And so, the interpid geek sets foot in the hidden undergrowth of looking at how using Windows 7 affects productivity. The startup disk on my MacBookPro is set to my Boot Camp partition, I have made heavy use of my Technet subscription to get pretty much all the MS apps I might want for general business use, and then delved into the blogs from the Microsoft Summer Camp to get all the add-ins and extra apps suggested their (though I think the other folk in the office might soon learn to question my choice of SongSmith!)

I have now also started a page to log the apps I use and try to collate any notes or link to any blog posts. http://grumbledook.com/working-with-windows/

I will not be sticking soleyl with MS based apps, but if I am working in an MS environment then MS apps will be my primary choice until I need to try something different.

Many IT Technicians and Network Managers are now playing summer catch-up. That list of jobs that they had to do at the beginning of the holidays still seems a bit longer than they wanted or has had to be moved around a bit as other priorities have cropped up over the summer (including working out how to save money now the HT grant has been cut!)

So, in the hope that a few folk read this I thought it would be an idea to cover a few things that need to be done prior to the new school year starting.

• Testing : No doubt many people have had new kit to set up, new software to install, machines to move around. The first thing I have to plead with you to do is test. Test, test, test, test, test! I know you cannot test every possible permutation of all software you have running on a computer but there are some things you can do. Log onto a few computers as an admin, a teacher and a student. Make sure the printers work as you would expect, internet access is ok, and that any ‘fiddley’  software (you know the stuff I mean) works … check that files can be saved to the correct locations and that any dedicated hardware works right (CAD/CAM, camcorders, midi keyboards, etc). We all know that at least one thing will go wrong … but try to do what you can to keep it at one thing … not a dozen.
• Tidying : There is nothing worse for a teacher than to come back into a classroom a few days before the new term and they find that there is a mountain of boxes or a plethora of unplugged kit laying around. They also might only have a few days to get displays put up, to move desks about and to make sure any cupboards are tidy with all resources where they need them. This is doubly so when teachers have had to swap classrooms around. The sooner you can get things clear in rooms the better (we can always talk about tidying up rooms as you go along but in reality it is difficult) and if you have to leave anything out and about try not to get too annoyed if a teacher, cleaner or site staff move it around to allow them to get on with *their* jobs. Try to leave notes about where it is moving to and approximately when.
• Logging : The perennial nightmare for support staff is keeping track of kit, new and old. With all the changes that may have gone on during the summer you need to make sure that you have kept your inventory up to date (including which room kit is in, what is install on what kit and who are the principle users), that any new items have been asset tagged and security marked, the old equipment is mark for disposal and when disposed of, that you keep at track of who you disposed it with, what the nominal value for the asset was and when it was disposed of.
• Planning : There are going to be things you could not complete. Or things that came up that have had to be put on hold. Or things that just did not work they way you expected and will need more work. Set some time to one side to decide when you are going to start planning to do this stuff, whether you can do it in term time, whether you need to wait until the next holidays and so on. The sooner you start planning the easier it is to let people know about things.
• Communication : Which leads me onto the next item … if you have new kit or services then let people know about it. Ideally, this should have been part of your planning anyway and so you have already got a training plan for staff *and* students (if needed) and a set of messages and announcements for people too. Back to the planning bit … allow for staff and students to give you feedback on the changes. This helps to plan for any future work … and purely relying on people putting in support calls will never be able to give you all the information you need (eg the lack of support calls is not always a good measure of you getting it right!) so plan for other ways to get information from people.
• Breath and relax : Remember that you are not superman/superwoman/superdog … there are times when you need to sit down, take a few deep breaths and relax. I always liked to have a film afternoon as a reward for getting things done (ok … only managed it 3 times in 10 years of being hands-on in a school) but others have a meal out or a few pints in the pub.

So … a few ideas there … some might recognise that there are examples in there of change management and configuration management (communication, planning, CMDB, definitive software library, etc) … but hopefully it gives a bot more of a real world approach to it.

