GrumbleDook

Opt-out is not suitable and I would recommend you read the thread linked earlier for a full breakdown of the previously had discussion ... there are some important concepts in there about it. Was the production one run by the school or by another organisation? If run by the school then you are still in teh same position ... opt-in is needed ... and the media company involved may have already done this for you (I would hope so) ... so it is down to selling the photographs ... which is a copyright question of the media company. If it was someone else who did the production then you need to check they did a permission slip and what was in it. If it doesn't say that the photos could be sold, etc. then you have an issue with how the data is being processed, etc. I would check with the media company involved no matter what and see what they have / haven't done. Be aware that just because the company has said that have done something, you need evidence to prove it. Just taking someone's word that 'it is all ok, you can do what you want' is not an acceptable excuse. Your Designated Safeguarding Lead should be aware of what is going on as well, so keep them in the loop.

I'll be there all week. Friday will be face paint Friday again and off to the Teachmeet in the evening. Looks like we are using AirBNB this time for accommodation ...

Hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas. A late finish to present wrapping, etc. last night and and early start for the eldest meant little sleep, a sore knee and relishing that fact that Wifey and Daughter are having a sleepover at the in-laws (we have Christmas lunch / evening there anyway), so me and toddler son get to have a boys night. As we have only just got back in from the in-laws, that means a drink of warm milk to help him nod off and probably another episode of ST:DS9 for me (recently started from the beginning) before I doze off too. Hoping he sleeps in tomorrow and I can have a let start. Night all ... see you in Jan!

Dancing Rodentia

I hadn't responded yesterday, but it is a definite no from me ... in a school doing an install today so not getting back until late, and a mountain of work to get covered off before the break. :-(

12th December - The Polar Express : £3.99

I used to be on the first train out. Then the meetings generally got held in Swansea (20 mins outside) so ended up driving instead.

We are tied in to it through our development cycle and probably don't use a lot of the tools we could do. I'd be tempted to also look at something like the free Project templates from BrightWork that can be used on O365 Sites ... If you are focusing on task management / document management then that could be a good way, or if you are focusing on issue / requirement management then Jira / Confluence is a good way ... like all tools that are powerful, you can spend ages tweaking things ... have a really good watch of the videos on the Atlassian site to pick up some standard methods of implementation.

All depends on what your requirements are for them? Both pretty good but I hate using Confluence as a wiki ... pretty annoying to format so I tend to do a lot of my documentation offline first then cut and paste in ... works out well as I need Word versions to convert in to PDFs anyway ... but still annoying. Are there any particular areas you are looking at? What for?

@Ephelyon and I have been looking at the breadth and depth of jobs that come up, and it looks like the common factor on low pay is lack of strategic responsibility ... but it all depends on how schools phrased that responsibility. Some will phrase it as Leadership, some as Management, some as Strategic ... and they can mean exactly the same or wildly different things. That is the frustrating part. We have tried to look at where adherence to the NJC scales happens, and find that the skill sets ask for don't meet some of the interpretations of JDs and Person Specs ... then again, after the problems with single status and so on, is that surprising. What is surprising is the number of academies that are opting to stay with the LA scales when they convert ... for those who have been involved as Governors, you will know how much fun changing the support staff scales can be! Unfortunately my general workload over the last 2 years has not allowed me to finish of the investigation (still cataloging things are they are found though) but I hope to do this this next year, possibly with the support of a professional body (not BCS ... they honestly don't give a crap about NMs and techies in schools, in spite of the SFIA+ framework ... and unless some brave soul wants to spend a long tie trying to engage with them on behalf of EG, this is unlikely to change). In short, quite a lot of jobs out there, the grade and salary do not always reflect what is being asked for but people are still applying ... would people say it is an employer's market right now? Looks that way.

I might struggle now as I might have to be on-site at a school to help with some installations. :-( I love being back out working with school, but was looking forward to this get together too.

Don't forget to make use of things like http://www.creativecommons.org

For a certain group of members ... "Nah, my boots will pass RMS's inspection. No need to stay up late to sort them."

*phone rings* 7th level of Hell, duty imp speaking!

They will probably have some cracking deals and I will groan having already got them. Same as when I see the cheaper versions of the DVDs / Blu-rays in Tesco ... but I used to do the same when building my own rigs, groaning each time I saw a graphics card drop in price or a board/chip package 50% what I paid.

I will be running this again this year, so any updates anyone can think of for this year will be appreciated.

Traveling in and out of London will be dead easy, I'm sure I could even do it each day if needed!

I'll try and go to something (meal, theatre, whiskey/whisky night) but I have to play it by ear every year now ... in case I get grabbed to go to an evening event. Friday is a no go as I parade the tiger face to a bunch of folk in the evening (TeachMeet BETT and then the after party) and Saturday is straight home for me nowadays.

A few things to remember ... You need to see if there is anything in your AUP about use of work email for personal reasons ... if they are not meant to you use it for anything other than work then they need to be clear about why they want the emails. It was their *work* email for whilst they were employed by the school. Yes, they are likely to have picked up things that could be useful elsewhere, but that is not why it was there. Their work email will include a range of emails that should only be accessible by employees of the school. As they are no longer employees then they are not allowed accessed to everything. This include data and information that may be personal and even sensitive. To allow these emails to be accessed by someone no longer at the school could be construed as a breach of the DPA. In reality ... yes, there are *lots* of reasons why they want their emails back ... from support in their application for UPS3 in their new school, access to connections they made whilst at the school, access to resources or simply logins for systems they registered for using their old school address. They should not have direct access to it all though. An application should be made to the SLT for information, detailing what is requested. You may have to consider it a subject access request (if the emails are relevant to them ... e.g. the login details of resource sites that they personally subscribed to, etc). Be reasonable about it, but be sensible about the work otherwise you could spend ages on it. Try to use this as a way of updating policies so staff are clearly informed that upon tendering their resignation it is their responsibility to request to transfer relevant, anonymised data for UPS applications, to change any subscriptions they have using their school email address and to ensure any personal emails are forwarded on. Hope this helps.

When people say how long they have been in the business it reminds me of the 3Dead Trolls in a Baggie sketch about Internet Helpdesks ... where the veteran has been there for 6 months!

Once again we see that EduGeek continue to offer valued CPD to all members. The IT Professionals' Life Line has helped coordinate this unique opportunity for IT support staff to meet and talk through a range of scenarios in a round table event, under Chatham House rules. Included in this session will be noted Online Safety evangelists, leading women in the sector, an award winning IT Service Management trainer and a range of experts who have transitioned from engineering and programming roles into Education support. (If folk can suggest their own contribution into the sales blurb for this we could make this a running blurb that could be used for other events ... things like "over 70 years of providing IT support between them" and so on. What do folk think?)

Anyone still struggling to be granted the time off? I am good at generating CPD blurb on this sort of thing, if needed.

Will be there.

I'll stick a tweet out about it later ...

And the number of folk that used to moan about the extra cost of RBCs because they had relisience and redundancy built-in ...