AngryTechnician

At both my current and previous school, this is in our contract. In the case of staff, this shouldn't be even remotely surprising. The school is paying you to do work, they have every right to claim ownership. If you worked for a company as a programmer, the work you do is theirs. Why should lesson plans be any different? I agree it is a bit odd in the case of students, though it was the case during my undergrad. Not that I care. My alma mater is welcome to my crappy final year project; I look back at it now and wonder how the hell I got the grade I did!

Crikey, I look as gormless as usual. Luckily so does everyone else (Apart from Tony, who looks as devilishly handsome as ever).

This sort of nonsense where MS partners don't seem to understand the pricing model is one of the things that @witch, @elsiegee40 and I had a blast about at a meeting with the Microsoft UK education managers a couple of years back. Unfortunately, Microsoft were (and still are) convinced that all their partners understand the licensing perfectly.

Indeed, Microsoft have in fact confirmed in the past that because they are a US company, the Patriot Act can be used by the US government to access any data they store, even in the Ireland datacentre. Microsoft admits Patriot Act can access EU-based cloud data | ZDNet

Temporary Internet Files should never be part of the roaming profile, as it is stored in AppData\Local, which by definition should not roam. If this folder is being copied to their roaming profile directory on the server, it is almost certainly a symptom of a partially-corrupted profile. Deleting and recreating the profile always fixes it in my experience.

Saying it is "not secure" is subjective. No computer system is completely secure. Ask to see their risk assessment. Saying the data is not held in the UK is correct. However, Google Apps is covered under the Safe Harbor framework, so storing data in Google Apps is not automatically in breach of the Data Protection Act just because the data is held outside the EU. This fact is poorly understood by many, and is probably the most frequent reason for rejection of Google Apps in local government. In short, the LA probably mean well, but they haven't done their homework. C-, must try harder, etc.

Are you determined to have them shutdown rather than Sleep/Hibernate? We just have ours go to Sleep after 35 mins inactivity (and Hibernate 30mins after). Saves power during the day as well as overnight, and it doesn't matter if they are logged off or not.

True. I prefer the Home Use Program as it legally allows non-work use, and there is no administration required by the school. With Work at Home you are supposed to keep records of who has used it, and you have to give out a single key to everyone. You are also supposed to make "reasonable efforts" to ensure they delete it when they leave.

Don't forget that if you are an EES/SA customer, you can set up your staff to access the Home Use program which gets you the Professional Plus version for £8.95/$9.95

I'm astonished it took this long, they ceased being able to produce quality goods almost a decade ago. My previous landline phone, DVD player, and stereo were Philips, and each one turned out to be awful and broke down quickly, all having since been replaced. We still have a Philips fax machine in the office and it is a terrible piece of kit (though to be fair, the same is true of almost all fax machines).

You only have to check the "Similar Threads" list at the bottom of this page for a litany of complaints about these things. They are terrible and the software is even worse. The TTS ones aren't fabulous either, but at least they are cheap and they work.

Yep, read that myself this morning and before even finishing the article I'd come to the conclusion that it was nonsense. Surely you've learned by now that all technology stories on BBC News are utter tosh?

According to the Android app, Boxford and Avantis are both there, though helpfully it doesn't say what stand. Brother are there too on F130. Haven't checked all of them so there may be more, or the app may be wrong.

Advanced Installer has a freeware version, and I rarely need anything more than the feature set you get with that.

I was fully prepared for that website to be a prank that had been created recently, but WHOIS indicates the domain was registered in March 2008, and there's years of posts on it... This has to be my favourite bit of commentary: Pylon of the Month: September 2009

1 question: how much has she offered you to make that one the permanent default theme?

Our normal ones are. But I'm not convinced that Live ID will accept three letter words in lowercase.

You can use any Apple ID that is NOT linked to VPP to actually do the install. We use a single ID per class set, and also use Meraki, so rest assured it does work once you've got it going.

I return top my point about 5 year olds. Does anyone really think we should be wasting time trying to get 5 year olds to sign in with a Live ID (complete with strong password) to find and install an app? As for comments about 'the Apple way', not so long ago I would have agreed, but now we have VPP and MDM. It's not the Apple way any more. Their way is better.

I use the search built in to Notepad++ for this sort of thing.

Not unless the amount of use is "significant", which would be a problem anyway without HMRC getting involved. EIM21613 - Particular benefits: accommodation, supplies and services: meaning of not significant use for private purposes

Yes. Allowing a reasonable amount of personal use of school IT is good for work-life balance in my view. As professionals, staff are expected to manage that time so that their use does not interfere with their duties. We do have Smoothwall in place so use is logged, and I am militant about staff locking workstations to prevent kids getting to it. Also worth pointing out that in my last school, which was a secondary school, we allowed Facebook for students too, subject to the same expectations. It was actually very useful in gathering evidence of cyberbullying that would otherwise have happened at home where we couldn't monitor it.

I have to say I didn't realise there were so many different services out there doing this - I was under the impression it was a few big ones and that was it. Keep them coming, the longer the list of alternatives when I inevitably get asked for it, the better!

If you use the Advanced dialog you can set a Deny Delete permission on Folder1 and apply it to subfolders only. I think that should achieve what you need.

Like many we had a snow day on Friday last week, and helpfully our text messaging provider (Clarion Call) had severe performance issues which meant there were long delays before parents and staff received the closure notifications. They've issued an apology today, but this is far from the first problem we've had, and I've been recommending we look elsewhere for years. Our DH, on the other hand, is frequently very defensive of Clarion Call for reasons I have yet to fathom, and is claiming that they weren't the only ones with problems last week, so there is no point in us considering alternatives. He specifically said that Parentmail had similar issues on Friday, but I've heard from school who had no problems. I'd be interested to hear from anyone using this or any other text services, and whether you had problems on Friday? tl;dr: What service does your school use to text parents, and did you have problems with it on Friday 18th?