KarlGoddard

you do know you don't really need a 24" imac don't you...... whats wrong with an Advent Celeron running Windows Me???? I'll tell you what I'll take it off your hands for £50, and I'll even come round and collect it....

this doesn't sound too good for my shiny new Vista loaded tosh laptop... thank fook UPS couldn't find my house and had to rearrange delivery.... don't know if I want it now

This topic has just reminded me that bar far the weirdest call we had was when a pupil came up to our office saying that a teacher had sent them to us so she could remove her eye make up.... god knows what staff must think we get up to as to suggest the girl came to see IT to remove make up

With some trepidation i have bought a nice shiny 17" Toshiba laptop - It comes with Vista installed.... Now this my very first Vista equipped machine and as it's a bit of a beast, spec wise, I'm thinking of eventually replacing my trusty, if somewhat noisy, XP loaded Dimension 5000. The main question I have is are there any issues with Vista when using it for development tasks - primarily I'll be using mainly a mix of MSSQL, MySQL IIS and PHP. Might look into using Apache in the future too. the only folk I now who use Vista are 'home' users - so its normally IE / Office / WMP etc so they can't help that much. I am tempted just to wipe it and put on XP Pro, but I think it'd be good to give the V word a try out, even if only for a few months. I have prepped some VM appliances (is that the right word?) ready to go on her - Ubuntu and a XP Pro so ic an still play with other OS's but any gotchas to watch out for would be appreciated

If you want to move for career / earning opportunities I'd probably choose another sector rather than education if you want to pursue being a techie. But if you're a sparks and want to move into IT, as one of the other posts said, consider a move into cabling. Our cabling contractor have sparks who earn 10k pa more than me ! and I'm reasonably paid when compared to other techs in my area!

lol, I must admit that made me spit my tea out

I'm slowly moving from paper based diary to electronic (OWA) but the problem is OWA or whatever platform you use is only effective if *everyone* uses it. In a school that simply isn't going to happen, well not in the immediate future, at least. By definition the technical staff within a school do tend to see everything from technical perspectives. That's not a slight to the techs (I am one myself!) but sometimes if a system works, leave it alone. Everything doesn't have to be electronically based. I'd prefer to give alternative methods of collaboration than autocratically declare the death of paper based diaries or whatever system just because *I* think it should be done a different way. Now, if there was a pressing business reason to adopt 'e-diaries' I'd be at the front of the charge to make a change, but I can see no reason as to why paper / electronic can't co-exsist. But I like my A4 diary - it's what I'm comfortable with and it compliments my way of work. And PDA's will be dead within a few years - Dell have dropped the Axim - the 'smartphone' will be the tool of choice... just waiting for the day where we start equipping staff with N95's....

ICT shouldn't be treated any different from any other subject, it's just that ICT is what I'm employed to 'know about' within my school so that's what I'm concerned about. And, to be blunt, you're missing the point by some margin too. The idea isn't to get the pupils around the table and ask them what they want - that'd be quite stupid. And how the hell can a pupil have a "well thought out long term plan"? Half of the technicians I've worked with wouldn't know the difference between an operational and strategic plan, so expecting that from an 11-16 year old is ludicrous. Getting the pupils involved could work at various levels, as Tony mentioned above, even at it's simplest level it raises pupil awareness as to why things are done in a certain way with regards to ICT provision.

The Office 2007 issue mentioned above is not, in any way, a fault of including pupils in a dialogue with staff. If rolling out Office 2007 was an operational concern for that organisation then that case should've been made by those responsible for IT within that organisation. I agree with Stewart regarding the 'maturity' aspect of the participants. We're talking about including children in a dialogue. We're not sitting them on a steering committee with full 'voting rights'. As Belshaw stated, quite rightly, in his blog post, children should be included for informing purposes only. I would never dream of bringing them on board to any forum / council / committee as stakeholders. I personally want pupils at my school to reflect their views of the ICT provision at my school to me - who knows I may learn something

apologies, Witch !

Data Harvest here too...but ours, I assume, are pretty damn old. They all work off the serial connection and are a total 'mare to get working consistently.

beat me to it.... thanks Russ

this update problem has killed my love for Zone Alarm. I must admit though I've never really noticed any performance issues with it, and I have a 3 year old Dimension at home so it's not exactly a beefy PC... I'll try this comodo out over the holidays!

my TC1100 tablet normally is around 30 degree mark but that does go up to 40-ish. I don't think you've got anything to worry about, IMHO. this is a nifty little utility I use for performance monitoring Notebook Hardware Control (NHC) - Homepage, Downloads, Help, Docu, FAQ, News - www.pbus-167.com

Having been watching the ongoing online spat between Doug Belshaw and Arthus Erea for a while now I was wondering is there a place in a secondary school for input from pupils to the development / delivery / usage of ICT within the school. Do any of you have, for want of a better term, a Pupil ICT Forum ie a platform for pupils to discuss and provide feedback on issues regarding ICT in the school? I know schools have student councils etc and these, like Doug says, are primarily for informing purposes. But, I'm completely neutral / open to opinions on this. Is there a place for them to actually contribute constructively to the ICT provision in school?

probably my most used and favourite quote when discussing the problem of teachers using IT Support to handle what is a teacher / classroom discipline matter!

that's normally the caretakers office or kitchen staffs' brew room in most schools I've worked at!

is this any help : A HOWTO on Optimizing PHP with tips and methodologies

List of drives and their roles > which drives can kids save to, which are public, which are staff only etc Staff list with their ext numbers (with the obligatory asterisk next to any attractive female PE teachers)

I've heard nothing about that.... not even a sniff of a rumour

I'm sure Singist is probably more in the know than myself, as he/she is one of the field techs, but I don't know of any secondary s in Bolton that supports any of the primary's. I could be wrong, but I'm 90% certain thats the case

its not just edugeek.... imho vbulletin's search has never been any cop

have you come accross any gotchas using Foxit? I downloaded Acrobat 9 to have a play before putting on our images and noted it was quite bloaty - dodn't notice any performance issued though. The reason I ask about the gotchas is that I used to deploy Quicktime Alternative instead of Quicktime Player as it was a lot lighter, but then we started having probs with some Cubase training DVD's that appeared to be 'hardcoded' to use the path to Quicktime Player so the embedded videoclips in the training DVDs wouldn't play... So I get a little concerned about using 'third party' apps....

were rolling it out on our machine images. The images need updating this time of year so it's simpler to incorporate it into our base images.

yep, that sounds about right now I think about it. I do know they were chucking a load of money around for the ICT staff. It's only a small school, I think around 600 kids, and the school has had it's fair share of problems. But I believe it's on the up and up now. Possibly being made into an academy school too?