Ephelyon

Inside Government - E-Safety This might be good to learn about current developments in the UK e-Safety world at the moment, if you can get the funding. Costs about 275 quid I think.

True Ketlane, though we often do have a little more intuition for the "instant alarm bells" kind of leasing deals as we would have a better understanding of what the equipment would retail for in the first place. Having said that, many Business Managers might also have this if they've previously worked in procurement.

We use PARS for a lot of things and this is one of the things it can do so we just use that, for both e-mailing and texting.

To be fair, Becta's frameworks may have left something to be desired but they certainly weren't THIS bad, and at least there was some form of structure that would have prevented the really bad eggs among suppliers from slipping through the net directly onto Primary Heads like this. Their pricing may have been a little inflated but I gather (and only gather) that their vetting schemes for potential suppliers were reasonably rigorous.

Ah, true. Depends if anyone on the Governors has the necessary experience as well of course. Here a couple of ours do, but I can imagine not every school would be in the same position. And yes, this lends further credence to the "schools cluster" paradigm, with secondary schools assisting primary schools in matters such as this. Again, to be fair to the government here, Gove has also said he'd like these clusters to become more common as well. Maybe he thought that would mitigate this problem before it started, only not enough schools have done it so far...

In fairness, that's what we have Business Managers (not to mention Network Managers!) for. Please excuse my ignorance as I won't get time to watch the programme this evening, but... maybe the issue here would be why more appropriate people weren't as involved in the procurement process as they could've been. If the Head decides they want to purchase laptops for the school, they're the boss so it'll have to happen but their involvement in the process really ought to end there. From then on it should be handled by the Business Manager / Network Manager / ICT Co-Ordinator or similar. I wouldn't blame Heads for having the wool pulled over their eyes here (I've been fleeced by many a mechanic before I wised up as I know very little about cars!), but maybe questions could be asked as to their procedures in not delegating these tasks. Unless the programme deals with this issue already and I'm talking nonsense of course... Maybe we could move this to BtRD so it's not searchable? Can see some already-defensive Heads getting shirty here...

Hi @wagnerk and others. Just wondered if anyone had gathered any more info or progress on this over the summer. Perhaps it's a silly question though, as we all know that everyone in IT spends their summers relaxing on a beach in perfect bliss...

You can if you do it by MAC address, which we find cumbersome at our site to do the traditional way in WDS. So we did it a less traditional way! We use a script that stores the computer's name in a text file on the WDS server, the name of which is its MAC address. The startup command to run the script is executed as a domain user who is the only one who can read or write to that folder. The script itself is a batch file converted into an EXE using the freeware tool available at f2ko.de. This is because it offers encryption of the target file, prompting for a password on execution (so the pupils can't randomly re-image our machines, which are all set to WDS network boot by default and prompt for F12). What's actually executed when the boot environment starts is a different script (plain old batch file) that's used as a wrapper, to make sure you can't just close the password prompt and bypass the protection. The encrypted name-recording script checks first to see if this computer's MAC address entry already exists. If it does, it doesn't prompt for the name. So if I do want a computer with a certain MAC address to become something else, I just change the name in the text file or delete it. Once the new workstation has rebooted for the first time, there's another script within the image that checks this file and sets the computer name accordingly, THEN joins the domain manually from the command line (so we have WDS set to not automatically join the domain). We did this because it was previously the last thing we couldn't completely automate in a satisfactory manner about the imaging process.

