Alan’s Blog

A member of our IT team brought the following article to my attention this morning – Wikipedia Hijacked. I thought it was probably worth posting it here as a lot of those reading the various Exc-el blogs are active users of Wickipedia. The article refers specifically to German users who have been targeted with emails [...]

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One constant criticism we in IT receive is that we always refuse to do things in the way users want because of security.  I’ve heard the comment that IT use security as the argument to trump all others when we don’t want to do something. I really do take exception to this. Most users of IT [...]

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Ross Nicol, the project manager of the Schools Wide Area Network project, has given me permission to post the following email that he has sent out to all schools. 
As most of you will be aware, back in February Education and IT began a project to upgrade the network links to all East Lothian schools during [...]

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In my fourth and (for now) final post about support for schools I’d like to tout for some ideas on how we can further improve ICT support for schools. If anyone is willing to share their ideas I’d like to hear them. Brian Cunningham, a science technician at Musselburgh Grammar, has already touched on this [...]

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I mentioned in my 2nd post on this subject that we use the same helpdesk tool for schools as we do for corporate IT within the Council and that the classifications for jobs are constrained by the corporate settings. I thought it would be interesting to contrast the resources available to corporate and curricular ICT.
 
Currently [...]

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Another statistic from our help desk is the percentage of jobs that we have managed to complete within the service levels that we measure ourselves against.
 
2003/04                   96.9%
2004/05                   90.9%
2005/06                   67.0%
 
What are the service levels we manage ourselves against I hear you ask?
Well, the helpdesk system we use was set-up for use with corporate [...]

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Good news – On Tuesday of this week the Education IT Group approved two new Schools Based ICT Officer posts. This will bring the IT team supporting ICT in the schools up to six (the initial number requested 3 years ago!). Given the elongated recruitment processes of the Council I would hope we would have [...]

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With the new school year now underway I thought it would be worth sharing a link that gives 10 excellent tips for using search engines such as Google, MSN etc to search the Internet.
 
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/moredone/searchenginetips.mspx
 
I would especially like to draw teachers attention to tip number 8 that tells you how to stop your searches returning inappropriate [...]

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Yesterday was a red letter day. We had our first project meeting with BT who won the contract for the supply of the new schools wide area network. It’s these network connections that link individual schools to John Muir House and then out to the Internet through the SSDN connection. 
For those who are interested in [...]

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Whilst school staff enjoy their long summer holiday, please spare a thought for the ICT officers and the rest of the Desktop Services team who will be hard at work in the schools.
 
The summer holidays offer us the one period in the year when we can carry out major programmes of housekeeping and replacements. This [...]

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