mthomas08

Seems to be the big discussion on every site, several articles etc etc I think Vettel is a great, if he isn't then Webber is a bigger waste of space? he is blowing him away with ease and everything seems to be going Vettels way. Even with being on different tyres or no kers still manages it. Of course there is always going to be doubters till he has a proven team mate like Alonso and Lewis. It's going to be an interesting year for Kimi though in 2014 There is no doubting though that the RBR and the team is just superb, would have been nice to see Webbers car have more reliability though.

I am with X-13 on this one, Facebook is a social network website which allows users to upload anything or link to anything and broadcast it in groups and to friends. Personally I think anyone under 16 shouldn't have a Facebook account and anyone 16+ should be mature enough to click the "report this". This is why parents go down the line of setting up their own filtering and prevent their kids for using sites like Facebook/Youtube. The only solution Facebook can provide is that it authorises every picture, video and link which means users will have to wait for their uploaded content. If Facebook needs to take more responsibility for the content it holds, then surely users (especially parents and schools) should take more responsibility in what children have access to.

Current job only a few staff - mainly PE and every classroom here has a PC. Previous job and the partner school yes - every teacher and even some support staff.

Yes but its all edited in such a way to go for ratings. My previous job had camera's on site - was something to do with the Prom on C4. It concentrated on a few students who wanted to either be asked or get a yes when asking some one else, instead of the overall Prom. So it stuck on the "love" story especially one girl who was put in to tears. It didn't go in to the full setup or even running of the Prom even though it was supposed to. Educating Schools is a great show but it has more of the troubled students or the "big" stories instead of the overall students. And it is recorded over a year isn't it? I do enjoy it though and does show what some students can be like. Doesn't show the IT guys fixing or simply "switching on" the equipment though. Doesn't show anything "not" working (at least from what I have seen). I certainly don't remember SIMs having zero issues

We still have some old Celerons here, work fine with windows 7. Not the fastest machines about but they do feel faster with 2GB ram in them and with 7 instead of XP. New machines or ones in the last few years do seem to age better but perhaps that's because 7 didn't do a vista and require more meat?

I based mine on the day to day maintenance. We support, repair and maintain the netbooks which are owned by the students and purchased through the school. Most of our equipment is old and as mentioned before 5-10 years old.

A technician vacancy is now available, don't be afraid to send off your CVs. ICT Technician If you need any specific details don't be afraid to PM me.

Me, 2 techs. 500 PCs 1000 student netbooks BUT I think the tech to PC ratio is wrong to use, Projectors/Printers/Services offered. Our tech to PC ratio is impressive but then I add the above and... we provide SLG for homework/timetables, RealSmart for interactive learning, Parent Pay for cashless catering, Biometrics which links to Cashless catering/printing, projectors in every classroom, IWBs in most classes, we also prep the halls/areas for presentations. SLG and Parent Pay is accessed by parents as well so another username/password for them too. Most of our PCs are also 5-10+ years old and not looked after..

Still miss the best F1 team, only thing was missing was Murray but he did show his face at times. Had Crofty on practices who certainly is good enough for the races, Brundle/David and the Lee (who I find hot for some reason). David/Eddie and Jake who not only gave us a good taste of comedy but you had the driver, team boss and a normal fan. And by normal I call a guy who probably hasn't watched it like its his religion... like some of us.. Cant blame them for heading to Sky, big pay rises, live F1 every race, spend more time doing the job they enjoy. it would be like me being offered the same job, better money and better working conditions.. E.g less teachers ands tudents

