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You know, I am slowly warming up to Fronter. Regardless of the trouble suffered by LGfL during the start of this academic year with their login system, it is very good when it works. I have been getting to grips with making pages, using tools and generally spicing things up as practice. I've seen productive (and not so productive) student message board posts, taught teachers how to use RSS feeds and promoted special events with the News tool. By digging into the tools and slowly putting up with the sometimes clunky interface, I have found it to be a lot of fun to use and I can't help but think of new ways for the teachers to make use of Fronter. If you were in Sixth Form and got to run a live advertising campaign as a project on an Internet based system in-school, wouldn't you be excited? I plan on presenting a number of ideas such as the ad campaign and more at a Fronter Development Group being started up next week. It's in-house but it means I can add more responsiblity to my CV and get an insight into how Fronter's usage will develop in-school. Maybe I can encourage more dynamic content in pages that the kids will enjoy. After all, it's comparable to a traditional classroom. Sitting there reading static text on a screen is dull, just like sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher drone on.

One of my jobs each week is to assemble the school's display that is shown above reception. This typically involves a slideshow of images, which this week was provided by staff who were on a ski trip. While looking at one image something stood out. That familiar stall where something isn't right or unusual on the screen and prevents me from moving on until I twig what it is. Students, check. Restaurant, OK that's normal so check. Appears to be at the top of the slopes, nice view in the background! Check. Isn't that one of the school netbooks on the table?

...you stick pins in marshmellow caterpillars. Wait I don't think I got the little Internet meme correct there. Some may recall my previous blog entry of why the education secotor is so enjoyable. The discovery of this little chap when cleaning up after the afterschool crowd further reinforces this. How random but cute!

Hello, I've seen people talking about work experience for year 10s here, and I was curious if I could find something here. So, I've got work experience 7-11th July 2014 (I think) and I'm looking for places to go. I have basic knowledge of IT and things, having built my own computer by hand too, and I'm looking for some kind of thing with IT, or developing or something. If I had some places, I will start on writing a application too, that is why there is not much info here . Anyways, thanks for looking, I'm based around Devon. -Elliot

Recycling bins filling up, spam folders overflowing. Yes it's that time of year again when you come into work with a bag full of leaflets and find half of them make their way into the bin. BETT 2012 is finished and the dust is settling in the Olympia Exhibition Hall for the last time with BETT 2013 scheduled for the ExCeL Centre instead. Click here for pciturs on Google+. This year saw the return of the Edugeek stand to provide tech staff with an amusing diversion in the form of a comfy sofa, piles of pizza and enough technical advice to sink a battleship. Hopefully all signed the poster and maybe caught a glimpse of a famous Edugeek celebrity. Unfortunately I didn't visit enough stands to do a news post so I'll put my highlights here instead. Serco - Serco were showing off their Progresso MIS this year, having written a completely new system to replace Facility. It's web-based, as can be expected these days, and has parental engagement tools built in to the MIS so you aren't adding a new product to deliver pupil data online to parents. Unfortunately I wasn't too impressed with the sales pitch; asking can I add a quick behaviour incident to a register led to a demo taking me to a whole new page. However, Progresso itself is definately worth a look at when weighing up what MIS to pick. Capita - The (in)famous developers of the SIMS software package were once again pitched front and centre near their rivals and the main entrance. I was given a very good overview of the Discover tool, though it came after I managed to crash SIMS on their demo unit! Discover is looking to be a very good data analysis tool that if you haven't installed yet, is well worth installing. Storyphones - Aimed at primary school kids, these all-on-one headphone/MP3 units are a feat of engineering in how to avoid destruction of your prized classroom equipment at the hands of overzealous children in single digits. They twist, they bend, they spring back to shape and are all updated at once with a USB dock. Google - I didn't dare to try the weird concoctions in test tubes, but I did grab a Google notebook. Seriously, but this "touchscreen" model needs a "stylus." What are you talking about? Of course I mean the paper kind and it's a rather spiffy one to boot. What do you mean I was supposed to be paying attention to their stand? Oh...yeah-- Horizon - "Can I help you?" chirped the lady in the stand. "Umm yeah, what this stand about?" I asked, nodding to the half-assembled train sitting on the stand. It turns out Horizon manufacture Hydrogen Fuel Cells and are using them to power RC cars, train sets and even your mobile phone. This is one of the stands that I love about BETT, it opened up the world of Hydrogen and gave me understanding that it isn't the volatile and dangerous technology I thought it was. It's safer, cleaner and has come far enough to come in battery form and works on solar power. YouSRC - When Michal Gove made his speech, YouSRC must have been overjoyed as I didn't see many stands offering programming experiences. YouSRC is a web-based tool for developing code in classrooms and I was given a very good demo of the system. The system is free and ad-funded, but they plan on offering a voluntary payment service to remove ads from YouSRC for your school. Worth a look when planning your new ICT Curriculum. I paid a visit to the Smoothwall and Net-Ctrl stands too and ended the day helping ICT-Direct do a stand takedown. A big thank you to all the exhibitors and Edugeek for making it an enjoyable trade show and I look forwards to seeing them again next year at ExCeL.

