GrumbleDook

There are always strange conversations at BETT ... like the time a Saudi Prince wanted to buy EduGeek ... If Chris could get it all translated!

Hippy Bathday!!!!! And here's to many more.

It almost feels like a 'Where are they now?' sort of conversation really.

Had fun over the last few days reading through the archives .... The nativity, how NGs deal with a pet troll, etc ... And the number of discussions that were had 15 years ago that seem to appear on here!

Just found out on the FaceBook group for ICT & Computing Teachers, as well as some tweets, that Ian Lynch from The Learning Machine / INGOTS has sadly passed away. For those who hadn't come across Ian or The Learning Machine, he was a real treasure to work with and talk to. A vision for changing the way we view assessment of ICT and I hope the legacy of The Learning Machine goes from strength to strength. My condolences to his family and friends, and all schools who have been working with him. For a personal memory I go back to uk.education.schools-IT and the circular arguments about Linux, RiscOS and Windows (wonder where the rest of them are now, eh @SpuffMonkey ?)... or one Naace conference trying to work out who would stay up latest between him and Tony Parkin.

A drop of this baby is nice ... The Old Bushmills Distillery ? handcrafting Bushmills since 1608

And if the bottle as been too near the lights on the optics shelf then it is also reasonable to add a small amount of ice to cool and release different flavours. Different whisky responds differently to water so it can be trial and error, and it varies from person to person, and even from day to day. I like a dash in most Oban, but never in Highland Park ... Then again, I also prefer Old Bushmills to many of the above.

If you are an LA school then unless there is magic pot at the LA (as part of school extensions, etc) then you are unlikely to have any extra external money. At that point you are in the same situation as all the academy and free schools ... applying for additional funds is an internal thing and you have to justify the spend to SLT. Your IT should be based on a model of sustainability. This means that everything has a life expectancy and should be replaced at some point ... whether due to risk of hardware failure, lack of support or warranties or simply the need for different / improved functionality. This applies to all assets, including your infrastructure. If you are running at CAT3 then you can justify the upgrade. If you are running at CAT5e, then unless you need to guarantee gig to the desk or are having serious issues, then the cabling may not need much work. Fibre runs between cabs is the usual improvement that is needed, often to improve the design of the network and add resiliency as well as speed improvements. In the present financial situation though ... you might find that it is a choice between this and the combine cost of replacing those 2 ageing servers, the refurb of 2 ICT suites and that training you wanted ...

The way it is usually discussed, the further up the chain you go in the Civil Service, is that the high the rung in the ladder the more open you are for actions to be questioned, pressure to be put on you by any party your are member or any group that you may be involved in that wants to use you as a lobbying point. This has been, and still is, routinely broken for some areas (including perks rounds the Arts) but it is a heck of a lot more transparent than it used to be. Not being involved with any groups is a way of protecting you, your position and the people you serve within the Civil Service.

To be honest it depends on the structure of the trust. If you are a single trust with Academies that operate within that trust and adhere to a central entry in the ICO registrar, then the test under the DP principles will be based around whether there is a need to use the data. If there are collaborations between the schools, at staff and learner level, then the data is being processes appropriately but it should be reviewed on a regular basis. If you are a Multi-Academy trust where you are individual entities who operate collectively, then there are more hoops to jump through and then yes, the introduction of central staff to deal with certain things is correct. Of course, if in doubt then the ICO helpline can provide advice on this. There are ways of locking down O365 to prevent the address book and people picker seeing as much, or publicising they can see as much ... and then you have transport rules to control who can send emails to the various accounts ... a lot of configuration but doable.

The problem with this is if it is created outside of school hours, for the purpose of your employment, and you choose not to use the employee provided device and use your own device (as a means of getting round the employee owning it) then it will fail when contested. It is a horrible, grey area and unless you nail it in the contract of employment you can spend ages arguing over it at court, or in arbitration. As teachers, they are contracted to work a specified number of hours a year as 'directed hours'. During that time there are allocations for planning and preparation. If staff choose not to use their directed hours for the directed work (i.e. the PPA time is spent sat in the staff room having a cuppa as it also just looked at as a free period) then that teacher is choosing to complete the work in their own time ... but it is still working for the school and the school own the IPR to what is created. At this point, you get into long discussions about proving people did or didn't work when expected, looking at competency, time management, whether there was significant instruction from direct line-manager as well as SLT, etc. Things like the TES premium resources muddy it further (though a good idea to reimburse those who create darned good resources). There are staff that work solely during the holidays on additional resources which they then sell but allow the school to use at no cost. They do this by creating the resource, never using in the lessons until it has been uploaded to their designated sales / sharing portal and then they download from there to use. This is a grey area again, but most schools view it as acceptable as they get to use the resources anyway. As long as the member of staff allows the resource to still be used if they leave then that is fine, but it gets murky again when it comes to adaption of resources ... this is where Creative Commons licences work best. Leicester City have gone one better though. They have gone down the OER route to start with. OER Schools | DigiLit Leicester has more info. So, back to what the OP asked. Short answer is that it would generally belong to the school, but it really depends on the contract of employment and anything else needs legal advice.

And the package has landed ... and settled in bed, fast asleep. 5 hectic days getting to know him, introducing him and J, making a few more changes to how we had already planned to adapt ... He will crawl if he has to, but had never really done it before this weekend. Now crawls really fast, but he has basically bypassed the crawling bit and decided to pull himself up and walk around the room hanging on to things so we are now rethinking a few things!

