kathabell

Network Manager required at Saint Aidan's Church of England High School. Full details on the school website. St Aidan's - Vacancies

Looking at it from the outside (as an "associate" member of staff) I see the best teachers have a genuine calling to the profession and can have even the most troublesome year9 students eating out of their hands in class; because their lessons are engaging, interesting but primarily because they have a good relationship with the students. They are not their "friend", but their "teacher" - someone they have respect for. Two members of our IT team work with students; I organise a "stage team" to support school events/assemblies/productions and my colleague supports DofE, goes on international trips etc. We feel we get the best arrangement here; we work with good kids and enjoy what we do, without any of the marking, parents' evenings and social-worker aspects which our teaching colleagues deal with. If teaching is calling to you, then like most of my colleagues you will deal with the c**p because working with the students makes it all worthwhile. But there are alternative roles in school if you want a compromise. However there is no hiding the fact that teaching is a well-paid profession, whereas IT support in schools is not!

Another vote for FormatFactory used with our student media club and also in tech support. Realiable, effective and free .

Thanks for the "heads up", just added 150 copies to our school MDM

Do you have the option to add a new one? If you're not seeing existing profiles, are you logged in at the right admin level?

Configuration\Security Profile\Security Configuration Table (pick relevant profile name & Update pen) half way down page - Pre-shared Key...

Done

We've had to tailor iPads for LAC but we purchased them so we treated them as "school owned iPads", supervised them and used MDM - as well as using other native iPad options for restricting specific websites (in one case we were asked to prevent any access to social networking sites). We gave advice regarding filtering of internet to carers, as we do not use the external publishing option of Lightspeed MDM. Two of the students have now left us - aged 16. With their carers' agreement the device management and supervision was removed and the iPads returned to them "out of the box". The only issue we've had in the last 2 years was regarding internet filtering in the home, which was resolved between the carers and their ISP.

Go with 2 monitors; we use this stand from Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Universal-Monitor-Desktop-Adjustable-Screens/dp/B00HEX6TTW/ref=sr_1_1?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1479204720&sr=1-1-spons&keywords=dual+monitor+stand&psc=1 £45 and this graphics card: Asus GEforce GT730 2Gb @ £49 from BT Business Direct. We also have a couple of triple monitor setups We use a matching pair of monitors; one utilises the DVI connection and one the VGA. All our admin/support staff, Reception and SLT use dual monitors - the flexibility this setup delivers is highly valued by colleagues and many have said how much easier they find working on multiple files/applications etc. Our finance and assessment staff love the way they can drag a spreadsheet out across both screens. The stand also delivers a high level of flexibility for screen tilt and height, which is part of our "care package" for DSE purposes.

CYA and everything else; we need to be transparent in our application of the access rights and rules. Security access is based on a job role/need to have not a personal "I want" basis - that can only lead to catastrophe.

Staff have read only access to student areas; we also have a "collaborative" work area which is accessible by a yeargroup of students where staff and students can work together. For controlled assessment, students have a separate logon account/user area with no internet access and other restrictions. These accounts are unlocked when required for a CA "lesson" and locked again when the lesson is over. No access to the data contained within by staff or students in the meantime. I would point out to SLT that if they want to give extended write access across accounts, you should also implement active logging of file editing/deletion etc. - a huge demand on resources, but necessary in case of any charges regarding unauthorised access/deletion etc. It is our professional responsibility to point out the pitfalls of what they see as a simple requirement

PARS isn't too onerous to set up. We run it on a separate server to SIMS which has IIS installed, but it isn't a major load on the server. As I recall the hardest part of the installation was getting our smtp relay working so that we could mail out to parents - and that wasn't down to TASC, it was issues with our firewall. The installation instructions on their support site are fairly comprehensive and easy to follow, the TASC Wiki is also useful. We originally bought PARS via our LEA and I was very happy when we moved our support direct to TASC. It will take an hour or two, but I find their support services very helpful and their response time can be very rapid. But surely you've been given info on what PARS permissions your staff are to have and how they are hoping to use it? Which features are you going to use - registration, mailing out, txt, detentions...? I remember there was significant input from SLT on HOW they were going to use PARS! Perhaps you could ask who is going to be your contact during the hols Good luck!

5. Responsibility for the pupil record once the pupil leaves the school The school which the pupil attended until statutory school leaving age is responsible for retaining the pupil record until the pupil reaches the age of 25 years. [see the retention schedule for further information]. Extract from the IRMS Handbook We use the Link site for Governors and the IRMS handbook was included as part of the Governor training package 2016_IRMS_Toolkit for Schools_v5_Master.pdf

We use Asset Manager; all the kit has a QR key which we scan, update the website with who's borrowed it and book it back in when returned. Works well and not too time consuming.