In a discussion about student IDs I got a tad frustrated by the take some people have about Becta guidance and that it is given from a point of not really understanding how the real world works or giving examples …

Originally Posted by GrumbleDook

With all respect to DB and AT … B*11*cks

Becta put out the recommendation based on data protection guidance and esafety guidance from a heap of places and just collate it. Having a go at them for doing this is pretty pointless and hiding your head in the sands about wider issues.

1 – a kid emails a mate about something, who then replies but includes a mate outside of the school. The person outside of the school is an adult, and then now might have name, approx age (cause they understand that 09 at the beginning of the userid in the email means they started at the school in 2009) the surname or forename (so many schools have it as jbloggs or janetb) and they are also likely to get the forename from the email too. It is not about a single piece of data that makes it dangerous but when you string it together.

2 – People hate giving real, flesh and blood people a number as their identity. “I’m not a number, I am a free man!” I hear you cry … well, how many of use know our NI number off the top of our head. I am pretty sure that ex-forces / police / etc can remember their numbers too! There is nothing wrong with introducing this to the kids as long as it is done in a timely, professional and sensible fashion. Roll numbers from MIS are fine … if your school uses ID cards then get this number onto the ID card. If someone wants a password reseting then just ask for their card. Job done … simples!

3 – When Becta (and others) give guidance or a framework too many people say “this is the way we have now been told to do it!” so they don’t give too many examples anymore because people don’t think for themselves and just point the finger if it is not right for their school. They just can’t win. Before you have a go at the lack of examples about it why not say … “hey, let’s think of some ways to improve this!”

I bet that if I was to suggest we do this though we will get a slack handful that say something, but people are more than happy to jump on the bandwagon about BSF, job applications, salary scales … I guess we all have different priorities.

I’ve always been pretty up front about how I will work with pretty much anything I have access to and through personal choice over the years I have tended to find Apple kit / OS just makes me that bit more productive. I do continue to use a fair bit of open source software and MS software though so feel I have a good balance, but after reading how people are constantly pushing themselves to try different ways of working I have opted to dedicate more time to different systems.

From 1st September I will be working purely on Windows 7 for a month. This will be on a MacBookPro as that is the hardware I have available (I do like running MS OSes on Mac hardware though … I had an install of Vista on one machine that ran like a dream … made me wonder if we were all so wrong about Vista!) but unless I have a very real need to access something on the Mac side then BootCamp will be my friend. Over the coming week I will be looking at a variety of pieces of software to make sure I am as tooled up as I can be, that my files are somewhere secure and my access through various networks is enabled.

From 1st October I will be going down the open source route. I’ll probably set up a VM of Redhat or Ubuntu and using that unless I can dig out another laptop (not enough space to triple boot this machine but can easily run a VM off an external drive). So I will spend that last week in September looking for all the suitable OSS I need.

And then from 1st November I will run solely MacOS and associated software.

Most of my requirements will be for office, web 2 and social network access. I may have to dig into some video / audio editing and perhaps some graphics work, but most of the stuff planned is based around boring work I’m afraid, but I hope to take a bit of time out to try to look at a range of different tools that I may not have touched before and even try my hand at some of the activities I see the software being used for (screen recording them for the general amusement of others).

I haven’t really been bothered enough to this before … when I did my month without Google I ended up discovering that I can do it, it is a bit of a nuisance and that the non-Google stuff I was already doing was what worked well. I am trying to be open-minded about doing the same with this … so if people think I am slipping them please let me know.

I am also happy to read and digest anything that people have from others who have done similar (or if you have done it yourself already) so that I can compare experiences.

I hope to be planning a number of SLT events over the year to address this locally, but I have also been chatting with a few others to see what elements of FITS you can get away with yourself and how you can structure your job (and that of any staff you have in your team) to still get a lot of stuff done.

So it is time to talk about the areas that some people like to keep secret and to share how YOUcan manage your Manglement. Most of these are based on real practices of Network Managers, technicians, ICT Co-ordinators and Heads of ICT in schools. If you have more ideas you wish to add please let me know.

