mthomas08

Can't give advice on FIreFly but if you are looking at Frog now I wouldn't waste my time. DOn't get me wrong, what you can do with it etc (assuming its even better now etc) is a good idea BUT.. it takes time to get working and setup. Takes time to get all the content created/online ready. And with its high price tag (back in my day it was) I wouldn't bother. By the time you have it setup I assume most of this would be blown over. EduLink is a nice option and doesn't take long to setup but it is quite limited compared to Frog but it is only £2K a year. This is the perfect time to have a system like Frog but only if you have it setup. Still, I see schools realising the true potential of online learning now being forced to use it. Depends exactly what you want. We have multiple systems which has caused a problem for some students/parents. SOmething like Frog should have everything all linked through a single platform. We have G Suite, Office 365, EduLink, Moodle VLE, home access to drives, email (exchange) plus MyMaths, Kerboodle, Seneca.. I think thats everything. All requiring username/passwords and mostly all different (because we also save money).

Had that same discussion with my previous line manager. The idea was I went in my own small office away from my team.. so I didn't get disturbed for the day to day tasks. Great idea! But how on earth do I keep an eye on my team and what is going on? Have daily briefings, get them to log everything etc.. unrealistic at the time due to the work load we faced. My current LM is within touching distance of the HT and finance which makes perfect sense. The majority of the admin team are located near reception again makes sense. There is a logical and professional reason some people are located in certain areas. Like us in IT, we are right by the servers.... no point sticking attendance here or reception.. On another note regarding C19. I made a calendar notification.. apparently by now C19 should be gone and all our lives are back to normal because the virus was just another flu. How wrong were they... I think its important to remind those individuals the seriousness of it all. We all got warned (far worse compared to Ebola). In my life I don't remember seeing the WHO constantly updating us almost on a daily basis of how serious it was (all the way back in JAN). As always, stay safe, take it serious and don't treat the situation like Trump did and call it a hoax (or just another flu).

Well for the first two days of our shutdown we were in, then the HT said everyone not directly critical to the students learning are to stay home. So like 2 staff on site only to cover the 20 students. Even my whole team are home. We've been doing email checking etc and 99% of the tasks done remotely. That was all a few weeks ago. I really don't understand how staff can be allowed on site when the nation is in lock down. I want to go to work and get things done but come on.. people are dying in the hundreds and the NHS is tight. Those staff are being pushed in 10+ shifts and are putting their lives at risk. Yes the majority of deaths are those with other health problems but even the healthy ones are dying or being put in to intensive care. People should not be going to work unless you are working seriously critical to protecting lives (no offence guys but we're not in this bracket). There are quite a few of my family members that have a high risk factor including my Mrs. We have rarely left our property just for a 5 minute walk. Luckily enough for us our route takes us no where near anyone or anywhere busy. Stay home, stay safe. Sooner or later the Gov may take more drastic actions and frankly I'd have zero sympathy for people being fined/arrested. This is serious, this is not a joke. Stay home. Not even your boss should nbe telling you to go to work.

I went in on Monday and was going to setup a rota. The HT/SBM decided that only those pivotal to the learning of students need to be there. Which is exactly how it should be. There is no need for us to be on site unless you suspect the system would fail. With under 25 kids turning up a day there should not be any problems. We are officially on lock down people and none of us should be going to work unless we are keeping the NHS > crucial employees at work.

Agreed. I've still questioned the over reliance on Cloud systems (I even hate the term because it indicates that its a magical fairy in the sky). Our firewall system is Orbital Net and again, no issues in 3 years. EduLink which is housed externally hasn't gone down once I think since we connected up back in June 2019. The only issues has been our SIMs server.... and not hardware related either.... but that's a whole different problem.

Reading through these posts, I'm glad we're with Orbital Net. Barely any downtime in the 3 years we've been with them, only Lightspeed issues we have are down to licenses not automatically renewing (which they are trying to get LS to sort out). We get our McAfee from the usual LEA and our domain name (mainly due to the work required). We don't have to fight for weeks to get ports locked/opened, got a backup connection and we save money. They are local too.

I'd say our school size is similar and our annual full cost is slightly higher. We don't lease the printers. I am currently reviewing our printer costs etc. The cost per print for us has gone up in the last 5-6 years (I've collected all the Toshiba increases). And its quite normal to have an engineer on site on a weekly basis.

Understandable but they are taking their time on this cloud system. Meanwhile, after about 3-4 years we are still suffering with the same memory issues with sims. We are at the point that Capita have us doing the same things again for about the 3rd or 4th time. And their response is "we can't do any more until you get them done"... with no concern over the impact of our staff... Wouldn't surprise me if the delay has anything to do with how little fuss it would be to switch MIS from one to another when they all go cloud based.

This is what I did. Checked every classroom, had a nice look at anything that can be improved with little to no cost. Think improving the state of the cables or putting staff PCs under desks (if its what they prefer). What doesn't work? What needs improving? what's unreliable? I'd also suggest avoiding doing one building/dept at a time. Try and make a single improvement to each area so they all know something is being done - word will fast get round. We also scrapped the help desk and just used an email group. It really helps that I have two techies that get jobs done very very quickly.

It can write back the SMS message? What about messages in EduLink? I didn't know this. It was one of the reasons why our attendance office still uses InTouch. Can it be done in mass?

Oh I agreed, although not on the part of EduLinkOne pushing the SIMs market. They've simple picked a popular.. I mean perhaps... just a well known MIS to link to (like they all do). I'd be surprised if there was plenty of schools signing up to SIMs just because of EduLink. We just signed up to the renewal but it is on my list to discuss with my LM. It's a big thing in changing MIS and that's the problem. Teachers tell everyone that its great, but they are not the ones doing the reports or deal with the complex tasks. Even our attendance person that suffers these stupid memory errors can still be positive..