Staff iPads are controlled by Lightspeed MDM. We have an "apps assess" group of staff (a teacher from each faculty, me and a member of SLT) who look at requested new apps and if agreeable ask for them to be added to their faculty profile. This ensures students are not asked to use a myriad of different apps for similar tasks. Faculty twitter accounts and staff-app accounts are all registered with school email ids; social networking (Pinterest, Twitter) accounts all have 2 staff members with access. Staff iPads go through a separate internet filter but are on the same ip range as the curriculum network, so they can move files across the network, access youtube etc. Student iPads are on a BYOD service, different subnet and go through a stringent student filter. The school iTunes account is used for purchasing apps, music etc. and only IT support staff have the password; staff cannot install apps or purchase in-app services without our assistance, but we do aim to respond quickly to any requests. SLT have produced a "recommended skills for iPads" which is part of teaching staff INSET, aimed at bringing a consistent level of skill to the use of iPads in the classroom. Good luck!

OK PM me your email address and I'll get our exams/assessment officer to send you a copy of our template as a sample - no point in reinventing the wheel

Is this what you'd like to do?

We use conditional formatting on our reports; depending on the grade achieved the results boxes are coloured red, amber, green or cyan (cyan = meeting aspirational target). SIMS produces them in XML format (which is often referred to by our Admin staff as "Word" because they are opened in Word). We convert them to PDF before storing them back in SIMS to ensure viewing by the parent portal is quicker.

We're running the latest version of Insight from TASC and release to parents has gone fairly smoothly. Only a month or two in and 80% of parents who are linked have logged on and accessed school reports etc. Now they are reporting absences and requesting updates to their contact details. Annual cost is £1.25 per student for us, I'm guessing this will depend on the size of your cohort. Parents like the mobile app which is costing an additional £350 per annum for a presence in the iTunes store and GooglePlay. All in all, fairly intuitive, easy to use and tailor and the tech. support from TASC is good - very prompt.

We were notified of the changes by ParentPay - about the same time as they announced their new system would no longer work with XP. Parents were emailed (by us) about the forthcoming changes and also via our Twitter feed. There are 2 useful PDFs on the login page of the ParentPay site, one of which I downloaded and "sent" as an attachment to parents. So far only one or two parents haven't ready any of this!

We have a school-wide Meru system, currently 35 APs (1020i) and a managed controller (MC1550) and I moved our contract to Virtue Technologies earlier this year. Very happy with their support and they are going to help us upgrade the service this summer.

We run Treesize Professional regularly to ascertain who-is-using-what and tackle the individuals. We offer to bulk compress photographs and/or videos and archive data to disk (CD, DVD or USB, whatever they prefer) if they wish. Inevitably with the use of iPads and increase in media/video work our requirements are climbing, but at least we are attempting to keep it to realistic proportions. In the past we have used disk quotas and if necessary would consider returning to them - but we'd prefer not to if possible.

Our curriculum year changes at the end of May, so the new timetable is currently being built. How can I restrict access to the new timetable? Staff are looking ahead to find out what their classes are, but the head wants it locked down until finalised. Our school portal is also picking up the info as it has a heartbeat with SIMS and so parents can browse ahead too... Is there any way of locking down access to the new timetable whilst maintaining access to the current one?

We migrated some of our VMware virtual servers to HyperV. We saved the VHD files and imported them onto a new HyperV host, then stopped the VMware versions and brought up the new copies for testing. Fortunately it all went smoothly and after leaving the new HyperV versions up and running for a week, we finally deleted the VMware. This is a good starting point: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/timomta/2015/06/11/how-to-convert-a-vmware-vmdk-to-hyper-v-vhd/

C: drive is for techies to install stuff that colleagues may need to run but not see or edit. Any data created in programs is directed to network shares to ensure it is backed up regularly and securely. We routinely housekeep PC hard drives and they are wiped/reconfigured as required. There is no good reason for any ordinary user to have any additional access/visibility to C: drive - this isn't their home environment, it is the workplace therefore they should understand that there are differences between the machine on their desk and their PC at home. None of our staff, including Leadership, have access to C: drive - only the IT techies. Securing the hard-drives of PCs also helps us to ensure that PCs function as colleagues expect them to when they have a lesson to teach!