GrumbleDook

I've been off WoW since the little one turned up late summer ... keep thinking I'll get time to get back into it but it never happens. Subscription now lapsed, haven't purchased Mists yet ... heck, I haven't even upgraded to FM2013!!! Save me ... someone save me!

Be aware that with non-Apple MDM once you assign the serial to a device you can't retrieve that licence to re-use elsewhere, but you can do if you use Apple's own solution.

There is some research into this and I would refer folk at this point to NAACE and MIRANDANET as places for this. There will be some talks around this at BETT so I'll keep an eye out for anything that might be handy for folks looking into things, but remember that most research is a) aimed at other academics, b) focuses on the educational benefits / change rather than the techie side of things and c) is like reading Proust at times! ... a lot of stuff, in a strange language (at times) but there are some good nuggets in there!

The community has had merchandise from very early on ... and people (including me) keep asking for more. The thing we have to be careful of is equating purchasing merchandise to the ability to be a good tech / nm / geek ... after all, there is a lot of Ferrari merchandise out there that people buy ... it doesn't mean that they would make a good F1 driver.

And yet to others they can. Have a look at the work by Fraser Spiers for a starting point. As with any significant change to how a school operates the iPads are not the only thing which will have had an affect, so it is often difficult to say that x technology has made the difference. The closest you can say is that x technology has contributed to the difference, either directly via the specific use or indirectly by facilitating change in other areas of the school (removing printing, forcing greater use of online resources, etc). This applies to *all* technology ... not just iPads or other tablet devices. I would be interested to see what others think about the SAMR model when looking at introducing new tech / changing tech.

If you want to register your home address then you put yourself down as a consultant / independent. If you are saying you work at a school, they want to know which school.

If using non-work purchased / allocated devices to access work emails then you can specify some security / protection settings to then. For example, with an iOS device specify that it must have a minimum of an 8 character alpha-numeric passphrase (and not just a 4 digit passcode), that the cover unlock feature is turned off (if you lift the cover you *still* have to enter the passphrase), that documents saved on the device are not synced with any cloud solution (eg iCloud / dropbox) unless specifically provided / approved by the school, that it automatically wipes after x number of failed attempts to access the device (a feature often not enabled with people who share their device with toddlers / children as a distraction tool ... but that should be dealt with in the next one) and that the device is only ever used by the member of staff (as they are not multi-user devices!) Similar breakdowns can be given for other devices but when looking at the range of windows, iOS, BB, android and other devices it is a shame there is not a single place where you can go to find all these ... or if there is I'd be interested to see it.

If it was in my neck of the woods I would probably go for it, if nothing else because the Outwood Grange lot are a pretty good bunch and tend to have their head screwed on. I went up to visit the original school a few years back and it was working out pretty well ... even though the Head had had to make some major culls on staff and resources.

I've mentioned his work before but have a look at the research done by Dr Don Passey (Don Passey, Educational Research, Lancaster University) as he has looked at the various ways that cost savings are achieved when using technology. You could also look at articles from EG members for Microsoft who have looked at cost savings when using Sharepoint. The principles are the same ... it just takes someone to sit down and plan carefully.

As a starting point for an ICT Director of a small trust it is not too bad ... you just need to have a clause in there to cater for expansion and managing of increasingly large teams. Remember that you will be dealing with a wide range of things, have to have a good grasp of procurement / business processes / etc and and be prepared to delegate.

This is a combination of staff organisational and technical policy (Principle 7 of DPA). If you have an organisational procedure then it *has* to be followed. Organisational and technical policies and procedures are developed hand in hand so it is not up to staff to pick and mix. As part of your school's risk assessment for information management you have a) chosen where you will host emails and associated data, b) have chosen the methods of authentication and c) have prepared your operational / organisational policies and procedures. Any change to this means you have to complete a new risk assessment. This would be too costly for the school to do for each member of staff so the school takes the position that *all* staff have to operate inside the existing rules. It is not just DPA you have to consider but FoIA too ... at this point, should a FoI request come in and you are aware that staff have been emailing things to a private address then you have to ask those members of staff to divulge any and all emails to the school related to the request. Remember that this is where the big argument is presently going on (still) between DfE and ICO. The amount of work this creates for those within the school is unreasonable. The legislation (DPA) basically says you need to know and control where the data is. The amount of control will vary from school to school (depending on cloud hosting, managed hosting via LA / RBC, locally hosted, etc) but you pretty much have not control over a private account.

