mthomas08

Well last night I looked in to Realms (hey it's free for little bit) and a mate is going to try find the map we built up. To be honest if he finds that map I may be tempted to stick it on Realms. He found 2 worlds which worked but it isn't the main one I wanted.

For the MAT thing, it depends on your School Ofsted report, ability to survive financially, grades and intake (possibly missing something too). At the moment we are an Academy but we have such a good prospect on many levels there is no need to join a MAT or even consider it. In the event we did, I get the feeling that we wouldn't shall we say be considered as a "Taken over" School but instead perhaps be a "Leader School". Still, things change so you never know. We are considered to be one of the very good Schools in our area and our next aim is "Outstanding" while still being a "Community School". Even though our location is quite poor, our intake is maxed out every year and no sign of it stopping.

I may be tempted instead of worrying about FFXIV today..

This made me laugh, good point though It is always interesting to see the Government react in such a way "Schools are not having budgets cut", no they are getting the exact same amount of money this year when compared to last... (they are just taking on another 250 Students extra, which requires more Staff).... It's always bleak times ahead as @elsiegee40 said, we are aware of some Schools in our area that are struggling, I know one that closed just 15 mins away, some have been taken over (emergency measures)... luckily we are in a very good position on intake. We are maxed out, in fact we have almost 3 times the applicants who want to join us. Our HT and BM are working hard to squeeze budgets, it's also why we are hammering on printing (among a lot) because if you are spending 50K a year, that's a lot of money over 3 Years just on printing. When it comes to any new ideas/tech, the case has to be hard fought. It's no longer "Look at this, buy it in 24 hours". To be fair to the Government, Schools have not exactly been careful with spending (that I have seen).

That's completely understandable. I will ask a few people I know who did it before, if they would be interested in this. Much appreciated either way.

You asked for it. How about an additional MineCraft server which has the ability to switch between the modes (for those of us.. okay me..) that love the "Building" element of MineCraft. With potentially a few mods e.g. Fast Build, ability to import in to a world and copy/paste from that one to the main world and possibly down the line with some "RPG" Mods. I guess what I am asking is perhaps a server that I can build till my heart has stopped. That it becomes so big and huge (if popular too) it has the ability to become an RPG World, which of course I can continue to develop. I'm probably barking up the wrong tree or wishing for too much......

With all these "Would you like a server of": Can I put through something that I have only slightly mentioned mainly because of my previous MineCraft times

Does that include Teachers?

We do, with assistance from the caretakers and sometimes electrician. Once done, we like it to look professional and never need touching again.

Used Frog many a year ago, our idea was putting all work online. Lesson plans for cover staff, materials and coursework for Students. All visible at home, on their mobile, on their equipment, in IT lessons - effectively any where. Similar how Universities present their courses, you still have your seminars and day to day lessons but you are physically able to access a lot online. Without needing to carry a ton of books etc. To be honest, only works if everyone or most are on board. If you have too many that are not with it, then it will effectively become a waste of money. When I was working on Frog at a School, the majority of those above Supported and could see the benefit. Then again the HT at the time was very Pro IT, very pro Online, Reports, giving parents access to it all and because we had a lot of PCs than most Schools it was a primary focus. Until new management come along who already made their opinion before they arrived. Our setup currently is mainly Moodle, although not developed no where near as I would hope. We simply don't have that kind of time plus we have gone to other companies for other services. So we have Moodle, SLG, RealSmart and another company for our School Website. There is also a few external services for content related stuff. I personally would like a single setup like Frog for all the above because of the amount everything costs (which is far more than Frog's biggest package). We are looking at cutbacks with RealSmart but the others will stay. SLG - for Homework and Parent Access Moodle for online work materials (we also have revision stuff). Actually can't stress how much is actually stored online and it does get used. ReaSmart for online portfolios External Access to email and their data through various means. Still at the end of the day if you have Staff that don't really see the benefit even after showing them, you could potentially waste their time (been there done that). Then again when you go for something ten steps back, you may find people are sick of it (again I have experience in this). I for one am a believer in having access to pretty much everything no matter where I am and I cant stress the nightmare that RealSmart, SLG and the content providers are not SSO.

Thimon has it spot on. We've been through the exact same thing, we don't do it and have the support from HT/LM on this. If they push for it, ask for it in writing confirming they require you to do something effectively illegal. There is a reason after all why YouTube doesn't allow downloading.

Apology and 100K, not bad really is it...... justice has been served... oh wait.. If this was really about justice, shouldn't Clarkson have been given community service or less? For that amount of money perhaps he can call me an English Beep and punch me in the face.

