danIT

At our school the music department bought Apple Macs: G5 power mac 2.0Ghz dual processor with 2GB Ram with the nice 20" apple cinema displays. Each came with Cubase and Reason, also garageband with ilife. Usb keyboard 2 Octaves. we are a visual and performing arts college and music department were insistant on having macs, we tried to go the windows route with cubase and reason both being PC products too. The learning curve was rather steep but there picking things up. Depends on personal preference and staff expereince.

are u in cmis or sims?

i didint bring up ilife (dr_dos did i think) , as i stated in an earlier post i didnt want to get into a discussion over mav vs PC no ones a winner, im stressing like urself to buy what the user needs and just highlighting some of the problems with it! go for mac if thats what you want! but ill highlight we dont have much fun using macs for video, well users dont anyway! but there pc people with macs being dumped on them from the powers that be! if you know the mac platform id agree but if your a windows person stay windows, purely for ease. Dan (not wishing to offend, take on the world or rub people up the wrong way in any way)

http://www.xvsxp.com/finalscore/index.php check the scores for what u need your mac for?

like i said not really getting into the debate, i have seriously looked at ilife especially after we spent £150,000 around 6 months ago on macs. mac software such as ilife are great packages since they come bundled with new macs, agree that this is way better than a windows machine. Although we have seen nothing new from microsoft in a while. For our needs, Music - you would probably say garageband, you can plug an electric guitar staright in theres no setup and its "plug and play" to coin a phrase. but its not what a secondary school looking to introduce music technology at GCSE and As/a2 level need. They need cubase and reason higher end products. We have a number of music tech's and teachers who/have had professional experience and they agree that garageband is limited. Primary level its great as in intro product. Using samples and USB keyboards to create simple melodies. easily picked up. Art - iphoto? not really a product for use within schools, a good product lots of pro's, but to be honest we went with photoshop and also bought macromedia studio 8 - a personal favourite of mine. Again high end products which cost a fair bob or two but are ideal for our school. Drama - havent really got much out of them so far bit of DVD creating, already had pinnacle for windows anyway which they ocntinue to use alongside media studies. For instance we have a sony camcorder for recording performances and such like but they record direct to DVD lovely if you dont have a mac. Mac doesnt recognise them at all, but slip it into a PC and away you go stright into premier/pinnacle even movie maker and away you go. Im not trying to knock mac products or mac's in general, i have an ibook at home and i love it its my main computer! I will admit imovie and Idvd are cracking programs and if you do knock out a fair bit of video to DVD go for it, although we do keep alot of our movie media on hard disk rather than DVD disk (lacie drive for instance). Im also sure iweb will be great for some people, the clean design and easy intergration with all things apple i like alot. but hey....who am i to judge each solution suits a different user, just dont let the sleak sexy design or mac's and there software sway you in anyway! There are plenty of Mac haters out there and i have to say im not one of those. (honest!!) spend £1500 on a mac and watch everyone go "WOW can we have one of those in our office" then ask them to empty the recycle bin.

no point waiting for bootcamp, why buy a mac for windows, although a new develpment, mac will be geared towards mac users. But dont get me started, this is about video editing and to be honest you should go for whihc ever option either: Fits your budget (but you want value for money so dont buy a mac) although if you think they are go for it. Ease of use (also learning curve getting use to new operating system if not previously used things as basic as closing and opening an application) its all donw to personal prefrence, we spent £1500 on each power mac, and im convinced because weve done it that we can build similar machines i.e. Windows based for £800 or maybe less? just how much video editing are u going to be doing, and how do you wish to out put it. have to agree piannacle is rubbish!

reset the folders?? 1. Open the Tools menu and click Folder Options. The Folder Options dialog box appears. 2. Click the View tab. 3. Click the Reset All Folders button. 4. Click Apply, then click OK.

thanks for the links!

Having seen the school i work for buy 50 G5 power macs top of the range, i would recommend that you buy a PC. Nothing particularly wrong with using a mac and would usually recommend a mac but to be honest PC with loads of RAM and Adobe Premier 'you canny' beat it!

we setup a number of new accounts i.e. exam1, exam2, etc all exams files are copied to these folders They are handed out to students at the beginning of the exam and they log on and are asked to change the password at log on. Typically students are sat about a metre and half away from each other, we thought about screens and booths but it really doesnt seem nessercary. I beleive there are a set number of printers per person, 1 printer for every 10 pupils?? not sure if this is correct number. We also help invidulate for the first hour to iron out any technical problems. Internet restricted, to be honest thats all we do. After all who needs internet when you can use the help inside all the microsoft products anyway!

