GrumbleDook

Some of you who follow SharePoint new on twitter may have seen the sad news that Dave Coleman @davecoleman146 has passed away. His wife announced that he passed away yesterday morning. He had been battling with a long term illness for some time, but it is still a shock to family and friends. Although a lurker on EduGeek he presented to EG members on a regular basis at events at the Microsoft Offices in Reading, as well as SharePoint events across the country. Many will know him from SharePointEduTech or from Twynham school, and he will be sorely missed by family and friends.

Another vote for Martine Mere. It has changed and improved over the years but has always been a favourite place for relaxing for me.

You could always gatecrash the HwbMeets ... or have a chat with @RichPowell about an ANME event in Wales. Let me know when you are having one and if I'm in the area I would like to pop in ... taking my work hat off, of course.

Moss finally learns what happens when you try to email the fire brigade instead of ringing 999

BCS offers a non-vendor specific recognition that you work in the IT sector, providing access to information and expertise that may help you in your professional standing (including local branches who hold regular meetings and demos), as well as a framework for *you* to match yourself against, including the opportunity to achieve Chartered Status due to knowledge and expertise in a range of Areas within the IT sector. in short, it is a club that could help but you have to do some of the leg work, but it is an internationally recognised club that still has a lot of weight, even if it isn't for your particular area or job. It is not a union, not a social body (though some local branches are good for that) or a guarantee of a job.

When putting LP+ in, put next to it Hwb+ too (to cover our Welsh members)

EduGeek members had spent too long listening to Right Said Fred by Bernard Cribbins, and decided that 'taking the roof off' was *still* not going to get that rack up the stairs. or It all started with an innocent search for Prometheus and ended up with Zeus shouting, "Well, if you lot still want to play with fire!" or Voldemort's attempts to break a Fidelius curse to find the secret EG headquarters goes terribly wrong and another piece of his soul is broken away ... leading to him spending the next 11 years wandering the land as a sales rep for an MFD firm selling evergreen contracts! (I wonder who they could be).

No, they should ensure that the skill set and knowledge is available. You are presuming that a) every schools works on AD b) every school has a tech team on site and c) that understanding authentication and understanding the configuration complexities of federation are the same.

Going *very* OT on this for a sec (and not aimed specifically at you but the general EG membership) ... and it is worth having a search for other rants and frustrates posts by both me and @Ephelyon ... BCS will take pretty much anyone as a member. It doesn't mean that they recognise your role as part of the 'profession', that they actively work to align your roles against any standards, or even provide advice / guidance / expertise for that matter. You mention working in education to BCS and you *will get pushed towards BCS Academy ... and they want nothing whatsoever to do with us. They are only interested in pushing coding into schools and talking to a handful of teachers. Getting onto the SIGs for Learning and Development gives you a slightly better position, but that is very centred around professional CPD (i.e. L&D in companies as part of their CPD programmes) and HE/FE. The one time BCS Academy did open their eyes a bit it was only to push towards the membership team ... basically passing the buck. The membership team were interested in seeing if something could be done so a few of use tried to generate some interest from the Admins, Mods and members here ... and were met with complete apathy!!!!!!! And let's face it, if folk here can't be bothered then why on earth are BCS going to bother in return. So, until EG members start hammering on BCS' door there were be little out there to get them to support us in a professional capacity. The work that Rich and co at ANME could provide a bit of a groundswell ... but that will take time to build up. At the moment we are still in the same position. No-one wants to actively engage with us as there is a strong does of apathy around and no-one here will get off their backsides to join in the work. And before anyone says that they expressed an interest in helping ... 5 people does not make a movement. Yes, it is something I am passionate about ... yes, I have tried to do stuff before but it died due to apathy and no, I am not going to directly get involved again on it as I don't have time, my day job does not directly give me a role looking after IT folk in schools and I have other work and life priorities. If anyone does want to get off their backsides and get involved then @Ephelyon and @RichPowell are good folk to start with.

Erm, why is it a must that they have that? Heck, if I want to incorporate OpenDirectory into an open LDAP service why do I need have the skills myself when someone else might have them that I can either bring in or employ? The same applies for any tech. If you are talking about a SysAdmin then you are closer to the the truth ... but in Education all our skillets are very stretched and sometimes having a little knowledge means we try things but they can go *very* wrong.

Shaun was regretting having that third helping of Puffin Vindaloo. or As much as Shaun liked a challenge when trying to update the site before BETT, Chris' suggestion of an Internet Cafe to use seemed a bit lacking. or Shaun finally realised that the retirement of Russdev and GrumbleDook from EduGeek Admindom had left too much time on their hands. or After using military security tactics, Chris was starting to think the extreme lengths being used stop the latest beta of EduGeek being seen was a bit much, but Shaun said it was Top Secret.

After the huge cost hike of OU I've been looking at options and this seems a good one for me. Also looking at the stuff Prof. Heppell is putting together too.

And I had a response back yesterday evening. If you have any queries give the tech folk at Scholastic a call. Details are on the website, should be on the CD too. Thanks to Chris at Scholastic for chasing this for me.

Published on YouTube with a specific contract and accessed in accordance with YouTube T&Cs, not via a free to air broadcaster. Not originally owned by the student so no rights to media shift. Exception rights to use the track may be fine but it fails on ensuring right to use from original source.

They got back to me, have seen the thread and will feed it to their tech folk for comment. It was mentioned about chatting to the tech folk via phone or email will help you, and from the above post it seems that it does.

Remember that you *have* to have completed due diligence when sourcing any works ... and if you are not sure where it came from then you *cannot* use it.

Left a note, contact is on the road at the moment but I will check in a day or two.

I'll send them a note.

erm ... what if home *is* my workplace?

As the access is provided via a box running IIS you have a certain responsibility to ensure that it is suitably hardened, that only the relevant ports are made available and that you have a healthy patch / release management regime. This is true of any web service though, but especially important as you assess the risk to data which is being served / accessed via this machine. The same is true of VLEs, CMIS ePortal, etc ...

If you don't want to work on strength with regards to press-ups then work on stamina. Find 2 decently heavy tins of food and lay on your back, and start doing bench presses. Focus on quality of movement and quantity of reps rather than sheer weight. You will find that this adds tone and definition early on, making it easier to move up weight loads and reducing the risk of injuries through bad habits. You will be amazed what you can find round your house to help you get fit. Unfortunately ... I haven't been able to find the TARDIS which will give me more time in each day to actually so stuff!

If users make stupid requests then you educate them, you don't stop them from making requests. If it ends up being vexatious, then you work with folk like tutors to deal with individuals. Once you have 'trained' the really difficult ones it gets so much easier. Things that help are Service Lists, FAQs, know-how guides (written by the children is a really good idea for this) and even basic video guides. All designed to make things run smoother, reduce the number of calls you get, increase customer satisfaction and keep everyone happy.

Time to turn on Parallels and see what it performs like under VM.

I always used to have it open to all. In the early 00s it was an invaluable way of tracking which students were time wasting, keeping a record of which internet accounts had been auto-locked and how frequently (3rd strike and they had to get permission from their tutor for it to be re-enabled and if they didn't come back in 5 days we would take it to the tutor / head of year anyway!), additional things that students ended training or advice on when they started the school, etc ... I would go with it. Also look at things like Digital Leader Network - Collaborative blogging between schools for seeing how students can make a difference with IT.

To be honest, I've been pretty lucky in the schools where I have worked. Heck, the first school I worked in even had ISO9000 ... documentation madness!