GrumbleDook

Thanks for all these. I will be tweeting them out tomorrow as 'via @edugeek'

On a serious note, saying no is hard. Identifying why things have barriers and what is needed to overcome them is time consuming and you will find that the language you may use for it differs to that used by teaching staff or manglement. Identifying the effort needed to do something helps school leaders to decide if the investment is worth it ... Leadership will work with you on that ... Manglement won't. Sometimes it is about explaining priorities to others as well. No-one knows your job list as good as you, but having a general plan to show others the impact of their requests can be handy. Evidence about why you are making certain decisions the way you are is also essential. It may be due to the Law, it may be due to technical solutions, it may be simply down to the laws of Physics! Get the evidence though, and be patient.

In situations like this I like to remind people that there are standards published by the elders of the Tinterwebz and that is where I get my advice from. RFC 1925 covers most of it pretty well, but I tend to quote Fundamental Truth no 3 I tend to phrase it like this. Ok, perhaps I phrase it that way in my head ...

To be honest, a good place to visit for discussions on certification is CertForums. A number of members are admins or regulars over there and you can get a lot of advice about what is in the relevant courses too. ITIL/FITS, Prince2/Prince2AGILE, etc are really good but you have to be ready to do a lot of 'translation' into education management speak. The certificate and diploma of School Business Management was always a good one for understanding school management, and the materials are now freely available under OGL so have a look there. That will help you understand school strategy. The National Association of School Business Management is a good place to enquire as well. There are various MOOCs around on technology strategy, and someone like @wagnerk could advise more there (a resident cert jockey and OU tutor to boot). Coursera and EDx are good places to look for MOOCs.

Spotted and perfect. There will be some duplication but to me that will show the importance of some tips! Created a proper thread for it now. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/bett-2016/164053-tips4bett.html

As stated in the thread about helping at the stand ... I will be curating the #tips4bett hashtag this year (partly in memory of the late, great Dave Coleman) so feel free to add more in. Work are allowing me to do it so the tweets will be curated on my work blog and go from both mine and the work twitter accounts. I have 80 and I'll post up the link of the blog article once it is posted tomorrow (should help cut out duplications) but the more the merrier. I am presuming that if anyone responds to this thread with a tip it will be ok to tweet out. If you don't include your twitter ID I will give it out as a generic @edugeek attribution instead.

Thread hijacking, but some of the tips are good. I will be curating the #tips4bett hashtag this year (partly in memory of the late, great Dave Coleman) so feel free to add more in. Work are allowing me to do it so the tweets will be curated on my work blog and go from both mine and the work twitter account.

To be honest, I think it might be best to see if folk who go along to UKCCIS could raise it there?

A few years back BSI spotted that work on standards around this was needed. They pulled together a raft of stakeholders and tried very hard to get things moving on it it. It fell down due to a few areas. 1 - the DfE would not sponsor or fund it in any way. They allowed 1 meeting to be held in their offices, and support was from ex-Becta staff ... but the response was that if bodies and the industry thought a standard was needed then the market should pay for it. 2 - It is difficult to persuade suppliers to fund and adopt a standard if you can't show competitive edge as a result. 3 - the main direction on public outcry at the time was home use ... and we saw the fun that has been had there. There are also some very interesting legal questions that are raised about the responsibility and liabilities involved in monitoring and the supply of technologies for use by pupils / students. That needs to be fully thought through but it is hard to get the discussion on that going too.

Handsome? Aw, shucks .... Only a tiger for 1 day a year. Now people can see what I am on other days. I am a man of many talents.

Just introduced everyone at work to the pleasures of JibJab ... Macareindeer is the video of choice. Thought seeing @Domino in Santa's Twerkshop could be amusing.

Merry Christmas from your Elf'n'Safety rep.

The photo is a data object which can be used to identify someone. When stored it has the DPA applied to it. Consent must be given to store and process all data. If permission for use as part of school information broadcasting (internal or external) has not been given then you can't use it. If permission has been given but the us on display screens is not covered then you can't use it. If permission has been given for internal use only then the boundary is what is internal use ... does being seen by 3rd parties (visitors, from the road, etc.) count as outside of this? Err on the side of caution, get permission and anyone with a court order, CLA or former CLA should be considered off limits unless you are explicitly told otherwise.

Hugs will be had.