It happens to everyone sooner or later. You get to work with the nagging feeling that you are missing something. Something important, all the way until you pull in to the car park at work. And realise you have forgotten your wallet. I have a supply of coffee at my desk, no problem. But lunch may be a problem unless... 15 minutes later after heading off on my break, I have a pound coin in my hand scavenged from my car ashtray. Will it be enough? Where can I get something decent for only a pound? Prices have risen, I doubt I'll get a sandwich for that much. Can't even buy 2 chocolate bars at 70p each round here. Lady luck smiles though, as I chow down on a small sushi box for only a quid. Exact money, how's that for luck?

Nothing makes your mouth water quite like two large boxes of biscuits appearing on your desk. We are talking nearly 100 per box of various delicacies from jammy dodgers to shortbread. Tasty! But wait, these biscuits, I recognise that box. We had those for supervised study...a couple of...years...back... Librarian: "Oh those are for the bin. I found them in the store cupboard and they went off September 2008." Surprisingly, they still look like biscuits. Even more surprisingly, someone dared to eat one and described it as tasting "quite odd."

Sometimes I look at why I work for lower money then my corporate counterparts in IT. Then I realise in corporate IT, you don't get strange and random situations every day due to the unpredictability of the students at the school. As an example, I currently have some of the older kids singing a joint rendition of the song below in one of the corridors outside my office. You won't see that in corporate IT. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx1XIm6q4r4]YouTube- Potter Puppet Pals in "The Mysterious Ticking Noise"[/ame]

monday morning - apart from it being a misrable day, whats gone wrong so far? 1. a roof caved in over the weekend, 2. the drains are blocked so the playgrounds flooded, 3. the postgress service (we're RM) wont start, so nothing is working quite as it should. 4. the knock on effect of 3 means i wont be able to do the remote work i need to tonight incase it happens again. nice....

...it fails dramatically. Such as not actually being an undo button but a "Too lazy to close and re-open the Marksheet Template without saving so here is a button to do it for you" button. Said button is mistakenly pressed after spending over half an hour assembling columns with great patience in Assessment Manager on the pretence that it will undo only one action. Instead it rolls back to when I last saved, which was over half an hour ago. It took so long as the Marksheet is very large and SIMS takes a long time to move the columns over a slow (or any) network connection. And so the words I give to my dear Sixth Form students when they approach me about lost work ring through my head. "Save your work often. No matter how much the application tries to get in your way when saving." (In this case jumping to the bottom of the columns list constantly).

There is no better way to end a day at work then spending a bit of afterwork (unpaid) time getting a printer to demand more cheese to print. PJLTalk is your cheesy friend for this. Note that this doesn't affect the printer's operation or stop it printing.