Become Sir Humphrey

For those who have seen Yes Minister / Yes Prime Minister this may sound like a terrible thing to say … but you can’t fail to recognise that Sir Humphrey would be able to get things past the Rt Hon Jim Hacker MP on a number of occasions … so let us think how he did it.

Ignore the use of confusing language. We already know that IT has a wonderful sub-language all of its own that makes people go glassy eyed … that is not what we want. Eventually people will just ignore you or work out you are intentionally trying to confuse them. No, I am talking about the careful use of language and the interesting use of providing a variety of options. Have a look at this clip.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ok, this is a dark art I suppose, but let’s see what it means by putting it into what already happens in a number of schools.

There is a need for an increase in the number of desktops for Internet access, word-processing, etc … not for video/audio editing, etc. You know that if you want to keep this sustainable you are going to have to be inventive with the technology you use. You know thin clients will deliver what you need but there is an initial high cost.

You put together a range of options. Uusually this is three, but sometimes you can have two main options, each of which has some other add-ins. The first option is the out and out howler … brand new, heavy-duty, high performance fat clients because you never know what they are going to be used for in the future. This can be expensive, relies on there being a future need for them (also meaning you are likely to need other low-end machines in the future as the high-end ones get pulled into another areas such as Media, Art, etc) and that there are sufficient funds. make sure that you highlight this into a 6-7 year plan of when they will need replacing and all software upgrades, time taken to install and manage them over that period too.

Option two should be one for minimal outlay … cheap and nasty machines but with little software on them… the plan would be to move to an online office solution to do the work instead of local apps. This, however, is likely to mean more frequent breakdown or damage to kit, an effort to move over to online / web 2.0 tools but at the expense of other parts of the school will still be using local apps so there will be complex problems swapping back and forth … more training would be needed and what you save in initial outlay could get lost in all the other costs.

Option three is the one you know will work best with minimal impact or change to the school operations. You cover the costs first. Lower than the high-end workstations (over a 6-7 year period … ie two lots of machines), dearer than the initial outlay for low-end workstations, but with no training or change costs. It is expandable (get costs for adding another suite as thin clients) and if the school is flexible, it could also be used for secure remote access (solving possible DPA issues) and used for access to the MIS (saving the lengthy updates to the local MIS software on every staff laptop once a month).

How does this apply to FITS though? When you need to do a ‘project’ (eg your summer replacement of kit, rolling out a new suite, etc) then you write down everyone who will be impacted by it, the timescales for deliver, etc … yes, basically a project plan. Even if people don’t want to see it you still send it to them if they are involved or impacted.

When someone comes along and wants to make a change or wants to get you to do something for another piece of work then you give *that* person the job of contacting all the people involved. Or, if they don’t want to, *you* contact everyone, with a new timeline and point out why it has had to change and who made it that way. Either way, people start to see who is messing up plans. Over time, this ends up with the introduction of the third option … people meeting before the project gets going to get things sorted out and reducing the problems … and there … you have your change advisory board.

If the CAB is the idea of Manglement it tends to run that bit better in these circumstances. There are times when it will not happen though so *you* have to end up going to each person involved on a 1-to-1 basis to do the CAB. If you are doing this then try to make sure that you see a few key people one after another (ideally in the same room so they can bump into each other) and you will be surprised at the number of people who think it is an idea to hang around to see what the other person says … you get you CAB purely because common sense and nosiness prevails.

So … there we have a beginning. What other tricks have you come up with over the years? Feel free to send them over anonymously if you have to. I am not saying that the above will work for everyone, but it is a start. For those network managers reading … this might feel a bit familiar to you from when a few technically minded teachers have tried to do things with new kit they want to get introduced? As I keep saying … there is nothing new in this game.

After a brief chat with one blogger I have come to admire he has agreed to allow me to syndicate his blog on mine.

Using the auto-blog plugin for wordpress has made this pretty simple too, so I get to geek a bit at the same time.

