skunk

Well, here goes nothing........................

This year we will be mostly trying to move to Open Source solutions for the servers, where we can't, Win2k3 will suffice for now.

So who got out of the wrong side of bed this morning? Go Andy! Well played.

Shall I be the first to ask the fateful question? Has anyone applied the June update yet and what did it break?

I am in the process of re-setting up marksheets as you are describing. It is a long and painful process, but I believe, ultimately worth it. Make sure you know exactly what you want to get out of it before you start making them. I am probably teaching you to suck eggs but technology is never a solution, just a tool. If you have the best student tracking system in the world, but no-one uses it correctly, then it is worthless. Everyone has to buy into the idea or it will not work. What is more, Ofsted will look at it and say (I know this because I had this conversation not two months ago) "So what." Ofsted: "Thats great, is everyone using it?" Me: "Yes" Ofsted: "Thats nice, so if I went into an ICT lesson and asked the teacher to show me their markbook, they would be comfortable with that." Me: "Yes, I would hope so, as they have all had training from their Subject Leaders, they fed this back to me." Ofsted: "So when I went into an ICT lesson today and they had never heard of the system, what do you say" Me : ":censored:ing incompetent :censored:s you should remove the whole :censored:ing lot of them." Ofsted: "What impact is it having on the student's education? Can you show me some proof?" Me: "Bwahahahahahahaha, no seriously, tell me another.:drunken_smilie:" However, we now have a (better I hope) plan in place to monitor the usage and impact of the system on student's learning so when Ofsted come back next term I shall be able to knock them out with a small swing of the Proof folder. PM me if you want any more help/ideas.

Take the offer and run, 2.45% in April is better than 4% in January that is not backdated to April. I wonder how many people would be complaining that the government are incompetent if they had said: "Have a 10% pay rise, because it will stabilise the economy." You would know it was a lie but I bet there wouldn't have been a strike called. Yet when they say "Have a 2.45% pay rise, because it will stabilise the economy" they are roundly criticised as not having a clue, being out of touch, their own salaries called into question and everyone wants to strike. Yet we all know that it probably will help the economy stabilise, even at our own expense. That sounds suspiciously like greed to me. Where is the money going to come from as someone mentioned the gov is flat broke. Tax increases on petrol maybe? No, politically too volatile. Increased tax on low earners? tried that and it failed. Increases tax on high earners? They will go somewhere else and take their companies with them so we end up with less money. That leaves us with.........redundancies, that means those support staff who appear to be doing nothing in school, hey they sit at a desk all day fiddling with computers. We don't need them. P45 anyone? The economy is going nuts and it will bite us all before it gets better, striking is not going to help anyone, just sticking our heads above the parapet waiting for the turkey shoot. Those firemen have got such a good deal from all that striking.........

If you look at the CVA for a large number of these so called struggling schools, they are doing an astounding job with the students they teach. As a lot of these school were already slatted for closure/academy status, this is just an exercise in spin. The government can now say they are helping 50% of struggling schools by giving them more money and the other 50% have already helped themselves, just look at their CVA scores. Ta-Da, now vote for us. Please.

Closing date for this job is Monday 2nd June at Noon, so still plenty of time to apply.

Has anyone installed the May Re-release yet. I am somewhat reluctant to do this until someone else has done the beta testing.

just swore at the screen when I saw that the May Main Release had disappeared from my solus screen and the census patch was there instead. After reading this thread I am somewhat relieved.

Cumbria CC's single status job profile for a Network Manager states that they are to be paid at the SO1 grade.

Sorry, the pay scale is dictated by the county.

The plan is for ALL spending on IT to come through a central fund and be signed off centrally. That way we can manage the sustainability of any new IT purchases. However, I am not against departments paying into that budget annually for something special, but again it has to be sustainable. Laptops for Teachers, who knows what we are going to do with those, we have 90 odd and they all replacing in the next year. So if anyone can do me a deal on 30 laptops a year ad infinitum then drop me a pm Departments will not be expected to pay for replacements, their budget is far too small for that.

We are currently advertising for a Network Manager at the moment. Details Here Good Luck P.S. As far as I am aware BSF will be hitting us in 2017.

I like that room. Almost off topic, but what are the dimensions of the room? We are looking at four new ICT suites and wondering how many PCs we can put in each without making a cramped hell hole to teach in.

Capita have acknowledged that there is a memory leak in the workstation software and there will be a fix in the March (IIRC) release. There is a thread on the capita support forums about it. Skunk

You want to use pivot tables, these are a great way of condensing data and pivoting it as well. They can take a bit to get used to, but once you have you will never look back. Skunk

Ok, found the answer (NO) here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/showthread.php?t=11784

Does anyone know off the top of their head whether SIMS will run in a 64bit windows environment?

Ryan, who do you lease from?

We are looking at throwing out all of our printers and getting in one make and as few different models as possible. This should cut down on our toner/ink costs. But it will be a huge outlay. We are looking at a lease agreement, so that we don't have to maintain them ourselves, get swapout, or have to dispose of the things when the inevitably break. Does anyone do this, how do you find it? Can anyone recommend a company that provide this service?

We operate a whitelist for years 7-11. Now we are six months in we have very little maintenance on it to perform. It has made a huge impact in the classroom, with students actually remaining on task for at least half the lesson now. We monitor 6th form activity (occasionally) and the head of sixth form comes down very heavy on those who abuse the system. They have now got the message. I would rather give the students free access to the web and let the teachers educate them in appropriate use. Yeah, I know, I know. We looked into websense, securus, policy central et. al. but they seem quite expensive when we have a very tight budget and would rather spend the money on positive software that improves the kids education.

Truecrypt can run in traveller mode I believe, where you set it up to carry around the software on the stick.

Yep, can assure you that one drive with the OS on is bad news. A quote from earlier today: "where is the web-site? why can't I ping the web server? why does the server sound like a sherman tank? f^&* socks! it's the OS disk!"

I have had problems with staff being members of too many groups. eg. Exams Organiser and Exams User, this stopped some of the functionality of Exams Organiser. I suspect the reason that they do not want to support custom groups is that every release changes the permissions and they update their groups to include these changes. However, a custom group that had maximum permissions in the September release may be missing some vital permissions once you have upgraded to the November release. However, it is part of their software so I don't know why they won't support it. Skunk