The attitude embodied in today's quote is becoming more and more common among senior leaders, so it's nice to see some balanced sense on the topic! It's important to remember that the educational function is not the only one that technology is facilitating within a school - financial management, personnel management, site management anyone? Without those processes working correctly, you don't have a school at all! I've been called in by our Finance department before when something has gone wrong with the IT facilities because, in their own words, "we can't work". As in they actually cannot continue to carry out adequate financial management until the problem is resolved. Consider building architecture as an analogy. There is a house, say, which is kept upright by its foundations. The house represents a school, and inside the house there are many things going on, the most prominent of which is teaching and learning. But what are the foundations actually there to enable the continued existence of? Is it what's going on inside the house? No. It is the house itself, the "institution" of it as it were, without which there cannot be anything going on inside at all. A different house might represent a hospital, where what is most prominently going on inside is patient care. For that house, again, the foundations' job is largely the same. Just because the point of having the house there is so that things can be going on inside it, this does not mean that we manage the foundations of the house based solely on that principle. They do not equate. If you need to improve the drainage around your home's foundations, say, you're not doing it with any particular regard to what you intend to do with your time at home. It's about keeping the home itself there and undamaged. It is also this purpose that your organisation's IT facilities are ultimately facilitating. In this sense, then, sometimes an area of the foundations (in this case, the IT system) needs developing because it simply needs developing, in a very generic sense - this is often the case in IT because the underlying technologies are so generic themselves. Something might be out of date and will soon become unsupported by the manufacturer, perhaps. Or it could be on the real back-end, such as server virtualisation, where the industry as a whole is advancing and it may be perceived that not to keep up now could be costly in the future. Attempting to tie that particular development down to a specific teaching and learning requirement would be difficult and, in any case, unnecessary. No organisation is all about service delivery, whatever their advertising gumph might suggest, because they can't afford to be. This might go some way towards showing up the chicken-and-the-egg question that GrumbleDook puts so succinctly. Just as the pedagogy can be agnostic to the technology, the technology is generally agnostic to the pedagogy. Yes, technology is often created, adapted or advanced in response to user requirements, be they business needs, children's education, patient care or anything else. But IT innovation doesn't always work that way - some questions to consider: 1) Did anyone in particular ask Linus Torvalds for the Linux operating system? 2) Did anyone in particular ask Apple for the iPhone? 3) Did anyone in particular ask Google for Google Docs? (I could be showing my ignorance here, but I've found no evidence to suggest that any of these three were created solely in response to a particular set of user requirements as presented.) These inventors' ideas and implementations may or may not have been based on some understanding of user requirements, but either way, quite often in the IT sector we innovate because we need to or because we simply wish to, rather than because we were asked to. Some might say this shouldn't be the case, but either way it is the case, and it has been for the past few decades that IT has existed in at least its semi-modern form. Consequently, the idea that developments in school IT facilities occur solely as components of an educational strategy devised by senior leaders in response to educational needs is inaccurate, insufficiently holistic and unwise as an approach, because there will always be other factors worthy of consideration as well. My own little story (not suggesting for a moment that I think this applies to everyone else out there), in analogy form as I would present it to an educator: Consider the child - a teenager, let's say - who is inquisitive and has an interest in physics. He is fascinated by the idea of Newton's Cradle and decides to design and build one for himself. He finds out everything he needs to know, collects the materials, sketches the diagrams and finally builds the device. Having put the finishing touches to it, he hesitates for a moment in anticipation, and then… *push*. A smile spreads across his face as he sits back and just watches it for a time. He is not interested in the practical applications of his contraption. He revels in the marvel that is the device itself: the complex interconnected system of acting and reacting forces. Quite a few of the people who go into IT, some of them ending up in education, are youngish men (and women) like me, who initially went into it because we were interested solely in the technology itself. The potential danger of that can, I think, be avoided by remembering that IT is such a generic set of technologies - you can do practically anything with it anyway. If you put the foundation analogy and the child analogy together, you come to where I was not too long ago, and where many others have been and will be. Naturally, however, where technology is applied in the workplace, its use does need to be directed and not merely whimsical as described above. Senior leaders actually have a tremendous opportunity before them to take these members of staff and develop them further, encouraging them to see both sides of the coin: the technology itself, AND its applications for the greater good. If you tell the child in the analogy above that his device is pointless and irrelevant without a practical application (that you can see), he'll stop listening to you. If, as a senior leader, you force-feed your technical whizz-kids an education-centric vision and thereby, frankly, stamp on their particular brand of creativity, they will become disheartened and unproductive. But, if you can share in their marvel and at the same time help them to find ways of applying their art in ways that are useful - as my employer has, to my great benefit - then they have the potential to become a tremendous asset to you and to your organisation. In short, the senior leader who accepts that technology in a school goes beyond just delivering education, and develops their staff and their facilities holistically, will reap the benefits.

Yes, the newly-joined computer should restart to complete the domain join and begin to receive machine-level Group Policy settings from the domain.

@wagnerk, did you ever get the chance to speak to anyone about this?

Does it have to be PowerShell?

Indeed - in some schools, half the users are spending half their time trying to break the thing (either by cutting wires or trying to hack the system). Any solid evidence of the latter in business and you're out on your arse, but in education it's very difficult to have a user who constitutes a 'real and present danger' to the network removed. Not that I don't think that's justified in a sense as they're only kids and all (been there myself in fact, many times!), but it's just something else we have to adapt to.

And how many businesses have everybody hot-desking every 60 minutes?

Agreed, it's often not easier or harder, just different.

Thanks, wagnerk

While the Education sector is obviously a different working environment to industry, or healthcare, essentially we are all IT professionals to my mind. The client sector we happen to work in is largely (though not totally) irrelevant as far as our skillsets and the way we should be approached and valued are concerned. Having said that, one reason why education is different is the compression of a number of roles typically found for a similarly-sized organisation in industry into just a few people (or, in my case at the moment, effectively one person with some support from an apprentice just out of training). This is an important difference and should be acknowledged. There is also a very uplifting side to working in education; here I can join the staff choir and help out with the Language Leaders club, i.e. use all sides of myself. I think schools need to be encouraged to realise that their IT staff actually have their own profession and standards; that IT is its own independent sector, entirely in and of itself, and that their IT staff don't just fit in with the curricular side of their school vision. We can celebrate the positive sides of working in education (recruitment?), while at the same time working on the recognition that our profession is a big boy now and has some standards of its own, which it is not for individual schools (or organisations of any nature) to redefine at whim to suit themselves.