So … With no further ado … Ladies and gentlethings of the interweb I present you with The Angry Technician.

My issue is with point 5 of the article which I have copied below

5. Take control of your Internet connection. Compare the cost of your LA/RBC provided service and that of commercial providers, and check you really do need any additional benefits that you may be paying for. How often do you need access to the NEN? This seems to be what’s hinted at in the DfE’s description of the second Harnessing Technology grant cut, as giving schools time to plan to “reconfigure their broadband”. I think it interesting that hardly any independent schools opt in to RBC services. Use Squid as a proxyserver to speed up multiple access to the same pages. Explore some of the filtering options for Squid, such as the kind-of-open-source DansGuardian, which is based on Squid. Think carefully about your filtering policy, bearing in mind that children have a right to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.”

Yes … the recent cuts are an attack on things like RBCs and the capital investment that goes into these projects and how they are now into the ‘revenue’ phase (your running costs should always be cheaper that the capital projects which will include the setup costs and running costs during that project period), but have you noticed how there is no noted revenue grant (either a new one or increase in others)? Strange that … Anyway, back to Miles’ point.

I’ll let RBCs talk about the other services they provide such as DNS, website hosting, email filtering and email hosting, video conferencing, firewalls and security … they already have a lot of collateral on that and they will have their own job cut out to get people to realise the the things which are taken for granted.

Instead I will focus on why I have a lot of respect for those schools who run their own filters, have their own firewalls and spend considerable time and effort on doing things as efficiently as possible. And I will also mention those that try and miss to hit the objectives (often through no fault of their own).

Dansguardian is a fantastic piece of software from a bloke called Dan. It is the open source end of an even better solution from a company called Smoothwall. It works on the basis of filtering on phrases, regular expressions in URLs, it can whitelist and is pretty configurable. It is compatible with squidGuard blacklists … and this is where my problem starts. Filter lists generated by the community come from *all* of the community … and what your needs are, they are likely to differ to others. Whilst the lists are really good for protection against porn (amazing how eager people are to search for porn … and then block it of course!) they can be lacking in other areas such as hate speak, weapons, drugs, violence, crime, malicious scripts … and then you get things randomly (apparently) blacklisted because someone doesn’t like it. Those of use who have run their own mail servers know what a pain it can be have to deal with RBL lists where your mail server is regarded as a spam machine … even though it isn’t and it is because someone has made a complaint! The same applies here … you run the risk of sites you know and love suddenly becoming blocked … on a regular basis. You get what you pay for when it comes to filtering lists … and that is why there are commercial add-ons to ISA and why DansGuardian is not as effective as Smoothwall’s Network Guardian / Schools Guardian.

Many schools who make use of DansGuardian are fine with this and have staff who can manage it and can whitelist the required sites … and this is my next sticking point. If you get a lot of problems with sites then the de facto method of dealing with it is to lock down and release it slowly. This means blocking everything and whitelisting sites. Yes … a step back for some schools to consider whitelisting resources instead of managing them effectively.

Now this is also an issue I have with people running Microsoft ISA in schools … who rely on a few key phrases and hope it works. They might turn off as many categories from the RBC filters as they can and say they are dealing with it all in house. The thing I would then ask is what are the criteria do they have for adding sites to a whitelist or blacklist? Who verifies that the changes to the phrases which are filtered are correct? I’ve already posted about how it is not the technology but the people and how it is managed. If the schools are going to move to something that definitely requires more management then they had better make sure they know what they are getting into.

And then we get to who will manage it … is it an admin task which teachers will not do? Is it something for pastoral staff to update? Is it soley done by tech support? You do have tech support available every day don’t you? The interface for Dansguardian is not exactly user friendly IMHO … I’ve seen worse (don’t get me started on vle editing interfaces!) and when it comes to reports you are talking about really knowing what you are doing … because make no mistake, out of the box systems take time and considerable effort to get right and be suitable to get infomration when you want it.