Surprised these companies were quick to say phishing. I thought it was quite obvious an error on Capitas part, especially those that said they contacted Capita direct. (agreed that EduLinkOne shouldn't be put in the same sentence as SIMs - EduLink one consistently works and was deployed very smoothly for us and I can't praise it enough).

Several of our staff got it.

It's quite a lot of data to keep live, and even though we have an impressive broadband capacity.. EduLink probably have limits in place to keep their own system stable. Considering how many schools can potentially sync data throughout the day. It only becomes an issue when parents need to use parents evening in the last 24/48 hours before the event. Most parents get signed up quickly. I wouldn't complain if we could edit the email address in EduLink, although we can send the account details directly because you can see the username/password. Perhaps even the ability to sync specific data would help. Still I can't recommend this product enough and the issues are very small ones. We've been pushing out emails to parents since September and it's very easy to do.

Well we signed up last year in September. Barely any complaints, our Parents love the system and we have around 80% of them logged on. Our previous system SLG wasn’t popular at all. The negatives: Most are related to our data side and some are quite picky which is always a good thing in my book. • We don’t have all the parents email addresses/personal details etc. • Occasional password resetting • Not everyone is aware of the system, even though we’ve constantly advertised it to staff, students & parents Actual EduLink issues - Low screen resolutions can cause the Parents Evening print/export button to overlap the timetable button (at the bottom) – our solution for staff is to zoom out - Not a replacement for SIMs Attendance messaging. We didn’t expect this part - SIMs actually receives messages from parents which can be quickly recorded to the child’s records (I didn’t actually know this until Attendance office showed me) - It takes a while to manually update from SIMs due to the size of our database, plus EduLink probably have safeguards to limit their own bandwidth usage. - Lack of forgotten password ability for parents. This really has been a complete success for us (mentioned in another thread). The best portal I've ever had to deal with.

We get new Smartboards around £800 and we rely on the software. All our old ones that are 10-15 years old are slowly falling over. Some classrooms we managed to persuade them to take standard whiteboards.

Recently went on some updated GDPR training. He was quite clear that you shouldn't be doing it and the words" just incase" he clearly stated no don't do it. How does your DPO deal with SARs? Has the DPO reported to the Governors/HT over personal Gmail accounts? We had a SAR not long ago and the pile of work was ridiculous but had to be done. Emails had to be copied, paper copies made, our MIS data exported (including scanned/documents) and making sure every external site we used was included. All that information had to be double checked to make sure it didn't include personal details of anyone else. We even got told during the training that we should be redacting more information than what we do. Every person in this seminar failed the task.... including me and our DPO. We should be redacting MUCH more and only the directly related data should be allowed.

Looks like my usual plan of hold fire continues to be useful. We plan to do our updates in the final two days we are open. No staff on site which allows us to get everything done smoothly. Hopefully everything is released by the 18th.

Does your current MIS work? Ours consistently crashes with memory issues when editing attendance and student data. This issue has been going on for 3+ years, I've got 100s of emails and dozens of calls logged regarding it. We've upgraded our server OS/SQL in that time (fresh install) and still the same issues. Capita get back to me every few weeks with a new idea that never pans out. There is no guarantee that changing to SIMs will just 'work' for you and I'd hold fire for SIMs 8. SIMs is very expensive and not exactly a smooth run.

Such a shame really, I read a basic review claiming episode 1 was quite good but heard nothing but bad on how it ended at episode 3. There is an American version coming out and the trailer seems pretty good. A touch of walking dead style on survival with War of the Worlds element. I have high hopes on this one.

We upgraded our system (got a cheaper cost by threatening to go elsewhere which was a lot less £). Consistently running slow, so they altered the sync update several times. At the moment we are struggling to contact them regarding one of our kit which seems to be failing often over the last 18 months (even after that got upgraded). I'm happy to spend the money on a system that works and is reliable... when we get to this situation again of needing to upgrade.. my advice would be to go else where because this isn't good enough. They also support our biometric equipment on our printers which is now becoming hard to find replacements for... Often tell our SBM that companies like this which has us bent over should be avoided. We have system printers tied to the bio and connects up to catering and Parent Pay. And very few companies seem to be willing to deal with linking it all together.

+ EduLink Can't praise it enough. Smoothest transition I've ever had. We now have over 1000 parents signed on and half using the app.

Funny enough, yes. It was sheer luck that I found out it was bewing discontinued. One person insisted all schools should know about it.. Only received my first email the other day. Anyway. EduLinkOne is what we have purchased and I can't praise it enough. -Simple and easy system (looks good too) -Demo available -Can link up your data to show what a live demo looks like -Provides a lot of controls -Works on any device and apps available I looked at the SIMs teacher Apps a while ago and I wasn't impressed. On non touch screen devices it became a pain to use. So I just gave up with it (our PE dept wasn't impressed either). We are now at the stage with EduLinkOne that Parents Evening is working fine. Parents want to use it. Our next steps involve attendance and more data to parents and using the email/message system instead of SMS texts.

Plus what happens when a parent asks for all the data regarding their child. Does the school know if those staff have 20+ year old personal data held in those areas? What happens when they leave? Setting up a school G Suite isn't that hard, takes a little bit of time but worth it. The sync isn't that hard either to pull from AD. All free.

This. We currently have a 200MB broadband connection and it sits on average of 100MB and peaks around 130-140MB. This used to be 50MB and hit the cap almost every lesson. Still save 95% on site and install locally. Our network is 1GB and when it was 100MB things would grind to a halt far too often. I would settle for nothing less than 1GB if we went Cloud. What I would do though is consider a single year or certain staff on a Cloud system setup and review how things go. Possible the year 7s because in the 1st year they will have the least amount of work saved and smallest files.