What jobs have you guys/girls got planned for a long Wednesday at work then?

APT&C Grade 4, salary points 4-6 £18,426 - £19,171 37 hours per week, term-time plus one INSET day Pro-rata salary £15,590 - £16,221 We wish to appoint a committed, highly skilled and forward-thinking ICT Technician to work within the ICT Support Team. This is a fantastic opportunity to work in a school which has a long tradition of being at the forefront in its use of digital technologies and is now a Microsoft Training Academy, one of only six worldwide. The successful candidate will be a well organised, proactive and positive person, who is approachable with a calm professional manner. You need to be able to communicate effectively with both pupils and staff. On a day-to-day basis you will be responsible for the running of the ICT support desk and any technical issues which arise, whilst supporting Windows 10 devices utilising the Microsoft 365 platform. Applicants should be enthusiastic, organised and be able to work on their own initiative as well as part of a dynamic team. Full details of this position will be posted here: Working at Ribblesdale | Ribblesdale High School Ribblesdale High School ICT Support The IT Support department at Ribblesdale aims to be an innovative, forward thinking team aiming to provide pupils and staff with the tools needed in order to move teaching and learning to outstanding. Introduction Working under the ICT Network Manager the department currently has two IT technicians, making a team of four with this appointment. The department is based in a centrally located IT Support area, to provide a customer friendly experience for staff and pupils. Microsoft Training Academy Ribblesdale is one of only a few schools worldwide designated as a Microsoft Training Academy. The aim of the Training Academy is to support and showcase the use of Windows technologies to support teaching and learning, not just within school, but at a local, national and international level. The ICT Support team is integral to supporting and developing this journey as a school. They must ensure that the systems in place are at the leading edge where appropriate and effectively support at all levels across the school. Facilities The department looks after a network of over a thousand computers. There are 4 dedicated ICT suites, each of which with over 25 computers. Each teacher also has their own Microsoft Surface, both for use in lessons and preparing work at home using remote access technologies. These mobile devices make use of the school’s campus wide wireless network. Each teaching room is fitted with wireless WiDi projectors allowing staff to present from their Microsoft Surface Pro from anywhere in the room for immersive learning. Infrastructure The network runs on Windows and heavily utilizes Hyper-V virtualisation. There are two server rooms on the multi-building campus with fibre connections to each of the different buildings. A dedicated Storage Area Network is used to improve efficiency and speed of file storage and create a HA Hyper-V Cluster. The school also heavily utilises the Microsoft 365 platform for both in-class teaching, school collaboration and management of the school’s growing one-to-one scheme. This is enabled by the school’s dedicated 1Gbps Leased Line. One-to-one devices The support department is in the process of implementing a fourth year rollout of Windows one-to-one devices to pupils, which is supported via a parent donation scheme. These devices support what goes on across the school, allowing pupils to have access to anytime anywhere learning, meeting their individual needs. These devices are fully Cloud managed with Microsoft Intune. Future Plans The school is passionate about utilising new technologies to enhance teaching and learning both within the classroom and beyond. The department provides a wide range and variety of support ranging from day-to-day problem solving, website and portal development, through to the implementation and showcasing of leading edge technologies. The Microsoft Training Academy at Ribblesdale will continue to grow exponentially. The ICT Support team will form an integral part and will be expected to maintain and develop the systems across school to support the future journey.