I can hear the Ubuntu hordes massing at my door telling me it is easy … yes, if you have picked up the skills and I won’t even start on the fun you can get into trying to compile things in *nix (and yes … for some of us it is fun, but not for everyone). I am not saying that ISA (or other products) are any better for this … a school I know recently had performance problems with their internet connection after moving to use an ISA box in-house … and it was also using a filter in front of that … so all web traffic went through the filter and then to the ISA … which had the default maximum of 600 connections per minute set. Yes, that means that only 10 connections a second from a computer could be made to the internet … all because of default settings being missed.

Open Source Software may be free … as in no licence costs and open to be developed by yourself and others … but the other costs of management, hardware, training and risk play a large part here. Out of the schools I have worked with who are not on RBC connections most use commercial products to protect themselves and the choice not to be with the RBC is mainly political, not cost. They also accept that they have to deliver *all* their own services including email, email filtering, etc … and this also involves spending significant money on a decent firewall to protect their network … and this is before we get into the fact that a ‘cheap’ commercial connection might not get you the quality of connection you get from an RBC. Very important if you live outside of a large urban area.

So yes, consider that you can make use of Open Source Software to supplement what you are doing on your connection … I love the textual filtering on some filtering products to allow you to score and filter keywords … but accept that this is small scale tweaking to target a particular issue (like the growth of new slang for insults) and the integration ISA has into the Active Directory making it more flexible when restricting a particular group of users … but also consider the time and effort to do all of this, the other things you will use … and no matter how much someone tells you OSS is free, there will be some costs.

And whilst we are talking about sharing and communities … I’ll hold my hands up to when I was a vocal person working in a school arguing that the idea of smoothing costs for RBC connections across schools was unfair to us as an individual school. Now that I am at an LA I can honestly see how selfish that was. Surely if we are a community and trying to share and look after one another then it is unfair to pull out of a scheme designed to give equity of access and not penalise the rural schools? I know people will say that the answer should be solved by the market, but since the Govt thinks we don’t need to invest anymore in the infrastructure then they must also accept that some areas are more costly that others for connections. Are we not just supporting the break up of this (NEN) community? Oh … it is because schools should have control and not LAs? Ah … that is a different discussion to have then and not about saving money, but power, control and politics.

Ladies and Gents, the cynic has left the building.

Mike’s blog goes into full details about who presented and what on, but here is my presentation as I looked more towards sharepoint 2010 as a business tool.

Why on earth would you take a business point of view for something that should be about education? Have a watch of my presentation below and I hope it explains my thinking a bit more.

I hope to spend more time on this in the coming months … to cover areas such as using Sharepoint for managing department or SLT meetings, tracking of performance management … there are lots of things to cover in fact.

If you have any clear examples of sharepoint as a management tool feel free to drop a note on here too.

One of the areas we covered on the FITS : Advanced course (also known as the FITS : Manager course) was about financial management … but, as with all of the areas covered, it was not dealt in isolation. For all of us on the course it was a good chance to look at all financial aspects which impact on IT / ICT in schools.

I’m not surprised that Ray has pointed out that 33% of headteachers could not state what percentage of their budget was spent on ICT … but I think that is more a reflection on the honesty of those headteachers and the complexity of what we are talking about.

Let us look at what we could include in this budget.

• Desktops
• Laptops
• Servers
• Peripherals (printers, cameras, scanners, etc)
• Audio – Visual equipment (projectors, IWBs, speakers, DVD players, etc)
• Consumables (toners, backup tapes, mice, etc)
• Educational software
• Contracted support
• Network Infrastructure

And then you get into some things that people might not have initially included in this pot.

• Broadband connection
• Broadband / LA services (email, web filtering, etc)
• Management Information Systems
• Staffing
• Reprographics (and perhaps the paper in the printers)
• Telephony
• CCTV

… and they might not have included things that individual departments buy from their own pot.

And what about the energy consumption … surely that should be included in the pot too.

