on one of the laptops. It was never clear who had downloaded the images; student, older siblings or her separated parents. Everyone blamed each other and we decided not to pursue this after consulting the police. We have looked at Forensic software CyberSentinel - e-Safety and internet parental control software however you have to consider how intrusive this is and whether or not it is an invasion of privacy. If the students and parents were fully informed about how the software worked and signed to accept that you would probably be covered. There is however a cost involved in using software of this type. You could always have a trial period and monitor yourself how the students behave with internet access at home. If they abuse it then go back to blocking internet access when the laptops are off site. Hope this helps!

Is there a way of restricting access to network folders other than using the logon hours feature in AD? I'm trying to set up controlled assessment folders which can only be accessed at certain times and I'm not sure how to do it!!! Thanks

Does anyone have scripts to block access to spellcheck, calculator, grammar check during controlled assessments? Thanks

We allow students to bring in their own laptops however they are not permitted to connect to the network. They can have internet access through a separate wireless network which is password protected. Password is never given out to staff or students. All students sign an AUP and anyone caught misbehaving would have internet access removed and told not to bring laptop into school. I thought of lots of reasons not to do this but so far it's worked quite well and the kids haven't abused it.