They have admitted it was rushed, they were not given a good amount of time to get it all done. Even admitted that they struggled. If they do more (which they are open to doing) they will want to take their time with it. Still in my view it was better than season 8 onwards and felt like X-Files but I feel they need more time/budget for better episodes and certainly more than 6. I'd like to see at least 10-15 if we don't get a full season for a good amount of story. Yet to see the last episode.

We don't do auto deploy in anyway, when updates are released we plan around half terms. This allows us to make sure all Staff PCs are turned on and ready for it. Also allows us to make sure it's updated correctly. One tip I recommend is holding back before you install recent updates, usually there are fixes and in the times we've done the updates we have encountered problems. Our last update had to be sorted out by Capita because the one before that caused Solus clients to lose connection to the server. Although SIMs.net was fine, Solus on the other hand had to be manually sorted out with a Capita Script before we can run the actual update (which was needed for the Data Manager). Document everything, be prepared to allow Capita remote access to the server and make sure Solus is allowed in the firewall (unless you turn it off).

We are going to have a look at this. Although I don't think it will fix our problems due to the inconsistency. Our machines are imaged and are effectively the same yet one Student will be fine, another will have issues where it crashes (requires restart) and another will be alright then have problems. Some Students are having to reboot a dozen times. We have tried multiple PC suites from OKAY machines to really good spec equipment. Doesn't help when you get the ridiculous generic response from the creator or company "Must be your network". We got a response that they will ask a School to send us a type up on installing etc. As I said it's an inconsistent issue but because every Students App is not the same we think this has a major factor. It doesn't even give useful error messages when problems occur. Students have also resized images which has fixed some crash problems. Again the crashes don't tell you why it happens..

It's a brilliant film. Bit like Ant Man I was expecting ... a low budget.. not a profit maker but pays for it self kind of movie but I enjoyed both. The humour is spot on what I love, the action is very good for a low budget movie and the direction of the movie was great. This will be a movie where the sequel is a must have for me. Think of Die Hard with a bit less explosions and machine guns, sexually frustrated all day and a super hero (or anti hero w/e they are called).

Sorry for the bump but we are experiencing inconsistent issues with this. What alternative products are available or do we have to use this?

We want them to be able to print, scan to email etc but not photocopy. It's okay we got the Toshiba reps arriving today for a catch up so I will give them a list of our next stage. Our aim is to cut back printing without impeding too much. After all why does a Student need to photocopy more than 1. Good thing about our HT and my LM they both agree that enough is enough, it's time to cut back from spending 10's thousands that we currently are on mentality, attitude and laziness (printing). They are also setting examples by not printing a lot.

This, as a senior technician you would expect much more independency. You'd think they could deal with all day to day stuff minus shall we say major decision making, planning and budgets. Their views would much more fit in line with what the Line Manger/Network Manager wants in regards to moving forward and understands the users needs much more. Add the usual - Experience and knowledge. A senior technician to me is some one not far off being a Network Manager or perhaps more "Network Officer" over night.

I too am keeping an eye on this, sooner or later we will have to look at our storage solution. I'm open to cloud but it has to work, has to be as accessible as our current internal storage regarding permissions and most of all not take forever to upload/download data. Some Students especially Art/Film and some other depts. have large amount of storage requirements (like 1-5GB) and some Staff can have even more. When a file can be up to 1GB, I can't allow a Student to spend have the lesson downloading/uploading.

For those using Papercut, have you managed to turn off Student Photocopying so they can't use this facility?

Been MFDs here a while but only really used it effectively in the last 18 months. Papercut > Toshiba Printers (supported by them but purchased by us) all linked with Biometrics cashless catering system. We also have two big reception printers that can do "a lot" and are cheaper. We've tightened the limits and now with the HT willing to hammer down the costs, we are doing a lot of "mentality" changes.

or another great day for cloud storage users?

Some of our warranty repairs go abroad, not once have we had to pay for it. Something I completely refuse to do. There was an issue in regards to a Lenovo warranty that required a charge with an externally involved company, this has since been resolved. I think they are pulling a fast one but just my view. Perhaps threaten to never purchase from them again or send their products back holding back any invoices? - just a thought. Something we have done.

We have two separate Wi-Fi setups, one being on the domain and the other is more open direct to the internet. The open one still requires the School password, we allow any device because they still need to authenticate to gain internet access. We've got visitor accounts available which can easily be reset and provided when needed. Students know this Wi-Fi password and it's completely VLAN off the grid to the point you can't see anything but the Internet.