Shirt, trousers and waist coat (Suit). Till I get a new full suit - shiny grey

As I say and always say, when choosing your VLE test it and play with it. Moodle is simple to install, work on getting your MIS data imported and ask a few teachers to create some content. Content creation and not necessarily functions is the biggest difference between the likes of Frog and Moodle. I work in a school with moodle and staff always say it feels too clunky and basic, development of anything is slow (because we have to do it). Where as with purchased VLEs like Frog you will find the functions are being developed by them and updated to your server. With moodle each function you add your self is something you have to do and test and play with, there are times you will have issues. We gave up here trying to setup our own SIMs connection so we purchased it for 2K a year (now its no longer a free VLE). Secure Gateway is also a function that doesn't come with Moodle. Content creation was tested by my old place with moodle and Frog, Frog won the majority vote of teachers. I my self spent my time doing content and working out how to do more "fancy" things instead of reading through pages and pages just to add a single function. Calendars on Frog are also much better looking compared to Moodle, but moodle has the small calendar which I prefer to be available (at the time Frog didn't have this). Drag and drop is more on the development side of Frog yet moodle is not. Linking it to your network drives is not a walk in the park as we discovered and it also took time linking it to our AD system. Frog took 1/2 day to get their system linked to our MIS, AD and start to create content with all the functions available. I would if I was you get a full list of the functions available in Frog and most of them do not require configuring and others require a little bit of time compared to the pages of configuring needed for a function in Moodle. Both schools I have worked at have at some stage walked away from Moodle and each time its been for the exact same reasons. It has been almost a year since I really dealt with Frog last but there are functions that are not available in moodle and vice versa, unless moodle was just expecting me to jump through hoops to find them.

Semi +1 on this, my previous job Games/Social networking wasn't allowed regardless. Can sit there all day claiming the kids can make the "right choice" all day but simple fact is they are kids, they wont make good choices and at the end of the day if you really allowed social networking I would recommend getting the parents to sign a form confirming they are okay with it. A lot of kids in my family and they are good kids but they do need protecting, I know some of their parents wouldn't want them accessing facebook at school. Games though I would do the break times only on them or block. Too many issues during classes I find. At my current job things are a little bit less blocked but only by a bit, again social networking is blocked - the child protection person made sure of this(thank god). At both jobs there has been incidents regarding police, CPD and social networking. And at each case it didn't involve school PCs, I even remember a parent going ballistic because she thought her child was accessing them on site. Turns out the child was accessing them from another source and again Police was involved in this. Both schools have setup classes to teach kids about social networking and the discussions from the kids is not shocking. They admit to not actually caring or worrying about it, even after the classes. Some of them admit that it makes them think more but they still admit they will add anyone without consideration. I always use food as an example of kids making decisions, they will eat what they want to eat given the choice. Regardless of their diet if its healthy or not they will simply eat what they want. Big difference between "Want" and "Need".

I wouldn't mind a button top right or even by the windows button... would have saved a long time in my life!

90 percent!—view Wi-Fi as essential to their educational success Sorry but this is an L O L moment, just like if you asked them can they live without their mobile phone and they will say no. BUT if they actually had no choice but to live without out I can promise you they will still be alive and kicking. You are asking kids who still are trying to figure out their way in life, still trying to work out what they want to do when they leave school. This popped up in a recent meeting "ask the kids what they want". I have yet to meet any parents who live by that, give them what they want for dinner, lunch and breakfast. Let them go out till they want to come home, let them stay in bed till they want to get up. How many kids say they hate school and don't want to go in - I hear a lot of them... /rant over

According to the realsmart guy Google is the best thing since sliced bread and vanilla networks are a waste of space. Almost fell out with the guy with his your system is crap attitude. I thought salesmans were bad but they had already got us signed up. According to him you can scrap your email system just like that (even though we have biometrics, printers, cashless catering all tied in to our AD/Email). The deputy head could see I was biting my lip, I hope the next realsmart guy who comes down isn't the same one otherwise we may come to blows. Train us on your product not telling me I need to scrap a 3rd of my system.

OUCH! That makes it much worse.... I guess Google/Microsoft is the only reliable way to go?

This is why if I did go cloud I go to a company like Google which is still raking in the money. It does show the risk of going cloud, so many companies are providing this service but just how many of them are going to be around in 5 years time. I am sure though that some very pro cloud and anti everything else person will be quick to turn around that maybe this only effects about 2 users across the globe.

Plus it will need checking, maintaining and as you said others will start using it and wanting it all the time. So either way regardless of what product the school chooses it is more work and more cost. And the government will probably not even provide the additional funding for it. So Schools will have to cough up, IT Support will be even more used and how often will these exams expect an IT Support staff member to sit in on these exams? We know regardless of device there is always the chance of issues and exams can't suffer problems and must be smooth.