I'll be down on Thursday, Friday and Saturday this year. When not in meetings, I will be on C300 (where Learning Possibilities is on the Microsoft Village) I will also be on the hunt on Friday, if anyone can spot me. #spotthetiger

Being honest, I would suggest a small group of you form a closed group on EduGeek and share all your stuff through there. once you have discussed for a month or two you should be able to produce a generic version with a few variations as options based on available technology or on specific targeted areas (e.g. literacy, numeracy, higher than average EAL/ESOL, etc.) and so on. It is best to do it as a small group to get a draft out for more generally consumption and feedback. Any more than 6-8 contributors and it becomes a committee. It is a really worthwhile thing to do, to collaborate on something like this, and it is a wonderful feeling to see others make use of it, adapt it, invest their own time into it. Speak to your schools about what you are doing as well, as this would count as peer review of your work and strategies. Persuade them to let the generic version go out under a Creative Commons licence with EduGeek as the official controller (standard attribution, non-commercial, international licence, perhaps). Unfortunately, you are unlikely to be able to make it share-alike as people will need to adapt it for their school and their school's strategy, but encouraging regular reviews, feedback and contributions will be a good thing.

We would be lost without our TIVO as a PVR and we cannot get even close to the Virgin speeds here for a similar price ... and I need it for work. Generally TIVO works, but the other services (iPlayer, netflix, etc) are unusable ...

I tend to think that being a technician is a state of mind, not a qualification. I can remember a friend at Becta came down to talk through some of the Technical and Function Specification stuff and one of the local NMs /IT Techs said afterwards that he was a good bloke and they were surprised that Becta let technicians out ... said Becta bod has a PhD and a tonne of published papers, including a lot of work for JISC ... I'm telling you folks ... it is a state of mind! On a slightly different note, it surprised me to see this come out when I have been chasing with BCS for a bit about the position of IT Professionals in Education. I am working with a number of others about a Position Statement for BCS on it and this feeds in very nicely. To some extent it compares to ICTTech at IET and gives a good career path from apprentice, to IT Tech, to Manager, to Chartered status, to C-level ... where it needs work is to ensure that National Occupational Standards tie in correctly (a problem raised at the BCS Learning and Development Special Interest Group already, acknowledged by City & Guilds and everyone needs The Tech Company and relevant folk at BCS to sit down and get it sorted). It should be an interesting 18 months for anyone in the BCS, as there are a lot of changes happening, and some good folk have come in to help make changes. I would recommend folk join and, where possible, not only go for RITTech but to make sure they are full members and working towards Chartered Status. the RITTech is a good start, but for many member here you are beyond that and should be recognised as such. Those with the old CITP are in the lucky place of not having to renew it ... those of us working on it now will have to follow the example of other Chartered Institutes ... and prove that we have still got what it takes.

Socks received and worn yesterday. Toastie!!!

The EduGeek socks are still in the EduGeek archive ... sealed in the envelope ... not to be opened ... even in the event of needing to keep my feet warm during a zombie atack!

I went from school to LA to private company, but it was to a company mainly working in Education. The salary and perks are good, the hours can be long (partly because I commute 2 days a week to London ... anything from 2 1/2 hours to 5 hours each way) but the work is challenging and exciting. Job security is good for me due the projects I am working on but I am lucky in that way. Would I go back to public sector? Part of me says yes ... in a heartbeat ... but I know it would be a bad move for me, unless it was back into Senior Leadership in the right school / academy group. Even then I would end up longing to get back to where I am now so doubt I would stay long.

Surely some string would work, as long as it is kept taut? (Remember this phrase when someone in the school says something like, "But I can get fast broadband at home in next to no time ... why does it take so long and cost so much?")

"If you have to ask what 98% of our time is taken up by then you are in that 98%!"

There was a requirement to deliver online reporting and the expectation was that it was via the VLE. One poorly written phrase in a speech made a mountain of work on this, but did provide a lot of impetus for change ... unfortunately it was often poorly thought through and done only to tick a box as part of a funding programme. Outstanding schools tend to use them well, but that is more of a mindset that a statutory thing.

Have a peek at this from the archives of Becta. [ARCHIVED CONTENT] Becta Schools An additional or two to your list though (and now updated) ... User Education (with or without ClueBat!) Lunch (when not in front of a computer catching up on EG threads or dropping crumbs in the keyboard of the laptop you are fixing and then blaming the teacher for the state of it!) Wall demolishing (usually done after the user education session where your head is being applied with force to a wall in frustration) Wall Demolishing (done as *part* of the user education session where the user's head is being applied with force to a wall in retribution!)