Ephelyon

Yes... yes, that is red on blue... xD

Perhaps we should just separate out the sniping and the griping in our minds, so we can have a constructive conversation about how undervalued we are, without sniping at teachers for being so much more visible to SLT?

(Response was PM'd.)

Is there a base range?

I take it the salary is negotiable?

Is this something that ties back into a "virtual school" provision for non-attenders? If you do have some budget to throw at this, there are some good resources and links back to other providers here: Blended Learning | Virtual Learning | k-12 Education Pearson

I think @crispinw might appreciate some of this as well in terms of supplier ratings/reviews perhaps forming the basis for an award scheme. Also happy to chip in with an effort for "most lengthy post" if anyone's still interested. For further evidence, please see... oh, most of my posts... =]

... AIN'T NOBODY GOT TIME FOR DAT!!!

Ah, fair one, does happen I guess. Kind of why I took this job instead of rounding off my FdSc into a full BSc. It was during the financial crisis and I was being offered a full-time job that I didn't even have to apply for... no-brainer! What does the NM do there?

What happened there?

It's contingency planning, just as we all have to do all the time. You plan for all manner of contingencies, even those that may not be very likely.

I certainly think there's scope for it to be an add-on to an existing role as well as a full-time job. As always, it depends on the school. Some may have the room for it in more of a capacity than others.

Just UPnP the lot!

Pretty much in the same position here now our sudden bout of issues from this year have died down... except that we're shortly going to have to upgrade storage and switches if we want to sustain this new-fangled 1:1 or BYOD idea, so then it's back to the technical side again. That's another important point I think. One of the dangers with people who have moved on from the hands-on is that they become out-of-touch or disconnected. We've all seen the "technology leaders" who last touched enterprise IT when everyone was using mainframes, and some of the stuff they come out with is... very interesting! So it's important to be keeping your hand in as well. The future technologist would be someone whose "day job" is still hands-on to at least some degree. That's why you have the progression from Network Manager to Strategic ICT Manager in some areas (as in ours), though it's not all that well-defined.

As those things change, many people have predicted the demise of (or dramatic reduction in) on-site technical staff. I'd agree that could happen but I'd very much hope it doesn't, and here's why. Some would argue that, even now (though the opportunities are rare), there is a logical progression for technical staff in schools (and elsewhere): the route from "technician" to "technologist". I think this will become far more common and will be "the future" - but only if structures to support those progression routes are put into place soon! Currently there is little or nothing defined for any support staff in education as regards career entry and progression pathways, which is also a problem for senior leaders as they don't have much in the way of standards to determine what they're actually getting when they hire a technical person. To my mind, a technologist is a person with a technical background who has developed a further appreciation for what the technology does, not just what it is. This is someone who can sit down with leaders (or practitioners) in teaching, medicine, business etc - they may choose a sector of preference to specialise in - and talk with them about how they use technology, all the wonderful things they could be doing with it as well as the pitfalls and constraints, legal issues and the like. They are a trusted adviser, a strategic partner, whose views are valued because, while they may need to be the one pointing out why X could be a bad idea, it's also understood that overall they seek to enable, not obstruct. It can't be overemphasised that the foundation of that work, however, comes from a strong technical background and broad experience in that field. It's not someone whose primary vocation was always something else.