I don't think it's necessarily that more of us don't want it, more that so many of us have accepted that it's never going to happen after years of being blatantly passed over and ignored because their schools are run by teachers, for teachers (not that all are, but looking around it seems as if many are). If that changed, the situation might improve. Perhaps you're right with the FITS/MoU approach; I think it's difficult to say at this stage. Perhaps we could ask for BCS approval and occasional supervision? BCS may well have been involved in the "professionalisation" of a sub-branch before; maybe we could ask them. I think it would be very helpful if you or Tony were able to broach these initial ideas to the BCS, if you're willing. Maybe have somebody senior read both this thread and the poll thread (where some of the discussion has spilled over to) as a start... I'm not sure the majority wouldn't join if the idea were to be to fight for more recognition for them. There would always be those dissenters who would describe it as pie-in-the-sky thinking, right up to the minute it had any success. The key would be to make such an organisation very accessible to people in our position, which as people in this position ourselves, we ought to be able to collectively work out.

As I think it was GrumbleDook who said, people might start to join up if e.g. BCS announced that they would pursue this goal for us based on that deal: that those who wished for the extra recognition and/or to take the training courses would then become (at least) associate members. Perhaps we could also pitch it to them on the grounds that, while proportionately it may not be very many people, it does pretty much represent an entire client sector's worth of fellow IT professionals (those willing to give it a try anyway, which can be worked on).

The IT profession is very diverse, with similar technical positions to be found in all sectors (business, education, healthcare, etc.). Methods and standards for entry and progression within each client sector vary wildly as well. From this point of view, a single set of standards and/or bare minimum qualifications might seem a little inflexible. On the other hand, there could be an argument for unifying these standards across all client sectors. It would be easiest, from the point of view of presenting ourselves as a more united front with a set of common standards and career structures, to insist that all IT staff become a licensed member of a professional body. However, that's just not going to fly, and I would probably have been among those resenting such a move if I'd been at the start of my career when it was brought in. This is largely because many of us are (or at least start out) self-taught - myself included in fact - and if this approach were completely unworkable we wouldn't have the IT sector that we have today. Creating a professional body of our own also seems to be pie-in-the-sky thinking at the moment from my point of view. It might be possible, though, to work with and feed back to BCS, IET, NAACE and the like about "where we're at" in educational IT at the moment and see what could be done from there. It used to be the case (say 15 years ago) that IT in education was a very different ball game from the kind found in industry, but that gap is closing rapidly. The question is: does BCS know this? Senior leaders often don't seem to know it, the government doesn't seem to know it, even many of our own aren't always aware. So I think that whoever agrees with the above assertion should band together in informing and feeding back to the right people to get the ball rolling. The approach of coming in on the back of such a movement for all school support staff is a good one in an ideal world, but I can't see it happening as that was essentially what the SSSNB was, and short of making a large and embarrassing U-turn on policy, I can't see the current government being remotely interested in it (they'd just view the letters and evidence submitted as an attempt to breathe new life into something they've already decided they don't like). Presenting them with something that seems a little more fresh might work better from that point of view.

Just found another thread where a teacher made a similar suggestion to what we're trying to get going now, and this was two year ago: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/behind-red-door/57074-job-re-evaluation-3.html EdWhittaker, about halfway down that page. @EdWhittaker, you are a man of vision! Maybe we could follow up with the interested parties from this thread to see if any of them got anywhere with this?

On a different but slightly related note, I have this week succeeded in appealing to our LA to upgrade the Network Manager JDQ that I was under from what we call Grade 7 (i.e. SCP 25-29) to Grade 8 (i.e. SCP 29-34). Currently this applies only to me but it may leave room for other NMs in similar situations to have their jobs regraded likewise. Similar moves may also be possible for IT Technician positions (perhaps even in primary schools). I gather this has not been done before for positions like this. I am reasonably well-versed in the NJC job evaluation scheme as it applies to these roles now, so if anyone is interested, please PM me.

Completely agree. I thought it was Unison that had the majority of school support staff though? I'm in Unison.

I imagine it would be, yes, and we're considering both options in this thread. The poll, as I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong, please, @wagnerk), is just asking whether you would join one, which may or may not be a new body. A number of people have emphasised the need for "teeth" so far, which is why I think it would be great if BCS could do it as they're already well-respected elsewhere.

The problem is, they're not doing it. One of the reasons for that might be that there's too much else for them to be doing already, hence setting up a new body. However, yes, I agree, if we could get BCS to do it, that would be better. GrumbleDook is on their Policy Hub, but it seems they're a little busy at the moment. Unison doesn't seem to be doing much on issues like these right now either; they're too busy dealing with pensions and the like and they have been for a while now. I'd prefer BCS over NAACE, as the latter seems to be mainly to do with the teachers. Becta, of course, doesn't exist any more. The TDA or the SSSNB could possibly have taken this issue on too, but they've died a death as well...