SimpleSi

Shall we take a reality check A photograph of little Tommy building a house with Lego with some text saying look how he's doing - he's now at level 1 in construction is not a danger to Tommy. Now, if it had his home address and the nights his mother goes out to bingo and leaves him with his 12 yr old sister babysitting on her own then their might be some cause for concern. Simon

Came back to orig non-working school and still not working so I've given county support a call and we'll see what they say. Must remember to try it out in all my schools to see if any pattern. Simon

One of my school headteachers found this https://orbit.so which seems to be a fully functional, free EYFS Profile builder a la 2Simple's 2BuildAProfile and FingerTips. They say they intend to keep the app free for schools and get income from advertising to parents. regards Simon

Sorry - missed the replies on this thread - if anyone needs 9.7 - PM me SImon

I've come to another school and it works there so must have been something specific to this mornings school Simon

I'm having a bad day Are Ipads normally able to connect to the App Store in schools behind proxies? Mine wouldn't connect via school wifi (yes - I set the proxy settings in wifi and it browses internet fine using Safarii) so I used my phone as portable hotspot and it connected to the App Store OK. I've switched back to school wifi and although I'm not getting cannot connect to itunes msgs now - half the apps are greyed out (as if its using some sort of half-filled cache!) regards Simon PS This is in Lancs CLEO land BTW

Just as a bit of info - I recently had a Casio develop spots before its eyes (prob dust in there somewhere) You have to go on a website an register the fault to get a returns number and pay to have it sent back (which cost us 25 pounds via post office!) It (or a replacement - I didn't check) was back a week later all working fine. This is only the 1st one to fail on me (one failed after a week - not counting that one) and I've got about 10 in service regards Simon

Thanks for all the suggestions. The solution has basically got to be easy-peasy to setup and use (e.g no 3rd person/techy) - just stick camera (or laptop with a webcam) in a corner and connect up 2 wireless mics and press record. The Motobix one (which looks like the one Edugeek uses at BETT) might be the one for the job - or maybe just a very wide angle webcam would do the job . What about suggestions for some wireless mics that could feed into a laptop or the external mic connector on a camera? Simon

There are a few (VERY EXPENSIVE) classroom video/audio recording tools (for teachers to video their own lessons and then watch them back afterwards) One of my heads wants to try this out but without having to spend £8k ! Anyone using (or can suggest) a cheap(er) option - pref looking at something that can cover 360 degrees with a couple of wireless mikes. Examples of what I'm talking about Camera Systems - Products - IRIS Connect regards Simon PS Would the Edugeek BETT Stand camera do this?

Coming to this one late so just adding 2 cents worth I use netbooks because they are 1. Cheap 2. Battery lasts all day 3. Cheap 4. Battery lasts all day. I've managed to kit out quite a few schools so that they can have have a whole class on a computer at a reasonable price and use them sequentialling from one class to the next. If machines come along with batteries that last ALL day, then I wouldn't mind paying a bit more than £200 for them but NOT going to spend £600 (or anywhere close) for one and NOT going to buy them if the battery only lasts 90 mins. (I'd rather beowolf some RaspberryPis into a old 17 inch crts and personally deploy them each lesson!) Simon

Big thanks to Geoff and his team for all the help today at HackToTheFuture Simon

If going for bulb powered projectors then its Epson unless you've some specific requirement that can't be met by them or you absolutely have to go for "cheapest" option Simon

I must be being really dim today I'll come back tomorrow Simon

yes But unsure how to implement. Standard install (on the teacher laptop) puts the Dropbox folder within My Documents or Documents on Win7. I suppose I could move it somewhere else and put a shortcut to it instead with MyDocs. But it would be tricky to replace it with one pointing to the server in school - actually that bits easy - the tricky part is making sure that if they are not in school then the shorcut would have to revert to pointing to the local laptop files. Simon

Doesn't work (for anyone in the world I believe ) and Dropbox doesn't follow ie settings (we have a LEA pac file that does IE Switching) mm - maybe your not an inveterate dropbox user (or maybe your a very advanced one !) but this makes no sense to me - "launching shortcuts"??? - loading viai web???? Simon

I love Dropbox but still got an issue on Teacher laptops that come in and out of school. The school dropbox is on a staff only share on the server/ I have there laptops set for no proxy so when they are working at home, ther dropbox folder syncs normally but for access in schools, I have to have a shortcut to the dropbox folder on the server and I explain that in school, that is how they are to access dropbox. Very simple to explain, obviously very hard to remember and do and everyone gets in a right muddle. Now option 1 - replace teaching brain with geek brain would work but not practical 2. Need a method of auto switching (or a competing product thats just as easy to use and can handle proxies better) Anybody managed to do this ? regards Simon

Mind you works a lot better when you remember to take the "copy" out of the line So the install.bat approach works - I wonder what the straight WPKG issue is? Simon

Changed the wpkg to cmd='%COMSPEC% /C copy "R:\Abacus Original\Abacus 1 Pupil\install.bat"' /> and that fails as well Simon

Why is this simple install cmd failing cmd='%COMSPEC% /C copy "R:\Abacus Original\Abacus 1 Pupil\Install Abacus Pupil Activity 1 Original.lnk" "%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Desktop\Install Abacus Pupil Activity 1 Original.lnk" /y' /> Is it the path length (client is Win7 Pro BTW) If I manuall type in copy "R:\Abacus Original\Abacus 1 Pupil\Install Abacus Pupil Activity 1 Original.lnk" "%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Desktop\Install Abacus Pupil Activity 1 Original.lnk" Then it works fine I'm going to make an install.bat file and run that but its just frustrating when you've pooped in on a Saturday to have daft thinks like this happen! Simon

Went back to teachers house today to install BackBlaze and it said it was backing up 25GB of photos! So I reset Explorer to show all files inc hidden and voila - there they all were - they'd just simply been hidden! So the malaware wasn't as evil as I thought Simon

Well, I've also seen a prototype ATX type switch at Preston RaspberryJam and I know the RaspberryPi community would love a little challenge like this Simon

Saved me having to rotate the smartboard Simon

PDF page on screen was in vertical landscape - they just pressend the old Shift-Alt-Arrow to display it horizontally for the pupils to view ! Nice one Simon

Anyone got a copy of this tool I can use on a W2k3 server? regards Simon

I've heard loose talk about RaspberryPi being the lowest low-cost thin client Seen it running Win7 in fact but no idea what the server platform was Simon