Gibson335

A teacher friend of mine said something very similar to this in his retirement speech at the end of his last term. I know several other teachers who think along the same lines...so it's not just outsiders who view it this way.

We threatened NS with court action if they continued to send mails as we deemed it 'harrassment'. It did the trick.

Have had Cubase running on 20 machines with no issue since September...getting it installed properly, however, now that was a mare. A cursory attempt at providing a network build by them, but absolute pants in reality. Would never want to do it again.

Yes, most IT folk are just too frail to play the drums ;-)

There does not appear to be a single common denominator other than Server 2012. We saw this prior to R2, and I know that R2 hasn't improved the situation elsewhere. What I also know is that rolling back to Server 2008R2 sees the problem go away. If it is in any way hardware related, then it would appear to be how Server 2012 reacts to that hardware as opposed to the hardware itself...ball back in Microsoft's court I think.

Fav axemen are: Steve Lukather, Larry Carlton, Guthrie Govan, Mike Slamer, plus the usual speed-freaks... Had a Gibson SG Les Paul, now a Strat and a 30-year-old Westone.

As others have said, great tool, many features we don't use, but those we do use are excellent. We happen to have power management anyway, and won't get rid of PaperCut, and there are bits and pieces we prefer to use existing methods for, but overall if the price doesn't prevent you, I'd go for it.

Also, if you ever want to VLAN then you can colour-code your patch cables for a visual ID (rather than use labels). Increases your possibilities for a very reasonable cost, the humble patch panel.

We have some ancient cabling done that way, but I would always go for a patch panel...much easier when testing for issues...much easier for managing the cab. Not heard of any cabling companies who don't use them as a rule...but then did they quote for them, were they on the order?

Hmm...our staff folders go when we close down their accounts...normally within a half term of them leaving. When students leave their folders get deleted along with their accounts...again within half a term. Essentially, the only fall back is the summer EOY backups.

For general staff, mail, for more critical a mail following briefing announcement. I got told by a teacher that they couldn't be expected to read the mails because they were too busy...the same teacher who, incidentally, somehow found time to send out endless mails advertising things they had for sale!! Some will not bother to reads the mails at all, some will scan and miss the crucial part, some will read, delete and dismiss from their minds entirely, some will read and ask something either already covered or entirely missing the point...a few, if you're lucky, will read, comprehend, file away in memory banks and react accordingly. Great one recently: been building up to some changes, and did a countdown reminder: x...will be starting Wednesday...x will be starting tomorrow...x...starts TODAY!! and then later that day had a mail to say 'Sorry, hadn't realised you meant today, and am not quite prepared...'

Nope - no Veam here.

One of the great aspects of virtualisation is: need a new server, well no need to source, order, receive, set up, configure, install Windows, etc...just knock one up in half an hour...in fact it'd probably take longer to Win update it than to create it. You need 2 servers though if you don't want to create a single point of failure.

Ours was just a data server, just student data...rolled back to 2008R2 and it's been fine.

I think supporting things we don't necessarily agree with is just part of the job - happens all the time.

Isn't this really part of the problem - school leadership should be demanding that the need for specialist technology is proven before it goes any further, yet in many circumstances they are the worst offenders.

And well-managed BYOD brings with it its own inherent set of problems. Which is no reason not to do it, but it can be a legal minefield. We have limited BYOD (Internet access only) and are likely to expand that, but at the same time trying to manage the potential for increased support demands. I happen to think that of all the current technological delights we have to select from, BYOD will be the one we veer towards most in the next few years. It sort of feels as if a move to a mixed fleet of devices, such as desktops, laptops, tablets and pads, is almost inevitable, and also expected of us. But it's easy to say, and not so easy to afford, not when you still have to continue a cycle of replacement.

The crux of it, I feel, is whether these devices are instead of or in addition to the existing provision. We know here that our staff would wish to retain our main ICT Rooms, that areas such as Design and Music would need to because of their software demands, and that they still like the idea of retaining the smaller clusters dotted around. And let's not forget the staff laptops, which very few would be willing to give up in exchange for a pad (a pad as well would be nice, though, eh?). So if their wishes are heeded, then any other provision of devices would largely be in addition to. So then you have to ask where the funding comes from - even if it's only shared with parents. Then there's the potential knock-on effect on staffing - are the current support numbers enough? Oh, and of course, if you happen not to have a site-wide wireless facility, there's that hefty expense to take into consideration as well. Different schools have different priorities, so none of this is a one-size-fits-all, and your starting point when it comes to facilities and finances is very much a leading factor.

Thing about forums is you only hear the views of those who can be bothered to use the forum. A straw poll here amongst teachers produced a result that was far less enthusiastic.

Engagement is the key here (in the article).

Effective classroom management...is fine in the hands of some, not so fine in the hands of others, and just awful in the hands of rather too many for my liking. What kind of classroom management is it when you get a mail from a teacher asking you to use Impero to check out what student x is doing on their computer, when they are in that same room with student x supposedly 'managing' the classroom? It's the fear of confrontation, I'm afraid.

I'd go along with this - can't recommend them highly enough.

My old school was at the forefront of the MS 'Anytime Anywhere Learning' scheme, with laptops (partly paid for by parents) bought in for one year group as a trial...it was an unmitigated disaster, with all kids of parental/school disputes, queues on a Monday morning to have fixed what they broke over the weekend, etc, etc. Few would dispute 1:1 learning as an ideal, but we don't live in an ideal world. As for the 'pad' approach. Most of the whitepaper reports I've seen included all the wrong questions. Basically, they were pushing the notion that they had introduced pads, there was a positive response, ergo pads were the way forward. What they actually did was introduce IT into classrooms that previously had no IT, therefore the positive reaction was almost inevitable. What I've never seen is a review that introduced laptops or tablets where none existed, took them away, replaced them with pads, and then asked for opinions.

If you moved a year ago and it's only just started to happen, then I don't think it will be the same problem. If it is, it usually sorts itself out after a while because the files get saved in the new version as people use them. I think there may be a fix from Microsoft, but no longer have any links I'm afraid. We mostly advised staff just to retry (which often worked) or save as a slightly different name - after which those files were fine.