Hello my name is Stijn, I am looking for the opportunity to complete and intership from September to January this year. Below is a little detail about me and the intership itself. For the past two years I have worked at a leading company that supplies wireless internet throughout Western Europe (Skybites BV The Netherlands). It has enabled me to develop a broad set of skills ranging from Cisco setup and maintenance to multilingual technical support (Dutch-English-German). From my studies I have experience with the following: Java programming Google web Toolkit Android platform Database Design Joomla-Wordpress My main aim is to complete my work placement at your company and gain vital experience in the IT business. I hope that during the course of my work placement, I will become a valued member of your staff that is both beneficial and productive for the company. I believe that your company can provide me this. Since my accommodation will be around West-Birmingham, I am looking for a placement in this area. Internship guidelines: Mentor has a bachelor degree or higher Student works on analysis, advice, design, integration or maintenance of software. Student works within an IT environment or division of a company Student needs to complete a project or participate in a project , this can be multiple small ones or 1 big one. Thank you for taking the time to read my post.

Year 13 chose today as their "muck-up day" as the pupils call it. Hence the current sights of Post-It notes declaring how we are going to miss them (amongst other messages) scattered accross the whole school. I'm not kidding either, every wall in every corridor and room accessible to the pupils are scattered with Post-It notes. It's like a tornado of sticky bits of paper whisked through the school over Period 1 and as fast as they come down, the walls are covered again. It's pretty hilarious to watch to be honest. I'd rather they let off end-of-year steam with a non-destructive act like this then what happens in some schools. I still recall the Police being called when I left school after a few "nitwits," as a polite term, vandalised the school toilets. Thankfully I never see that here. I guess other schools have the same things to look forwards to over the coming week as exam season kicks into full swing and study leave begins. Now to wonder how the caretakers will remove the Post-It notes covering the school's sign by the front gate...

I spotted a little quirk today in Assessment Manager that anyone using it for reporting should be aware of. Over time, staff members will change and the Marksheets that have been assigned will slowly become out of date. In our case, a baby boom amongst the staff population led to a large number of maternity cover teachers being employed and thus assigned to the now teacherless classes. This lead to the Marksheets that were assigned at the start of term to be out of date and still bound to the absent staff members account and not the one for the new staff member. This means it is important to know who is and isn't on leave. Luckily Assessment Manager made it relatively easy to update the sheets. Section 3 of the Template screen lets the Assessment Co-Ordinator delete all the marksheets for a subject and re-assign them. This refreshes the list (though a Refresh button would have been preferable). Repeat for all the marksheets in your collection. You don't even have to know who is covering the staff member as whoever is responsible for keeping that information up-to-date will have handled that already. SIMS will assign the new staff member when you re-assign the marksheets. Unfortunately if you have a lot of marksheets this could be a time consuming process in which case it is time to settle down with a cup of coffee and update every sheet one-by-one. If there is a faster way to do this (like some magical auto-update wand to change every sheet in Assessment Manager to the new owner) please post below with your ideas.

Recently, I was asked by the Headteacher to look into using a centralised system for the internal school display. I settled on Xibo, a system I could set up for little or no cost to the school. Unfortunately I lacked a machine to test it on. The end result is a working Xibo install running on a Ubuntu-based Apache webserver. This proof-of-concept test server is installed on my...memory stick? No fast hard disk, no large space to store files, just an 8Gb memory stick plugged into a random office PC streaming a low bandwidth test display. It isn't much but it's a start. And a fun little experiment too.

Following on from my post earlier, I am publishing a quick guide to removing this nasty virus. Hopefully it will let you clear it from your network a bit quicker then we have. First of all, you need to shut your network down. This is important because Conficker spreads from computer to computer regardless of them being patched against it. We found lots of systems that were patched but still infected after the virus propagated over the network, only a few systems that didn’t belong to the domain and were set-up strangely were completely unaffected. Next you need to run a virus scan on all computers and memory sticks, even unaffected ones. If possible, ensure the Task Scheduler service is stopped. While you go computer to computer, it is worth checking they are all patched against the virus. If Conficker is detected, restart the machine and run another scan. Check the following locations Scheduled Tasks for a task (or many tasks) called AT and a number after the name pointing to a randomly named file in C:\Windows\SYSTEM32. Also remember to check the file it is pointing to is gone. If a task cannot be deleted, right click it to choose properties and in the Security tab, grant full Control to Administrators. Open the Registry Editor (Windows Key+R -> type Regedit in the Run window) and find HK_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and look for a registry entry pointing to the randomly named file detected earlier. Delete it if it exists. Scan the machine again if any of these are found. When every computer in the school is scanned and you are confident they are patched, protected by antivirus and free of the virus, bring the network up slowly. Keep machines disconnected and gradually bring them online. It helps if you have some central monitoring software, like the Enterprise Console in Sophos, to keep an eye the entire network on as computers come back up. If a machine doesn’t have antivirus, you can obtain a tool to remove Conficker here but get Antivirus installed as soon as possible when the machine is cleared of infection. The patch for Windows XP to close the vulnerability used by the virus can be found here. Be warned that the virus is highly infectious and you must monitor the network closely over the coming weeks to ensure no re-infection occurs. All it will take is one infected system lacking the right updates and antivirus software.

