KarlGoddard

We (Bolton) have gone with Uniservity too. I went on a day long training course with a degree of scepticism , but I was pleasantly surprised. Uniservity wasn't that bad, in fact I thought it was OK. I'm still waiting for my admin/super user login details so I haven't been able to play with it in any meaningful way yet, but from an initial few hours I could see that our school could work with it. However, if I was to be totally honest, I'd still prefer Moodle - free, flexible and purely because it's 'open'. If I want a feature that isn't available I can hone my PHP skills and make it. No other VLE can provide that (I think)

this is *exactly* how I'd like to see it in my school, apart from the single budget holder part. That aspect I'd like to see (yet another) committee / panel who would mange the budget and assess the pitches for money and tie in the innovation budget with the overall school ICT strategy

i think the manager and the techie there are new appointments. My boss has visited the school met the manager there, but i dont know any of them personally I nearly applied for the techie post myself a year or two ago - it was 20k+ for a techie job but was only a 12 month contract

sensible thought would normally make us think that.... but that doesn't actually happen in the school While our ICT infrastructure is excellent we don't, in my and other members of staffs' opinion, do anything truly innovative with it. I was thinking that the introduction of a 'budget' would a) guarantee that a sum would be available for certain ICT based projects and b) ignite sufficient interest amongst staff to be more creative with ICT Perhaps I'm slightly biased as I'm currently prepping for my MA, the focus of which is the development of learning technologies, so i may be ploughing an idealistic furrow, but thanks for the question. I'm sure that that particular question will be presented to me by the school Business Manager and SLT

Firwood is just around the corner from me...

what spec and for what role? If it's something light you could do a lot worse than one of the Proliant DL140's ICT Direct - computer hardware for ict in education - primary, secondary, special needs schools and colleges

A idea I've been kicking about now for some weeks is approaching SLT and asking for a modest budget for developing ICT innovation in our school. Ideally the 'ICT Innovation' budget would be there to provide a ring fenced budget available to departments to buy new kit or software that would allow teaching and support staff to be more creative in their delivery of lessons and development of the curriculum. Now when I say modest I mean *very* modest. My ball park figure was £1000-£1500 and in a school of our size and budget the £1000-£1500 figure is tiny. Does anyone's school here have such a budget? If so does it work for you? Did anyone have such a budget and the project fail? Do you think it's an idea with legs? Any ideas on a good way to pitch this to SLT (grumbledook - what do you think?) Lots of questions I know, but I'm quite excited about the idea and I would desperately like to see it work in my school but I thought I'd bounce the idea of you guys first. Cheers!

nope, no over riding reason to migrate over... as other posters have similarly commented, our network is rock solid and performs well. It does everything we need it to now and has the capacity to do anything we need to do in the foreseeable future we're even considering never deploying Vista and wait for the next release of Windows. I think we should downgrade back to NT4 / Win98 and show the teachers how lucky they are now

now why didn't I look there..... thanks!

Can anyone point me in the direction of a signed Activ Driver msi so I can deploy it via GP I have the msi off the install disk but that appears to be unsigned Thanks

Just like SteveMC said.... see what other schools in your area use. Get the opinions of the teachers that use them. If you have to pitch to SLT, getting the backing of the teaching staff will get you far further than pitching from a purely technical point of view. I've used Smartboard, Promthean and even the horrid Mimio devices at various schools I've worked at and Promethean were / are my recommendation. Never had any issues with them technically, plug them in install the software and away you go. More importantly, the staff at my school love them. The ActivBoard software is pretty easy to pick up and as my boss said above, there's some realy good online courses (moodle based, in fact ) available on one of the promethean websites. But no matter which you choose make sure the staff get on with them...

to digress slightly.... what tangible benefits have you achieved by using TC's I'm primarily looking at power usage and physical environment benefits - more space, less heat etc. Reducing support issues are less of an issue for us as the kit we currently have - Optiplex 170L's - have been (touch wood) 100% reliable, in fact I've not had 1 support call this year that required a visit to the 6th form (apart from replacing toner carts that is ) thanks!

