Ephelyon

Do they also strategically liaise with SLT around major upgrades and changes to the system?

From the look of this job description ("first-line maintenance"), seemingly no Network Manager within the structure etc, I'd guess this is a school with an outsourced support contract in addition to the in-house post?

Your own £19 Pocket Spacecraft could be FOUND ON THE MOON ? The Register Just saw this and thought it could be a good thing for school Science Departments to get involved with. I've shown it to our HoD here and he seems pretty interested.

If I were closer I'd go for that as it's pretty much what I'm doing here (but on about £10K less) too. Sadly I'm not closer though, so ho-hum. Having said that, this is the sort of role I'd typically associate with being on the SLT itself and taking all the responsibility at that level on board.

Agreed, both his questions and the interviewer's are crafted in the manner you'd expect for this kind of interview. But I think the issue for debate that Gove is raising centres around the question of this perennial "good teacher". What is a "good teacher"? Gove's answer is that a truly good teacher is someone who can always get the best out of any pupils they are presented with (and I can think of worse definitions). He then seems to say, almost philosophically, "Wouldn't it be nice if that were the standard and became the norm?" A similar debate has been raised on EduGeek before about the standards (or lack thereof with the exception of FITS) for our own profession. We're expected to do the impossible a lot of the time by literally knowing everything about IT, but wouldn't it be nice if we could have the kind of training and career pathway framework that actually promoted that as far as possible? Coupled with standards for accountability as well, real change could be achieved. It creates both a mechanism and a context for improvement. But then the issue is raised of whether this could be used as a stick to beat us with, and we are back to the start again. Essentially I think the above is what Gove wants for teachers, and the stick-beating argument is being raised by the interviewers (and many teachers) as well. Ultimately it will always depend on the implementation, but I don't think the idea alone of having those standards is a bad one in principle.

Interestingly, that was one of the comments on the video Listen again. He is not saying they should be; he is allowing HTs the freedom to decide whether or not they should be. Presently it has to take at least a year or something, and doesn't it seem strange that if a teacher's classes are making little progress, it has to be at least that long before action can be taken? But the most interesting part is the questions he raises at the end and the interviewer's response. Nobody ever seems to want to engage with Gove when he talks about things like that! Just food for thought.

It's a good video and raises some good questions. I also like this one: BBC Breakfast: Michael Gove on axing crap school teachers (13Jan12) - YouTube Particularly at the end... it's quite an interesting exposé of Gove's logic from the horse's mouth.

Agreed - we're the recognised centre for that in our LEA and the school turns out a high proportion of successful children with additional needs through good differentiation and high levels of TA support during lessons. We have around 35 TAs, which isn't far off the number of QTS staff. This school would quickly become completely unrecognisable if the TAs were removed or simply not replaced.

@Trapper, I'm glad to hear this is the case in some places but it isn't the case everywhere yet and that is an entirely different battle to be fought. It should be that way as you say, but the entire country isn't quite there yet. When it comes to the specialist/mainstream debate, this has been going on for decades. At the end of the day it does always depend on the individual child of course, but there's also a case for suggesting that this is the very heart of the "differentiation" principle. Good teachers ought to be able to differentiate appropriately for individual classes and in principle this is absolutely true... however that depends on how well they are supported in doing so!

Has anyone noticed how the Network Manager is described as a TA in this letter? Though the teacher is very complimentary of her I must say. Either the teacher believes all support staff are effectively classed as TAs, or this is a school where there is no NM as we know it and the role is just added to a TA's responsibilities - which as it's a special school and they tend to be smaller, I can imagine might be the case. Nice that a teacher (a Senior Leader, no less!) mentioned someone with IT responsibilities though...

A TA does not necessarily require subject knowledge if they are working one-to-one or one-to-small-group with children with additional needs; what they do require knowledge of is those children themselves. They are acting in support of the learning process; what exactly is being learnt isn't so much at issue. Another reason to deploy TAs in a classroom including e.g. a few SEN kids with disruptive behaviour issues is to contain the disruption to that particular child, such that the negative behaviour does not spread to the rest of the learners.

True, although you do get those in all professions.

@superatticman, that's actually quite an encouraging story considering there are so many who don't get that eventual break, I think. +1 to David Attenborough narrating it, or possibly Morgan Freeman. Here's another type: The Responsibility Sponge With technical ability ranging from weak to exceptional, this denizen of disused prep rooms and staff-room-annex server rooms sees their responsibilities creep up with each passing year as another device with a plug on it is added to their silo. E-safety is piled on top of them as well, and their conscience won't allow them to flatly refuse when others are claiming they have no time for it. Having wanted to specialise (and having a skillset that is really intended for that), they instead find themselves lumbered with everything under the sun. The stress piles up until at some point they leave or have a heart attack. Despite all of this they actually quite enjoy a lot of their job while it lasts, sometimes too eager to say no because of this. Often this creature will progress towards the infamous BOFH type in later life, having not been born evil but had all the enthusiasm beaten out of them.

This one tickles me as I was thin and clean-shaven when I started here as a Technician, while my boss was "larger" and had a thick beard (half-Italian so it grew back in days even if he did shave it all off). Now I too am broader than I used to be and have a permanent beard... and my Technician is thin and clean-shaven. So yes, around here maybe it is a bit of a pattern!

We've got one who's just finished. If your current (or future) school would like some help on delivering apprenticeship programmes, I can Skype you as I was responsible for unit design and delivery for ours here.

IT is normally managed at the district level in the US, with small teams responsible for the IT affairs of a number of schools in their "catchment area", though I believe a US private school would employ its own staff just as ours would.

Here are two resources to support its constructive use within education: MinecraftEdu :: Home

I tend to enable it for Windows VMs but set it to 'ignore failure' rather than 'require success' as I want the VM backed up every night anyway, even if the job could've been cleaner. Naturally I disable it completely for Linux VMs.

This is something I posted years ago to fix a similar issue that might help: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mac/43879-snow-leopard-ad-integration-woes.html#post549033

Haha, nice how it worked on both levels!

Is this a record on EduGeek? An EIGHT-YEAR gap in posts on a single thread?

It has a command-line version that accepts all necessary parameters. I've posted in detail about the scripting we use here to automate the entire re-imaging process here.

As far as I know there's no way of scripting TrueCrypt; that's why we use this: Main Page/en - DiskCryptor wiki I can automate that as part of my staff laptop auto-build process.

Is ingestion by a coworker a common occupational hazard at Totteridge? "Some of the teachers weren't happy with the service that one of the team had provided, so they took him out back, sautéed him in garlic and proceeded to devour him in bite-size morsels. The IT Manager sighed on hearing the news and mused thoughtfully, 'I suppose we should get a new one then.'"

This looks like a good job. Very good pay in relative terms too. Is it just me or is there a trend towards voluntary-aided schools offering better remuneration packages? It does look like more of an NM role, but then it's a primary school I suppose.