So … I am actually surprised that it was only 33% who said they didn’t know, as I didn’t think the Becta survey quite drilled down as far as some of the above, but I will be suggesting to my local schools if they can use the above as the basis of their planning. It should help with those looking at virtualisation as an option which might help to reduce the energy consumption as well as helping to establish long term, sustainable plans for funding IT, or at least being able to manage the impact of some investment in refreshing equipment is put off for the next year or so.

As with many others who have experienced working with Becta over the years I would like to thank the various staff there and others who have worked closely with them (and yes … that even means consultants). I have had the pleasure of having input from Becta in 5 roles. The first was way back with I was an IT Technician (in a pretty forward thinking school) and I was able to attend various events include expert workshops and the Annual Research Conference. It shaped my view of technology as a tools for education, and with things like FITS for me to be an enabler. Next I experienced then as a middle leader … a network manager. They allowed me to talk on a level playing field with teachers and other Heads of Departments. As a Senior Leader their work helped give direction for my school, especially around the Self-review Framework and as an LA worker the advice, guidance and clarity means I can cascade this down to schools and support schools moving forward with using technology.

The fifth one? Why, it was their support (and patience) with EduGeek. The first EduGeek Conference in Corby had Becta staff coming along for the keynote and happy to take an ear-bashing from a bunch of techies … EduGeek members and mods (I don’t think we even consider calling ourselves admins, never mind staff!) had the chance to air their views about the IT Infrastructure documentation … I was invited to give input into the advice and guidance to schools on Data Protection.

So … yes, I have a healthy respect for what they have done over the years and I am really thankful for it.

Do I think some things could have worked out better? Of course I do … some of the targets they were given were political.

But where do we go from here?

It will take some time for all the projects to run their course, for legal and contractual requirements to be sorted out and for elements of work they do to be taken on by others. People should not make the mistake that just because the organisation is gone the work will finish. Until Becta, DforE and others sort this out we are all down to speculation.

However, there are some things we do know and can do. If nothing else, make yourself familiar with the Becta site and materials. Even if you have thought “They don’t have anything to offer me,” still go and have a look. Dig into the research section to see some of the background work done over the years, because just as the Laptops for Teachers and IWB projects were large funded projects they came from small beginnings.

Have a look at the different schools and teachers who have won awards from Becta. See if you can track them down today. Are they still in successful schools? Are they now senior leaders? Do they work for LAs? Consultants? See if you can speak to other schools they have worked with? Can you find some good practice you can use.

Look at how they examined emerging technologies. What criteria did they use for seeing whether there would be benefits to learning and/or teaching? Look at how they took on some of the procurement frameworks. See how they worked out how to challenge companies to get the best deals they could, even if it meant doing a bit of a deal with the devil at times.

Look at the technical documentation. Examine how it has changed over the years … try to spot where it is going to change again. Look at the work, both historical and fresh, on open standards. Will this have an impact on what you choose to use in the future?

Why all this effort though?

Simple … you don’t know what bit of this work you may have to do yourself, or find someone else who is already doing it with whom you can work with. Some part may be taken on by other groups … some might get dropped and schools / LAs / Companies have to do it themselves … but start preparing now for what your requirements for the future are and learn how to plan.

If you are a school which doesn’t engage with stuff then this will mean nothing to you … you will still plan poorly, have a panic every few years because you have a sudden bill for hardware, and you will see computers as something to keep kids quiet with.

If you are a very proactive teacher / school / LA then you will be happy because you can gloat about being able to do it all yourself anyway and will be able to tell everyone how wonderful you are … but please start talking to others about how that can be effectively shared without costing the earth.

If you are the other group … those who happily work away, waiting for the early adopters to do their bit and learn from the experience of others, who know that in the mountain of priorities which is education you sometimes have to put things to one side and pick up a bit later or you have to get the advice and info from others … well, now is the time to start developing those networks of support and advice. Stuff that could have been cascaded down via the LA might not be there because some of that stuff will have come from Becta …

As you form those links then let me know … I will be doing the same and happy to share mine with you. I’ll also happily share any news about what I find out about the future of what is happening with technology in education … and I hope you will do the same for me and others.