Don't know why anyones complaining, they will just do all this on their own ipads, it will all be fine with no issues. In my experience there has yet to be a single online exam/test which has gone smoothly.

Lenovo x131e, 13 inch screens £315 asking price though roughly. You may still be able to find some Zoostorms or ASUS cost roughly around £200.

Yep! I use a USB drive, my old one packed up and I couldn't be bothered to replace it. With the USB one I know its portable. As for work PCs I have not been including optical drives on student PCs because everything is network installations but I have included them for staff PCs because they still use CDs which have all sorts on them. Discs though I am sure will be around for a while and its just another war mongering comment about "this is dead, that's dead" they may have an iPad or a tablet but sitting in the corner being used for work is a laptop with a used optical drive. Hey Ho I am sure I am wrong and in a few years time (like many said a few years back) it will all be gone and we will all be using tablets, fast internet connection, all cloud based and will never use a PC/laptop/optical drives.......................

My view and it is only my view with my life experience. I believe schools should block access to these sites like I have done at both of my jobs. There has been incidents that have caused serious problems and I won't go in to detail. Those children were protected by the filtering setup. The parents pre filtering had complained and if those serious matters occurred before the filtering then jobs could have been lost because those students would have been doing it on site. Training only goes so far because there are parents who do not care or think it will not happen to them. Do you allow any random stranger to walk on site ? Is that safe? There is a difference between locking children in cages protecting them and allowing to go out late alone in the worst possible areas. As for teaching the students again that only goes so far they are kids they still add their enemies on Facebook etc so they know what's being said about them. That is the same excuse from every student I have had in my office when a teacher wanted to do some checking. At the end of the day there will be those students who try and bypass but you would have protected many more students who accepted the filtering. Ask your self this. How would you feel if those students going through some serious harsh times went through that AT YOUR SCHOOL. I think it's far too easy to wash responsibility and leave things open. Sooner or later the press and the government will get involved when a young child has something serious happen at a school. Are you prepared if it happens to you ? Frankly I would rather safe guard the school and the children. If adults can't use these sites properly then what hope do children have.

As others have said but I don't want the call to introduce your self, it came to a stage where I got 13 of these in one day and I wish I was joking. I don't mind the emails but I don't want spam

Few things I would add: Plan long term, there is no point getting a product if it doesn't give you what you want over the next 3-5 years. Ignore what people say in regards to planning far too ahead, I prefer a 5 year plan - IT Changes but everything has become more online based and no matter what device you use it should also work on it. Ask Staff what they want, ask departments what they have to produce online and what they want to produce. My previous school went Frog because the staff wanted to develop a lot online, we are not just simply talking "File Share" access, we are talking about SecureGateway and Interactive Learning. Now the school I work at heading up IT has just purchased RealSmart. Sadly though we also have SLG, Parents Evening and Moodle which will be shutdown once everything is on RealSmart. The cost of all this over a 3 year plan could have better spent on Frog which would have given them 95% of all the functions available on those packages and more. With Frog I would visit other schools, watch their videos and get some serious demo work. You can also gain access to their Demo platform, you should also ask them for a full function list. Its very long and impressive, something people ignore because of the cost. As others have said I wouldn't give moodle a total miss, as much as its "open" remember its only open if you actually know what you are doing and have the time. If you want to add functions those functions require you to do all the hard work even if some one else has provided instructions. E.g the SIMs link (unless you are prepared to pay for it which negates the reason of a free vle). One thing that has impressed me with Frog is their development, they have a few updates a year for Content e.g. extra functions and then more updates for fixes etc. At the end of the day it depends what you want to be spending your time on. Learning content or developing functions/supporting them etc. Either way if you spend money make sure its exactly what you want.

Biggest popular one was secure gateway, we had this setup and students/staff loved it. Also the ability to improve and edit their own sites, staff here utterly hate the way moodle is on the basic level "too clunky" are their words. I showed staff how to drag/drop and setup their sites in frog and they were shocked at how easy it was. You have to play with frog yourself to fully understand the difference, I didn't believe it till the school had got frog and even then still took me a few months.