Interesting to see how this thread has developed over these couple of years. Some very interesting comments and a worthwhile read. My personal take on moving towards using someone else's infrastructure rather than your own is that it's a massive strategic decision that should be taken when, and only when, it's right for this particular organisation. I don't want to be going cloud-based just "because it's the future". Another important point is that once you move one service over, it almost certainly won't stop there. I'm going to be so esoteric as to go for a Star Trek reference and quote "with the first link, the chain is forged". It's the start of a very big journey that, as with anything else that massive, ought to be properly change-managed, and my worry is that I see this happening a lot without that process in place. Moving from Situation A to Situation B is not the same as starting with B. Arguably the cloud IS the future for a lot of organisations, but then we have to look at why. Often these are either start-ups (or in education, new schools) or organisations that, for whatever reason over the past 6-7 years, haven't opted to develop their core platform such that anytime, anywhere access is already in place and working well. Our core platform is a virtual infrastructure (albeit a fairly small one as we're not a big school, two production hosts and one redundant) that has plenty of expansion available and can basically handle whatever's thrown at it - which is what it was designed for and should be a core principle of any system design, be it in business, education, healthcare, you name it. Bought a new service that needs its own server instance, such as Securus? Fine, whack it on the secondary host and give it 4GB RAM to begin with. (Aside: this is why I disagree with the SLICT view that IT strategy begins by "generating a vision for education", i.e. how the system will be used. No, no, no... you develop a core platform that can handle whatever it needs to, then you have maximum flexibility for how it will be used and the exact functions can be worked out at a later date with minimal restrictions. Over the decades, the power of IT has always been that it is generic, and therefore has limitless applications when set up properly. I'm not saying the use of the system isn't a very important factor, I'm just saying it's not the only one, nor should everything else under the sun revolve around it as you will, you just WILL miss a number of other important factors if you start thinking about it that way - seen it so many times! It limits your perspectives because IT developments are actually a two-way process, with the industry changing all the time and these changes being fed back into "client sectors", not just the other way round.) Anyway... multiple DR options are in place, including offsite backups to another school where we've colocated a server (and are waiting to reciprocate if they ask). Unsure of what a bulk operation will do in SIMS, or whether a Service Pack will break a server? Fine, leave it till out of hours then snapshot the VM, make your changes and see... snap back again if you need to. Or, even better, run up your DR replicas on the redundant host and make your changes there first to test. I can do that with MY infrastructure because I control it completely... if you're only going for a SaaS cloud solution rather than IaaS or PaaS, you don't have those options. Then there's a virtual RemoteApp server with access to most of a host's 12 cores and 48GB of RAM allocated to it that obviously makes for VERY fast remote access from home to the complete school environment, and during the day that's also used in school to provide the same environment (guarded by Securus) on e.g. tablets, if it's anything more than simple web browsing that they want to do. Exchange is in place for e-mail and offers a few unique customisations like importing our set lists from SIMS as distribution groups in AD (yes, I know you could use the same PowerShell commands on Office 365). Basically we have a very small-scale equivalent of a "private cloud" setup in place... which is what EVERYONE should have by now, though granted if budgets or senior manglement have got in the way there, it's hardly IT's fault. Now, granted, if you haven't got all of the above in place and are concerned about the costs of getting it there... and/or if you're concerned about the costs of employing someone to maintain it (which since there are only two of us and we'd still be needed anyway becomes moot)... then using someone else's infrastructure becomes a very real option and is worthy of consideration. But if you DO already have that, then the question around moving away from it becomes very much "Why?" rather than "Why not?" in my opinion. It must be a choice made by each individual organisation according to their own needs, not a decision that we rush into "because it's the future" (whose?) or "because everyone else is" (why?). That is all.

I had it set to Work, Overwrite Main, Overwrite Primary. In the end I set it to Work, Overwrite Main, No Primary and then went through them all setting the Primary value. We're alright now. Thanks for the assistance

Got it to the stage where it'll import (type initialiser error with the previous SIMS user), but if they've already got an e-mail address it won't overwrite Main and Primary. (Sorry for all the posts...)

Now I'm finding the stable version will run on the terminal server and will import, but then none of these imported e-mail addresses are actually showing up in the SIMS staff records...

Right, problem with the CSV file originally (not all fields filled in). Exported properly now, down to 40-odd people in the right format, can select the right fields to match, but then it gets about halfway through finding people and always crashes out. Tried both stable and preview versions about 20 times each.

This is 1.7.21.0 that I'm using.

Now doing the same thing for staff in relation to AlfieCloud, got a CSV containing Surname, Forename, Email, but nothing comes up in any of the drop-down boxes to match the fields to. Using the stable version for now.

Voted.

Are there any schools out there using LP+ without Office 365, or without some of it (e-mail for example)? We're considering our VLE options at the moment and the choice has been narrowed down to either Kite from e4education or LP+ from Learning Possibilities. In principle, if it's really right for the organisation, and once that's been means-tested beyond the phrase "it's the future", I'd have no objection to moving some services to the cloud... what I'm less happy with is having that massive strategic move (which is almost always the start of a long journey with a lot of implications) being dictated solely by the choice of learning platform.

I think the vital point here has to be that RM have always targeted a certain market within education. Companies that decided from the outset their strategy would involve a particular focus will provide their best service when they hold true to that philosophy. We can also point to a history of RM trying to do too many other things and not always doing them very well. On that basis, if they now want to return to focusing on what they do well, I think that's a good strategic move for them. It could be fair to say that RM is to IT in education what Apple is to IT in general. Both companies target particular markets, both have proven successful and both are at their most innovative when they return to what they do well. All the best to them, I say.