AngryTechnician

Definitely tailor your questions to the person giving the tour: I was shown around by a member of SMT, so technical questions wouldn't have been appropriate, as they were more interested in how I interacted with non-technical bods. Also, ask questions about what you're being shown. For example, if you get shown IWBs in every room, ask how well used they are by staff.

End of July? 4Gon are listing them as 'In Stock' right now, and I received my back-ordered one from them on Wednesday...

We have to remember that this right is not absolute and does not cover all situations. If it were, schools would be violating it every day. Children would be entitled to voice obscenities at staff all day long without being reprimanded. They would be allowed to take photos of teachers on their phones and share them around unrestricted. Technically they would also be allowed to do nothing but watch TV in school all day because we could not interfere with them "receiving information". I disagree with the council's decision, but trotting out the Human Rights Act like it overrides everything else is nonsense. I believe that legally they are within their rights to stop her using a camera. Ethically, it is very questionable indeed.

Habbo Hotel chats silenced over sex allegations - Telegraph Very disappointing and a bit surprising. It wasn't long ago that CEOP used Habbo in their Thinkuknow training as an example of one of the better-moderated services, and yet this has been going on apparently undetected until now.

I've heard about these sorts of interview techniques, but never actually been subjected to them. The closest I've ever got to bizarre interviews were the ones I did for IBM's graduate programme, part of which involved a teamwork exercise building something out of LEGO. I can sympathise with the idea of going off-piste for graduate job recruitment as it's difficult to judge a group of people who don't have experience, but if I was ever asked to be a tree when going for an experienced role, I would simply walk out. I think it's fair to say I have a pretty low tolerance for HR nonsense.

I'm not terribly impressed with ours - to be honest I think the ST was a bit of a misstep by Dell. I won't be buying any more of them, and I hope they've learned some lessons when it comes to designing Windows 8 slates in the near future.

Posted to our school community on Edmodo.

Another way to do this would be to run subst in a logon script.

Released 17/05/2012: Dell System BIOS A04 Curiously, the driver page for ours only lists A03, but when you click on that, the newer A04 is listed under 'Other versions'.

Just checking back in to report that my problems with WDS on the Latitude ST pretty much went away after upgrading from BIOS version A01 to A04, despite none of the newer BIOS versions having any PXE fixes listed.

If they want something official, tell them to call your LA child services team and they will explain basic child protection to them. This was covered in our CP training and there's no good excuse for SLT not understanding it.

You can't. If you somehow managed to disable the ribbon, you wouldn't be able to use Access - there's no legacy toolbar that would magically come back in its place. Time to man up and finally update those lesson plans he's been using since 1998.

I've never actually had one break, but they are touch things to remove. As far as I can tell there is no real trick to it. The only thing I can think of is that yours may have gone brittle.

That actually exists (at least the ordering a taxi bit): London Taxi App

We've done exactly this, for two reasons: 1. Staff send huge amounts of attachments via email, despite my protestations. We don't have a leased line, so having those emails go out to a datacenter in Ireland only to have to come straight back again would introduce an unnecessary delay to mail delivery. 2. I have several months worth of backups of our local Exchange server. That length of retention is not currently available in Office 365. If someone accidentally deletes stuff at the end of the Summer term, and doesn't notice until the Autumn term (this has actually happened), that data would not be recoverable on 365. It would be recoverable on our own server.

If you do not follow a person, they cannot send you a direct message, so if the teacher account does not follow anyone, any direct message can only go from the teacher account to a pupil. This could still cause a liability for the teacher, as any private communication should be avoided, so the login credentials should be made available to SMT/IT support so that it is clear the account is not private to one teacher.

A significant proportion of Chrome updates are only for Flash vulnerabilities. My point is that it will mean a step change from Microsoft in terms of how often they issue IE updates.

That's the biggest problem I have with this. Either Microsoft are going to have to push updates at short notice up to 3 times a month (yes it is that frequent sometimes) or we are going to have a lot of compromised Windows 8 machines.

Not exactly a turnkey solution, but I did it by writing some code for our intranet using EWS that pulls the parents email addresses (by form or set) from our MIS, then automatically creates a draft message on our Exchange server and opens it in webmail. The same would be possible with Office 365, but not with Google Apps as the API for Gmail is rubbish. We do also have an account with ClarionCall for whole-school messages and SMS, but very few people have access to that here and general staff were clamouring for a way to email all the parents in their form.

Email won't die, but it's use will change. The biggest change is already happening, as it shifts from a messaging system to a notification system - i.e. only used by automated systems. Until there is a single open system to replace it as a notification medium, it will remain.

Well, they need to create demand for Windows 8 somehow...

Our Geography teacher is helping with ours. Really you just need someone with a bit of interest and who can translate your explanation of a technical concept to the kids in a more engaging way. I've been told by staff I have a knack for explaining technical concepts, but watching this guy take what I say and almost immediately re-phrase it is actually quite impressive.

I've had a Pro on back order with 4gon since March, and no news yet. Getting a bit concerned as to whether they will actually be available in sufficient numbers for a summer deployment at this rate.

Oh, now I really want to know who you picked... And as for companies reading the forums: yep, been there, nearly got the t-shirt. I'm pretty sure that one of the companies that monitors EduGeek figured out who I was and tried to drop me in it with my manager after I cancelled a load of contracts with them. Luckily my manager wasn't a douchebag about it (unlike the company involved) and it wasn't a problem for me.

At an easier level, we just started a Kodu club after school. Only in week 4 so couldn't give you a full report, but I would say that getting a teacher to help you with it will make a big difference over trying to run it on your own (or with another non-teacher). There is no substitute for having someone who actually knows how to teach and manage a class, even if they don't know how to program themselves.