And in celebration of this an order was given from the top to not use any heating in the school for some reason. Everyone was freezing cold but we dilgently followed the order as obeyed. No heating on in our department! We used the air-con instead. Bliss!

This just slipped through our smoothwall, might be worth adding it to your ban lists!!! Not Safe at work.* Find out if a website is NSFW. Safe for work. Grim. Edit: forgot to warn you all that clicking the link takes you to a picture of a man's and locks you on the website!

I've been using Excel for years but I never knew about this one little formula that can save so much work. My predecessor has been using the ISERROR() function nested inside an IF() function to fill cells that return an error code as blank. This means if you have two columns of data that may not necessarily be filled, you can have a blank cell instead of #DIV/0, etc. A little tweak like this can improve readability quickly so you can quickly spot empty cells or not have to wade through errors if the cell isn't meant to have any data in it. The code for a nested ISERROR() is as follows: =IF(ISERROR(Evaluation), ValueTrue, ValueFalse) This checks if the evaluation returns an error and reports the presence of an error as a True/False response. If the response is True, the cell is filled with ValueTrue otherwise it is filled with ValueFalse. This is fairly simple until you start putting another function in place of ValueFalse because you want to show the functions's output in the cell. For example, =A1/A2 =IF(ISERROR(A1/A2),"",A1/A2) This will check if you can divide cell A1 by cell A2. If you can't and it returns as True due to an error such as #DIV/0 (Divide by Zero) then it will display nothing (represented as two quotation marks together "" in the ValueFalse argument ). Otherwise it will calculate A1 by A2 a second time and put the results into the cell. This can become a headache if you have a complex and mammoth sized formula instead of a simple statement, such as VLOOKUP. Cue IFERROR() which will condense the size and complexity of the formula significantly. =IFERROR(Evaluation, ValueErr) This will check the evaluation and, if it spots an error, places the contents of ValueErr into the cell. Otherwise it shows the result of the evaluation. So if we apply this to our earlier example: =IFERROR(A1/A2,"") If an error is discovered, nothing will be placed into the cell as ValueTrue contains "". Otherwise the value of A1 divided by A2 is placed into the cell. This cuts down on having to repeat a complex formula twice in one cell to reduce the risk of error and save Excel a bit of legwork on an especially large sheet. Note that this formula doesn't work in older format Excel sheets, hence my predecessor's creative use of ISERROR() as IFERROR() wasn't around at the time.