Has anyone come across any good resources for ICT related games - quizzes - flash animation - movies that we can use at secondary level? Just looking for a few things to help motivate students a little more, wondered if any of you guys have come across anything? Thanks Dan

glorified webdesign company? masquerading as a virtual school> surely not

we have cameras all over the place, none of them have been placed inside toilets, and i doubt ever will! Im not sure parents would totally agree with it, legal or not. Most cameras are on entrances and exits to the school, protecting us mainly from break-in rather than vandlism. We have remote view software installed so cameras are accessable from any workstation.

you really do have to rely on the teacher presence, checking mice at the end of a lesson can help, aslong as teachers stick to it, our IT labs in IT get very litte vandelism, but around the school others labs get abused, we refuse to supply mice continuly to rooms which have been vandalised regualrly, we spent £300 on mice and keyboards in one room last year! that room is now pretty shocking, the powers that be are going to assign the room to a member of staff rather than leaving it as an un-adopted room for use with IT. cable tie to VGA cable is a pain!

we've had the soft tft's for 5 months - all gravy "Touch Wood"

Im fairly webpage design/development literate, designed a number fo sites and currently in the process of creating a school website, little front end to the school while we get exhange, share point, and class server up and running. IVe been looking at a number of CMS's plone, mambo etc...all seem very nice liike the look of wordpress too. But does anyone have any links to tutorials or screencast/podcast about using the systems. I can set them up easily enough but its the rest i have problems with setting up pages and such like? Anyone give me any pointer?

we have many teachers who have recieved laptops though this incentive. WE order them in bulk and they are delivered direct to us, we log serial and install all nessercary software including AV - updatable via Network. Supply them with a local account as a power user and they retun them every term or so for check over upgrade etc... AUP is essential, its a good idea that teachers sign for a WORKING laptop and date it so when they bring it back problems u know when they occured and by whom.

someone maybe able to help me too, couple of months ago we trialed this piece of software, http://www.securus-software.com/ we loved it, basically its logs all keypresses and words on screen which match a "badwords" database, its logs time, computer, user and also takes a screenshot of the page with the bad word. stores them on a nice page ready for you to print out of save for later. has anyone come across anything similar that is either free or cheaper than the £4000 this company wants?? Dan

look for a register at this website, cant remeber the url, its dida-delievered, cant spell, but you get the idea, viedo and odf tutorials on studio mx

HAs anyone got there hands on any manuals relating to the use of CMIS, envloving any of the following: Report writing SEN views (module) E-portal use, including use of assesment Exams or anything for that matter. I know they release them but our support people never pass them on, i also know there like gold dust especially electronic versions? Anything ppreciated, Dan

we had this problem but for 50 macs, i couldnt find a way to apple sciprt local users accounts, as i might on a windows computer, luckily we had someone do it for us created 10 accounts on 30 machines manually. you could set one machine up with the correct accounts and permissions and image it and send the image to the rest of the macs?

there is an open source flash file out there which will create a magazine type booklet, although it does lack the zoom function, its called pageflip,http://www.iparigrafika.hu/pageflip/ its free. it does require some knowledge of flash, but its pretty straight forward once you've messed about with it for a while. Ive worked round the zoom function by creating pdf file embeded within a webpage when the flash page is clicked, so for each page there is a padf file which when clicked loads, so you have zoom function and ability to print specific pages. but obviously it requires flash plugin? we like it, use it for the school prospectus online. if you like i can send you and example?

I have two of the exact same printers purchased a while back now, 3 yrs or so ago, before i started here. In my experience this printer model is a shocker, it rearly does anything right, netwroking problems galore, although it maybe be pcounter causing a few of the problem.....anyway We often get pages which come out with your described effect, usually the primary colour most used in the printout, for instance test page Magenta. We are yet to find a cure, but to be honest we only keep them because we spent som much on them all those years ago, just picked up 4 hp colour laserjets 2550n i believe, these are outstanding so far! they were £250 i think.

20 Servers 2 D/C, DNS, DHCP 3 File Servers 2 Application 2 ISA 2004 (NLB cluster) 3 Web Servers (NLB cluster) 3 Exchange Servers & SQL (A/A/P Cluster) 2 Print Servers 1 iSCSI SAN 1 Backup Server 1 Proxy Server

we user dameware, its light weight picks up all our domains and member computers, it can do a silent install so you can monitor pupils without them knowing, take screenshots, lock the keyboard, show local and remote mouse pointer, pretty nifty. no so practical for say a "normal" teacher, little bit of networking knowledge required. Dan