Ephelyon

It's always the modern context that is important. The actual etymology of the word has little relevance as they almost all have origins that were entirely innocuous, such as the F-word which is derived from an old Germanic root for "to breed". Hence the (modern) Dutch sentence: "Ik fok honden." / "I breed dogs." A more, shall we say, "literal-sounding" version of that translation was once famously uttered by a Dutch woman - improvising without her dictionary - in front of the press...

We have to bear in mind differentiation here. Not everyone will get it in a few months; some will struggle even after a few years. You can easily keep Scratch in use in the classroom for lower-ability sets throughout Key Stage 3 while working in something more advanced for the upper sets. It's probably fairly safe to assume that the kids in the lower-ability KS3 sets aren't going to take the subject further at KS4. Accordingly, some would argue that Python should be in play at KS3 for the upper sets (assuming you get the hours/week to do it properly, which is where some schools will fall down) and that KS4 Computing, as an elective option, should allow more freedom for development in object-oriented Java (for example) because these are the kids who definitely decided they want to study this. That's where your VMs or isolated labs would then come in.

And this is precisely the point; the principle of "absolute logic" can be taught with almost any language. If the most important thing is to get the "core concepts" across, it doesn't matter whether you teach it in an industry-standard language because that's not the point of this level of education. The point of our teaching at this stage is to encourage, stimulate and inspire (though it doesn't always have to be "fun" as that's not the world). They will have opportunities to take it further later on; the exceptions being the best and brightest who will be doing it by themselves anyway.

I agree with most of what she's saying, particularly the point about how this level of education now is not intended to generate "work skills". If you ask me, education at primary phase is intended to provide some basic skills for future learning. At secondary phase our education is intended to generate interest in subjects for future study at a professional level. At tertiary phase, yes, we might expect to be learning skills applicable to the workplace (though that wasn't always the point of it). Having said that, some children are high achievers even at secondary phase and it's good to support them where we can, though we do need to remember that the school is not the last bastion for these kids - it's the first. Their opportunities for learning, both within and outside formal education, don't end with their GCSEs. What's more important at school is to inspire the children, not to churn out boil-in-the-bag professionals, so when she talks about "core concepts" she is absolutely correct. On that note, @Bradlys pointed me to something today that I've had a look at and subsequently sent over to our ICT staff. It's a game that's designed to teach coding in JavaScript and it does it well partly because it's fun, but also because it doesn't let you get away with a missed semi-colon. It's a fantastic resource for getting across that "core concept" - common among all languages - that, as others have said, it's either right or it's wrong. But it manages to do it without insisting on C++. CodeCombat - Learn how to code by playing a game

Congratulations!!!

For my tuppence worth, lots of good stuff. What @Andrew_C has said in particular is spot on! I like the points here from an individual perspective, but maybe a "whole team" perspective is important as well? The problem is that IT is an umbrella field; in terms of how we employ IT staff, it's meant for specialism. In this sector we have little recourse for that (partly because we've never been very good at getting the message across), so whoever you get in a Technician role - or indeed an NM role or higher! - will have somewhat of a "mixed bag" of skills. Where you have a need to employ generalists the key is to find the skillsets that best interlock to create a dynamic team, if you're lucky enough to have one at all. You may have people who specialise (or "have the most experience") in Networking, System Administration, Support, Web, Hardware, Databases, Storage, etc... and all of those areas can be broken down several times for sub-specialisms as well. Support is a very common background as it's a typical route into the sector, as long as we remember that's only part of the game. It may be worth doing a radar chart for yourself of the many areas of IT and how your own skillset could be depicted there. It's a good tactic for schools to use when they are making several appointments at once within a team, or creating a new team from scratch where a mixed bag of skills can be expected. You list the major skill areas (as they pertain to your needs) around the outside and then you have the candidates draw an arrow shape as close or far from it as would depict their skills/confidence in that area. But the key is, you get them to do it on tracing paper and you prepare a blank one in advance, so at the end of the interview process you can overlay them all in different combinations to get a very visual picture of how well-equipped such a team might be to support the school's needs (though of course I'd never suggest this as the sole means of candidate selection). You can repeat the process for annual CPD reviews too (because we all get those), to identify both how a team has developed and where it needs further development now. At the end of the day, we're all going to have our own different experiences and skillsets... to an extent it's all by-the-by. What's important is that the team providing the service is well-proportioned for what it's expected to deliver.

VM TIIIIME! =]

EDIT: Didn't see the new posts! Try opening a command prompt and navigating to the folder above this admin one, then running this: takeown /a /r /f FolderName See what messages you get. I'm around for another half hour or so.

Okay, thanks for that.

To be honest, I'm not interested in a rule-breaking sales pitch. What I want to know is whether this Impero offering is pitched in the market to compete with Securus. That's essentially a Yes/No question so I don't think it contravenes forum rules (in the same way that a post simply stating that Progresso is pitched to compete with SIMS is perfectly fine). If it is, I'll discuss it further by phone. If it's designed to be an alternative that pitches itself alongside something like Securus though, rather than as a direct replacement, then I'm probably not that interested. If the claim is that I might be able to kill two birds with one stone while saving 1 vCPU and 4GB RAM on my virtual infrastructure - especially if the add-on module is likely to be cheaper as well (without specific details) - then I'm interested.

Again, can I ask how these new features would compare to e.g. Securus?

@fairm010 and @MordyT, I posted this last year - it's here. It works alongside a number of other scripts we use to replicate some of the functionality of SCCM and/or MDT because I essentially couldn't be arsed with them. If you're not going to copy the entire setup exactly, it may well require heavy modification. I might be able to help via PM. Back on topic, it's the very specific link to cessation of support for XP that I find a bit strange...

We use DiskCryptor here for the simple reason that it's command-line scriptable (and also pretty decent). I can automate the encryption of staff laptops through scripting as part of my workstation auto-build process now; moved away from TrueCrypt a couple of years ago owing to a lack of this feature.

On that basis I'd argue Great Expectations introduces some decent talking points as well; particularly in areas of the country where the class divide is more pronounced than others, for example. Though I'm not sure it's considered "done" to actually talk about that to the kids who can be very much subject to it!

You need to look at the volume of NTT work that may be required over a full year. That's the first test; if you can't quantify it, can you otherwise prove that such a requirement exists? I'm not saying it doesn't exist; I'm just saying, what would you want to be going on during the holidays and what benefits would it bring to the school?

I'm very confused now

... mmmm?

Sorted about three people's computer issues over this BH weekend so far, should probably start charging but they're all friends and it's just a co-incidence as to the timing! When you say they've "got your back", do you mean the Head has agreed to overrule such requests from your LM, or that SLT have agreed that he can have the access but you're definitely not responsible if anything goes wrong?

In his case, it's Liverpool.

@speckytecky, the "default vote" phenomenon applies to both Conservative and Labour voters. There have always been people who say "I have X background, I vote for X party", just as there have always been people who say "my family are from X area and if I supported any other football team I'd be disowned" (that's pretty much a quote from my Technician).

How does this compare to Securus? We use both here.

Does the Essentials plug-in cost extra?

Dave, I'd be interested to see what you'd do something like this for actually as there's a potential consulting opportunity I may have over the summer where I might suggest switching from a workgroup to a domain-based environment. Not education though, firm of lawyers.

You can set that setting just fine, just don't set disable script processing to Yes as well if you still want to run logon scripts and etc.

Digital Media Technology?