Ephelyon

No job without 'em sadly! I do hate my own as well, like stock inventories (probably also because I'm disorganised)... xD

I'd suggest it's the teacher who knows in detail the tasks they'll be having the children perform, as well as the environment they'll be carried out in, so they would at least need to have input into the process. A general office assistant might not understand all the risk factors for a given subject area. Either way, there seems to be this and this.

(Around 700 students.) PARS was £5.5K for us up front and is now £2.2K ongoing - for us, that was cheaper than buying Lesson Monitor (which we never did). Insight was around a grand up-front and ongoing. You could stop renewing Lesson Monitor to help with the migration; you won't need it if you've got PARS. You can bulk-select students for whom to add a single incident. Five seconds is just not a realistic timeframe in which to do anything useful, but there are ways of making things easier. You could use the rule-based behaviours/detentions and automated reports to simplify a lot of workflows, which would be reflected in the overall time taken by staff to do their jobs across a lot of roles. There's a Green Abbey-based demo site available here. Username: blacka. Password: abcd.

Seconding Insight as well - it's our Parental Portal too and has been very well received!

There's a .Net-based client you can install on workstations, or you can use the web interface Connect. The web interface is the newer of the two and new feature requests are likely to appear in Connect first, or solely. It's a resource hog though: I've had to give our IIS VM 4 cores and 16GB RAM to get acceptable performance out of it for whole-school use! The problem with discrete solutions like IRIS is that they do one thing very well, but don't always integrate brilliantly with your other systems. PARS writes back to SIMS so everything's in one place, plus you can avoid forking out for things like InTouch because it has built-in texting functionality etc. Support from TASC is excellent overall, though recently I've been finding myself required to justify what I want more and more, with responses like "the developers have decided this isn't worth implementing"... sorry, but developers are there to develop, not make decisions about what development work is required! They should have input, yes, but the overall decision should be determined by liaison between customers and internal BDMs... Still, that's a lot better than Capita, where the standard workflow seems to be: 1) Make request > 2) Wait 18 months > 3) Receive response saying "no". TASC operates a "release early, release often" model, which is good for (often smaller) schools that have a lot of unique requirements. It's one of the main reasons why we continue to use them.

N'awwwwwwhhh... @Bradlys is a big softie! Many thanks to all, much appreciated! My present: tonight is the last night I sleep at the old house. Moving into my new one (first mortgage) tomorrow! =]

There's a Group Policy setting called "Remove common program groups from Start Menu" that you might want to enable.

The way I'd try to go about that is to still keep a single repository of shortcuts on a share with ABE enabled, but then have each computer on startup copy on the files/folders it should have down into a local Start Menu folder, which redirection for everyone points to. This would be regenerated on startup. You could define which shortcuts are available to which computers by organising their computer accounts in AD into security groups, then setting permissions on individual shortcuts (or folders of shortcuts) to include just Administrators and whichever computer security groups you like - i.e. no full access for SYSTEM as by default. The magic of ABE would mean only those items could be "seen" by computers copying from the share on startup because their individual SYSTEM accounts, which startup scripts run under, equate to their AD computer accounts I think... Le EDIT: Actually, I think @timtom's suggestion might be better... xD

Dave, do you happen to do mini "silent" cabs/racks by any chance?

If you deploy that as a PowerShell startup script you can do it site-wide without leaving your desk! =]

Ben, that's simply a far too logical approach for me this morning! echo h: | %{$a = mountvol $_ /l;mountvol $_ /d;$a = $a.Trim();mountvol z: $a} Just change the z: to whatever you want. Change the h: too if it's a different drive you want changed; you can do it for multiple drives at once by adding more lines with the values you want.

@johnhart96, do you know what drive letter you'd like to change the reader's current H: assignment to - like Z: or something? Let me know and I'll give you a PowerShell script you can deploy on startup for the affected computers. It's just a one-liner and we're using it successfully here.

My school is often low on funds, so when I want to go somewhere for more than a day - however much it costs including travel - there's then accommodation on top of that. The costs of a nice hotel in London for an event like BETT could be a deal-breaker for some schools when considering whether to send colleagues to the show. I wanted to advocate, from personal experience, how good some of the hostels can be. You can get them from £15-20 per night. There are the drug-ridden ones, and then there are the decent ones. This is one I've used a few times: Hillspring, Hostel London - Palmers Lodge It's a great place; very safe and very friendly. They can do block-bookings and private rooms too. There are a good few others just like it all over London; they may not be all that close to the show, but the extra Tube costs are nothing like what a hotel would have been! You get to meet people too. You soon learn which are the places to avoid if you don't want a dozen drunken Spaniards coming back at 4am (yup), and I've made a good few links where I've been before. I could never have sent my apprentice (as he then was) on all the London-based training he's had without these places!