Perhaps I am in the minority of ex-forces folk but I look at Tough Mudder, shrug my shoulders and laugh ... remembering CFTs in the rain, tabbing on exercise and even the dreaded exercise final fling in basic ... when you usually drank mud (mainly because it tasted better than coffee/tea). I used to do similar events prior to the army too ... and miss then greatly. To be honest, the goals are fantastic and the money raised is always a winner. Well done to those doing them, or planning to.

She has come out with a few classics ... "I can't carry him up the stairs as he will be too heavy, but am I allowed to see how far I can throw him?" (to Social Worker) "Of course, I will give Mummy and Daddy lots of help with R ... but not with nappies. Nappies smell. Mine never did but I am sure R will have smelly ones. Maybe even worse than Daddy's shoes!" Almost makes me think of

The process is a lot better than it used to be, partly due to recent changes in legislation / funding but the cynic might also say that it happens quicker as councils need to get children off the books asap as it costs more money when they are in care! I've just set up a private group for adoptive and prospective adoptive parents if anyone is interested in joining. Please note that some information on there might be sensitive and not for the faint hearted, depending on what people feel like sharing. J is a lovely girl who is 5 1/4 and who has been with us for 2 3/4 years. She is so excited it is unbelievable ... She has been quite involved in the whole process ... and even before she was aware of what was going on she was asking if she could have a daughter as she wanted a sister and Mummy can't grow babies in her tummy. We pointed out that if she had a daughter that would make Mummy a Granny, and she isn't allowed to have a baby until she is at least 21, or maybe even 30!! We then agreed that we would go and talk with our friends who help us find her and we would see if we can find a baby .. but it could be a boy or a girl, we just don't know.

That is what bungee cords are for. Connect the 2 darlings together so that as they run away from each other they bounce back. :-)

Brilliant news on the new job. Hope to catch you around.

Appreciate that, and appreciate all the advice you have given so far. Virtually no chance of me staying late on my next few visits to Swansea now though!

Some of you may have seen from my FaceBook status last week but My Better half and I have been approved to adopt again, and matched against a lovely little 9-month old boy. We will be meeting him at the end of this week and he will be a full time resident of the Sheppard House not long after. A big thank you to those who have already given congratulations, and those who I have prodded for advice in recent months as well as for when we took on our first child. First time parent for the 2nd time!!!

The only way this works is if There is an agreed whitelist of sites (I wonder if a charge ... erm ... I mean tax could be levied against those sites?) There is a total ban on encryption to stop people trying to bypass this whitelist (ooooohhhhh ... that one has been covered already!!!) The language used is carefully controlled (I *knew* learning Newspeak would come in handy one day ... it was either that or Esperanto!) There is no acknowledged advancement in technology used within the UK and we have to use state agreed equipment, provided by a nationalised manufacturer (Quick ... everyone!!! Get to the Raspberry Pi factory to protect it from a national takeover!) I wish I was only half joking with some of these things.

Can't see that this has been posted anywhere but spotted SysmanMK's tweet on it. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/schools-get-4-million-boost-from-copyright-deals Don't get me wrong, it is real progress to centralise and simplify this ... and this is *not* teacher bashing ... but this has been sold as saving teachers from time-consuming paperwork. Not that many teachers I know did the paperwork on this ... it was done by the LA and then heads agreed it, or by Academy groups doing the same. I look forward to further simple information that can be shared with staff in schools, but there was already a lot of information out there and so many staff ignoring it, and lots of SLT turning a blind eye. I would rather hope that things like this were being used to stress about the education of staff in schools about copyright ... *all* staff.

The policy works in lots of different ways and each school is likely to do it differently. Work on the following principles though. 1 - All desktop and general use equipment (including projectors, cameras, etc) are purchased with a life expectancy. This is likely to be at least the warranty period but you may opt to add in an extra year as you roughly know how many machines that are out of warranty are likely to be unusable within that year. You can opt to have spare parts or spare devices to use in the case of failure. Some kit may have an expected failure rate of 10% in the first year outside of warranty but others might have 25% ... 2 - All servers are purchased with a life expectancy. Follow point 1 for most of this but remember that some systems cannot afford to be down whilst you do out of warranty repairs. 3 - Network infrastructure does have a life expectancy. Your network kit may be based on warranty or it may be based on how long the device will be supported in general. Cabling also has a life expectancy and speak you the cabling engineers (or manufacturers of the relevant parts / cable) for this. 4 - All this information should be in your asset register. 5 - Having a refresh policy allows you to do like for like comparisons when done like above, but your refresh policy should also consider changes in technology and views should be taken whether the same functionality can be obtained via different setups instead of just repeating what you already have. Physical to Virtual Servers is one example, desktop to mobile devices is another. Don't forget to include *all* your costs ... including time to plan and migrate as well as any changes to time for support (proactive and reactive support).

We are not bankrupt because we still have lines of available credit and the debt we do have we are servicing ... it is debatable whether we have sufficient assets to cover the existing debt (plus interest) but theoretically we do have enough to keep some folk happy ... It really is that simple. As soon as someone calls in our debt or we stop making payments then we would be bankrupt.

There are several reasons why you don't get a change / revision control with many public docs from the Gov't ... ranging from that standard method of only using version/review control for internal consumption might be not to do it for *all* docs in a particular section of a department (reducing the chances of something going out with it in by accident), that the documents are amended so frequently that it becomes an administrative overhead (at that point they usually refer you to where you can get the present list of x instead of having in the document ... but that takes time to build up) or simply that they want you to re-read the whole document again. Only a cynic would say that it is so that you don't know what else has changed. Politicians and Civil Servants would never do that.

Use SharePoint Learning Kit and build the questions into a SCORM file using something like Udutu