When you output dates in SIMS with the Reporting tool, the results will come out as text and cannot be converted into a proper date with the number format window. This is a fix used in the SIMS Standard Portrait template to prevent Excel from throwing a fit and entering the data incorrectly. You can modify the template and remove the fix but that is best left to advanced users, there is a simpler option. Let's take a date in the format "1 March 2012" in cell C2. You can use the DATEVALUE formula in another column to convert it into a numerical format used by Excel to represent dates. To do this, you enter: =DATEVALUE(C2) You might need to choose Formulas then Calculate Now as SIMS has a tendency to disable automatic calculation. The datecode will now be shown as a number, in this case 40969. You can now right click the cell and choose Format Cells to change this to the Date format and make it readable. It will now work in Excel like any other date, including other formulae using dates or for grouping them in PivotTables. But wait, deleting column C with the SIMS output in it will break the formula as the cells don't contain the value as seen. The cell actually contains the formula and it is pointing to the cell in Column C which will throw an error when that cell is deleted. What do you do now? Paste Special is your friend here. Before deleting Column C, copy the cell containing your DATEVALUE formula then paste it over itself by right clicking the cell and choosing Paste Special. Select the option called Values and click OK. The cell will now be stripped of it's formula and the result will be inserted into the cell, leaving it unaffected by the deletion of it's neighbouring Column C.

And I made a biggy! This year we decided to set up SIMS Learning Gateway to comply with the 2010 Online Reporting requirements. These required us to provide a means of serving school reports to parents online for which Learning Gateway does perfectly. But as we roll into the close of the written reports cycle, there are lessons to learn. First off I overestimated how much Assessment Manager can cope with. Figuring staff were used to it for single grades, it is terrible when it comes to written reports. Much feedback was left by our Heads of Year during the written report cycles that checking them takes too long and double clicking to open them is tedious. It is clear users want to read the information on the page and edit it as they read, preferably with all of a student's reports visible at once. Next up was the importance of clear visual cues to tell staff what to do when filling in reports. To a technical person like myself and many users of EduGeek, CTRL+C and CTRL+V are taken for granted. We know how to use them, but give a member of staff a box missing the cut and paste buttons as seen in Assessment Manager and they may not know how to use it. The same with the multiple step saving process in Assessment Manager; Apply & Next then Save the marksheet, takes too long with too many clicks. Reviewing was also an issue, with staff finding it difficult to review a year group's reports. Lastly, home access is a must have as staff love to fill reports in at home (well, prefer may be the stronger word here ). If they can't for any reason, then you soon hear about it! Unfortunately our SLG server seems to hate Comment Aspects and runs slowly if too many are included. So never use too many of them on a marksheet being used in the web interface. We went down the Assessment Manager route due to a mixture of good knowledge of how to set up advanced templates and the Published Documents feature still in the works when we were making plans. This year I will be taking a very close look at Profiles and seeing how we can implement that in place of Assessment Manager for next year's written reports. Until then, anyone who wishes to try Assessment Manager for anything beyond a gradebook is advised to tread lightly and consider if Profiles training will save hassle in the long run.

Sometimes strange kit get's pulled up from the depths of the school and sent off to the school's technical team as "potentially useful." It's a common occurance and every technician with a blog has probably posted recollections of their old kit found in the dark corner of a classroom or server room. Today is no exception when I was handed some old kit that the PE Department had cleared out of their gym. Amongst them was a still camera with a likely usable lens and couple of camcorders. There was even a laptop running Windows ME that surprisingly still worked and ran pretty well (kept off the network of course!) though it thought it was 1980 on turning it on. However, the sheer size of one of the camcorders surprised even me with it's big, black plastic casing and an eyepiece that stuck out in a most eyepoking manner. It was old, had no charger and the battery pack had leaked white stuff all over the inside of the bag and back of the unit. But it's not until you see old kit like this that you realise how lucky we are today to have such small devices. I got some snaps of it and added them to this post. Enjoy!

Back in the days of limited memory and general user-unfriendliness, cryptic error messsages were common place and understandable only by the computing elite. As time moved on, error messages became friendlier and geared towards the user by hiding the cryptic error codes and debug information. Microsoft even announced this as a key design concept of Windows 7 compared to earlier versions. However, some software manufacturers have other ideas, especially with SIMS (connection error spouting more verbal diahorrea then useful text) and Fronter (Unknown error occurring when uploading a SCORM Course that Pearson themselves provided on a CD). Feel free to comment with your own examples.