Richard_Finnigan

Yes well I was trying to be very diplomatic and fair to them possibly bending the stick too far in their direction.... some of them have got honesty issues.

Open Office has its own version of Basic and both VBA and Open Office Basic have a lot of good tutorial pages and forums on the net.

Teaching primary age children I have found that context sensitive tool ribbons have lowered the accessable age range of Mediator and Corel Painter by one and two years respectively so I can now consider using Matchware Mediator with Year 5s and I can use Painter in a limited way with Year 4s. It's all about exposing functionality to the user. On the basis of this experience I am putting in a bid to have Office 2007 installed in the ICT suite. Open Office does have its own little context sensitive tool ribbon that pops up underneath the main toolbar but with young children the size of the icons makes a big difference so my vote goes the MS Office way.

Hi DgSmith, I use gamemaker with all of Year 8 and not Year 7 just because of the scheme of work that I have in place rather than any actual decision about its level of dfficulty.

If you can afford it you absolutely can't go wrong with a set of Wacom A6 Bamboo drawing tablets they can be bought for £35 each and when I bought darwing tablets off Wacom they were also willing to sell me a set of spare pens which is essential for schools. What's really good is that you get Art Rage 2 bundled with the tablet and the two together will provide lots of Art/ICT activities that you can do with the kids. BTW don't underestimate the power of Artrage it supports tracing, layers and PNG export with transparent backgrounds, also the stencils and colour sampling from imported pictures are excellent. If there is an award for user interface design then Art Rage 2 should get it.

Anim8or for 3d modelling is quite good, takes a bit of learning though, hardly ever crashes and runs on lower spec systems and its also got a small and active community around it so there are tutorials available for it. http://www.anim8or.com/main/index.html

For various reasons, partly to do with our school and partly I believe to do with the faults and deficiencies of the Serco Facility product and service, we had such a frustrating time with Serco Facility that I ended up making Access databases to fill the gaps and to achieve a successful MIS development. I started with a student profile and moved on from there, it took me a countless number of hours but its been an enjoyable learning experience, and as the old saying goes "What does not kill you, makes you stronger." We've now replaced the Facility CMIS Admin. (which is quite good) with our own student records database and we are going to trial flying solo for the next twelve months. The MIS requirements of a prep school are not that extensive so I'm not sure that we really needed to buy Facility in the first place. I am keen to find other schools that might be keen to join this project.

We are deciding whether or not to renew our Atomic Learning License and we do find that it can be very slow at times. Now this might be down to our shared connection which means that if our nieghbours are in and accessing the internet the aviable bandwidth on our connection drops. Friday afternoon is a particularly bad time. Or it may be down to Atomic Learning. So is Atomic Learning unreliable for you ?

Yeh I know .... Open source evangalists remind me of the extreme revolutionaries that I used to argue with in the 1980s. They are idealogically driven. It's better to just state your point and move on.

Mediator by Matchware is excellent in my opinion as is Gamemaker. Phrogram looks very interesting, I must look into that.

Gamemaker is excellent I use it with Year 8s and an afterschool club, its one of the few educational/child friendly applications that I know of that has a decent text book. "The Game Makers Handbook", its a welcome relief to be able to avoid the usual teacher's demos and to let the children figure it out from the book. Its good for them to learn how to deal with technical English. Mediator by Matchware is another excellent drag and drop development tool. I disagree with the educational reason d'etre for all of these drag and drop programming tools, as soon as you try to go beyond the basics the visual programming structures become overly complex and difficult to read, its far easier to do it in code and there is no substitute for teaching the children how to cope with code. As with any difficult learning objective the only place to begin is at the beginning so with Year 6 I use Excel and VBA to create simple puzzles and games and with Year 5 we do some Logo work.

I teach young children and the problem I find with a lot of open source software is that the user interfaces are often over crowded and difficult to interpret with most of the functionality presented on one or two levels of the application. Also often the icons and controls are often far too small. This really does not work at all well with primary age children.

I think that waiting for Server 2008 to get bedded in possibly with its first Service pack release might be a good idea, at the moment support is not an issue for us, we are going for an in house solution.

Thanks Micheal, we are moving on from Serco Facility at the end of the month, thats why I was doing data transfers, I'll look into the point about Service Pack 4 on MS SQL Server, though I think I've got that covered. I want to upgrade to MS SQL Server 2008 during the spring break.

Thanks for your reply, it was the Server Operating system that was being upgraded SQL Server carried on running slowly and then disconnected when the server rebooted. Nothing showed up on the Server or SQL Server logs I think the records in the table have locks placed on them, there is a procedure that you can run to identify and then clear those locks, but I have rebuilt the table so that this no longer an issue.

Yeh Access is such a complex application that its particularly important to keep it bang up to date, also for me its the application that I use to control Excel and Word, everthing I do hinges around it.

Recently a key student information table that I've been working on was corrupted while I was demonstrating the database to staff when the Server was having a service pack installed. The Access client started to run slowly and then I got an error message stating that it was not possible to save this record because another user user is writing to this record. The client then lost its connection to MS SQL Server because the Server was rebooting. So I slogged through all of the possible causes until I found out that Server had been upgraded during my training session with the office staff. The table has been corrupted and I've had to do another datatransfer. I think that the Server Upgrade is the most likely cause of this problem, has anyone encountered this issue before ?

Hi I develop MS Office applications using VBA Access, Excel and Word for my school and I recently hit an awkward error message that I had to do a lot work on to resolve. One piece of advice that I came across was to ensure that the latest Service Packs had been installed so that I am not contending with problems that have already been resolved. Access is on Service Pack 1 and Excel and Word are on Service Pack 2. I would like to get all three applications on Service Pack 3 but I have been told that the Service Packs are not very useful and it looks like that job wont get done. So how many of you out there have installed all of the MSO Service Packs up to 3 on your school's machines and do you think its worth it ? Richard Finnigan St John's School Northwood

Running Clipmate off a USB stick is very useful, it stores everything that you copy including the hyperlink if you copy off a webpage, does excellent screen capture as well as the ability to export the images directly from clipmate as images ....its a mature product stable, reliable cheap to buy, you can organise your clips into collections .... and so on ..... (more positives i'm singing praises to it)