What sort of spec should i look for on a server(s) for Thin Client use? Early days on the project yet but I'm looking into using TC's in our library (7 PC's) and our 6th form study area (15 PC's) the current PC's are used for email / internet / MS Office type duties, the heaviest app they'd ever get used for would be MS Publisher so I think they're a prime candidate for replacement with TC's A friend in another school has just, or will be getting, a trial Axel box so i'll be going to have a look at that when he gets it but at the moment I'm thinking about the server end. With only 22, possibly going up to 25 / 26, clients I reckon 2 servers should do the job. So what sort of spec should I be looking at. Never used TC's in work so i'm pretty much clueless as to what spec I need. Cost, as ever, is also a big factor! Any input would be welcomed

as far as I know its web only contact with Dabs with the last 2 purchases we've made fom dabs its been web based chat if we had any questions / queries. I have to admit that when I did do a web chat with them they were very efficient, but I must admit I would prefer a phone converstaion too

Has anyone had any experience of deploying a custom toolbar for IE? I'm working on a little utility that I'd like to be used from within IE so I thought the easiest way would be to create a custom toolbar / button. I know you can create and deploy custom toolbars in when deploying Office (never actually done that 'live' so to speak either) My network is 2003 / XP and we're running IE6 Any pointers or tips or any gotchas to look out for would be appreciated

how about advertising for a doctor on 16k or an airline pilot..... totally different jobs... 16k is about the average in my LA and I'm sure that 16k goes far further up here than in Kent and as for the poster who claims that 16k only gets muppets.... 16k is bang in the middle of scale 3 up here - the average for ICT techs - a lot of good techs I work with in my LA are on that whack and they're certainly not muppets. It seems that being paid more than 16k doesn't appear to enhance your personal skills, well in some cases at least.

why oh why OH WHY is it every time there's a job posted people instantly post replies relating to the salary, or lack of salary. Unless it's something high end its the same pointless posts....

yep, filemon is your friend in these situations....

I can't actually see the overall value in using texts for communicating school > pupils. Yes, there are people who would be devout users of it, but they are also the ones who try and shoehorn using Twitter into lesson plans.... using technology for just the 'use' of it. No tangible benefits IMHO. And from an inclusive technology point of view - what about the pupils (probably very very few) who don't have mob phones?

I had to use Vista once, on a laptop. I'm now in therapy.

another 'ticket everything' here. Can be a pain in the butt when you've got several lower school asking for passwords to be reset at the same time as dozens of year 11 asking for increases in quota, and staff asking for pupil x to be removed from the internet all at the same time!!!! Staff can submit their own calls through a web interface or we enter the call if the request is phoned through. We still accept 'corridor requests' from staff and we enter these when we get back to our desks - not very FITS I know But the real value I want to start extracting from our call database is using closed calls to form a knowledge base. That's probably possible out of the box with a specific application, but we use a home brew app created by our IT Manager. Looking back now it's hard to see how I actually coped with only my A4 pad and a pen......

We've been using Sophos (7.3 client and 3.0.0.2321 console) for some time now and, after a shaky start, it seems to have settled down with few major problems. One ongoing issue we do have however is the updating of laptops via wireless. Out of a network of around 600pc's we get the odd error, normally when a pupil powers down a pc while it's updating, but we continually get problems with the laptops not taking their updates. If we cable them to a wall point they update fine, it's only when they're connected via the WAPs do we get the 'Download of Sophos AutoUpdate...' errors. Does anyone else experience this? The Sophos KB isn't any use at all!!! Thanks

another vote for Sharepoint. We're currently on v2 and as yet I haven't managed to migrate to v3 successfully. it can be a bit quirky but if you get the security settings right it's pretty stable, fast and fairly easy for the numpties, I mean the teaching staff, to use. The kids can't edit any of the pages but I'm thinking of creating a pupil site with a dedicated editorial team made up of pupils as a trial to see if they can create, edit and moderate things themselves - had bad experiences allowing a year 8 class to create their own wikis...... :-) Some of the features aren't very usable for a school environment though so out of the possible features you'll probably find yourself only using a minimal set of tools. the navigation is a bit Big downside of v2 no file level restore - someone deletes a file from a library and you have to restore the site No affordable integrated AV either. But overall, I set up the intranet 2 years ago and it's been quite a success with several depts taking to it really well. Set up a test platform and play - you could have it up and running in a few minutes and a live site created within a day.

without wanting to sound too thick how would you ghost to the drive? Admittedly I've never gone too deep into local disk to disk imaging but I can't see how to do it in Ghost! Any pointers would be great!

we're not happy with this solution at all. We don't want to start opening up folders with write access for users just because Capita break things with every single update. Why can't they just test things before releasing updates (stupid question I know) but all me and the boss have done this morning is FMS / SIMS problems... we're both thinking of asking to start being paid by Capita directly as we both feel like Capita support staff