For those who might not read his blog Fraser Speirs has put up an interesting post about what the refresh plans for his school are, and how they are making the choices. Fraser Speirs - Blog - Refresh: ThePlatform

Try asking parents if they include children in the photos they upload to FaceBook, or if they use iPhoto with PhotoStream (which has already tagged their children via facial recognition within iPhoto), or if they use location tagging on their mobile phones when taking pics of their children in the park, etc. If they are going to be extremely careful about data management when it comes to their children then you could always, as a school, offer to run eSafety sessions to raise awareness of what other data they may be allowing into the wild. It is not to say that they shouldn't use the above, just that they should be aware of issues and concerns and deal with things appropriately. This tends to work for me.

When I was doing security and store detective work I officially finished an hour after the stores closed ... mainly to double check that the staff were only taking home the stuff they purchased, had bagged up and signed for (part of the staff discount meant you could buy x amount each week but could only take it home on Christmas Eve and all purchases were logged). There are few things worse than having to go into the staff room and ask for each person to come out to collect their bags and having to ask them if there is anything that shouldn't be in there. No matter how much you become friends with other staff ... in that line of work you still end up having to be Mr Nasty at times. Still, at least I was lucky enough never to have to do an Xmas duty whilst in the forces, but being an LA escalation point for the RBC over the break always filled me with dread about shat could go wrong (but rarely did ... thankfully)! Then again ... there was a very interesting Xmas a few years back with a certain irritating poster (to me, at least) who was trying to use EG as another launchpad to continue a vendetta against some folk in CEOP ... interesting calls on Xmas day and Boxing day threatening legals, etc ... a lot of bluster and annoyance.

Is this for wordpress.com? Adverts?

Have a read on ALARP for a better understanding.

There is also a reasonable challenge to the school policy on BYOD (esp if they have their own connection) in that because the schools allows / facilitates / develops the curriculum to make use of teh device, should anything happen (accessing harmful materials, cyberbullying) then the school has a responsibility to have taken all reasonable actions to ensure they are not Negligent to the risk of these happening. There have been some interesting discussions about this aspect online in the past.

The missing one is Bob!

And a special merry Christmas to all those fellow first-time parents!

Hope everyone has a good one ... lots of cheer with family, friends, or even just on your own ... and remember that you are never on your own when you have EduGeek!!!

Presently hunting for a tiger onesie ... purely to make my daughter happy ... honest!

To be fair, most RBC type connections (when put in) were done with the approach of only needing to removed them when you are upgrading to an improved service / technology. This was mainly down to the central approach from the Gov't (including cross-party groups previously working in this area) and it was how funding was delivered. Councils can't keep huge swathes of money in the pot 'just in case' ... not without having to do a lot of justification, both to the Gov't and to local tax payers. Paying a supplier up front for work that might not be done is another thing that is something that just isn't going to cut the mustard with Audit, central Gov't and local tax payers. An approach some have suggested about things like this is to smooth the costs across schools. I don't know whether this was suggested in this case, but that is also something that will make some schools happy, but other schools equally as angry ("Why are we over-paying to support school x?") and the general approach (again, as directed from central Gov't) tends to be that any costs should be the real costs, transparent and final. These tend to be agreed at a very senior level within LAs (believe me ... the amount of work to get this sort of thing agreed is long, laborious, full of politics and lots of discussions with beancounters, etc!) and if a school isn't happy to pay then you can guarantee that there are already given processes to discuss and challenge this.

It isn't just about decommissioning kit from schools for things like this though ... and sometimes that gets missed when chatting with schools. Without knowing the full details of the contract I would say it is hard to say something is unfair, especially as it will depend on contracted terms for partners / suppliers to complete work, costs to the organisation itself, requirements around WEEE and secure disposal of equipment, the amount of other services that are linked in with the connection (clearing out users from the Directory Service, closing down and archiving mailboxes, etc) ... Exit costs are often one of the most argued about areas within contracts ... I know that I am glad that I don't have to worry on this one anymore

Covered in a different thread. When the SSAT went over to a management buyout a number of domains were not retained at the time, and this one has been poached and is being squatted on. They are presently looking at getting it back.

There is something to be said of getting folk in schools to understand project management, and the concept of the project sponsor / exec being the person where the buck stops. However, you have to be careful not to think about everything being a project, otherwise you can stifle ideas and innovation.