Oh, you can become a member, but they won't do anything to recognise how the education sector is a different beast from many of the rest, as those on their Policy Hub know only too well. *Clumsily attempts summoning charm for @GrumbleDook* - - - Updated - - - Well, quite. But what I mean is as a general sector, we don't.

Well, we don't exactly attempt to set standards ourselves, do we? Some are available (through SFIA, CITP etc) but there is no universal, active encouragement to ensure that IT professionals - you know, the ones who manage the technology that half the bloody planet now hangs off the back of - are actually any good. And the BCS won't touch us of course. Personally I think all IT professionals ought to be regulated and licensed to practise, just like a plumber or a doctor. In fact, I think it's so important for the world in general that I'd support the introduction of such a measure even if it meant I myself didn't meet those standards and had to retrain or find another career.

But we know plenty of schools don't have standards for that sort of thing because they wouldn't know how to set them. It's very easy in this sector to be improperly recruited unless you're a teacher (and sometimes even then I'm sure).

Surely there's something like a download counter out there? Also, that would make sense if the point were to work out which types of customers (sector, staff size, fleet size, primary OS platform etc) were distributing however many copies, but you don't even have to log in - hence the earnest warning about not sharing a link in a world where we all do that day by day! You can't actually gather any meaningful analytics through this unless you force customers to log in using their own account; it just seems like something that was thought up a good few years ago and nobody's bothered to change it...

Had the same e-mail, agree it's unlikely to be a problem but I have to echo @localzuk's concerns... just why? It's not as if it's a paid-for product!

Perpendicular Radius Intersects Neighbouring Tangent. It does too

"World Without Windows". Should be next to an Apple Store too!

Will have a double room in my new house in Crewe available shortly, £350/month all in. Please reply or PM if interested!

It's true though... @Dos_Box doesn't so much drive to EduGeek conferences as simply choose to reconstitute his earthly molecules in the appropriate location.

@vikpaw does make a good point in terms of representing both, though, to be fair. If you've got a Tech Thanks button for your Tech Rep, and a Community Thanks (or whatever) button for your Comm Rep, then at least everyone knows whether it's because you've got a lot of useful tech experience or whether you contribute a lot to the community (which includes being funny). And obviously if you find someone with lots of both, they become a Godlike figure and are duly worshipped every day until they eventually transcend this mortal plane. Some might say it's a silly system but I'd argue it's practical enough, while also showing we're a mature community that knows how to poke some light fun at itself

I think there's still the question of how long the school would last. Yes, good teachers can always teach, but we do now rely on data analysis and tracking, both of academic and pastoral factors, to inform the education we provide and there are requirements now incumbent upon schools to do so that didn't exist a couple of decades ago. Can you compete locally if everyone else has an edge over you there? I think it's the educational equivalent of the oft-quoted statistic (wildly twisted though it often is) that many businesses that have suffered a major data breach/loss never fully recover. Those of you who have personally supervised situations where schools have had to rebuild their MIS... for how long have they been monitored in this respect afterwards? The school may well rebuild a good proportion of its data, but there will always be gaps and they could be critical. CTFs don't contain everything, and we're transitioning away from paper/Excel markbooks here in a drive towards the MIS, because it's supposed to be the one place where this stuff is. That's why it's also backed up offsite every evening - in fact, the entire system is - to another school over the interconnecting County broadband network. Paper and other copies are wasteful (the obvious exception being a stock of blank paper registers to deal with temporary issues) and we can't afford that at the moment. There's no point in investing in a MIS and shifting towards technology if you're going to lose a number of the economies it provides by duplicating its functions elsewhere. It's like buying a backup abacus for every computer. Do invest your processes in the MIS... and then make damn sure you take adequate measures to protect it and hire staff who know how to manage it. That's the gamble we're all supposed to be taking these days... and then making damn sure we hire decent technical staff and pay and train them well!

That's exactly it. It's the impact on kids of things like attendance data for court cases missing, Ever 6 information unavailable, assessing progress against targets (which don't exist anywhere else), behaviour patterns... the loss of that has an impact, and that impact to me falls squarely within the category of "absolutely unacceptable scenarios". I'm then extrapolating that such an impact could quite easily be enough to cause the school, over whatever length of time, not to be able to compete locally to the extent that it either ends up in special measures, has its leadership replaced, is force-converted to Academy status against its will etc... is it really just me who calls that an "automatic game-over" in terms of bare-minimum standards we should expect to avoid at all costs?