Completely OT - bedtime for children

[News]

In message , Frank Erskine writes

What I love is not the number of threads that wander off topic, but the number that eventually end in a Windows v Anything discussion :-)

[Tim Watts]

I was kind of thinking that the box with the blank is *is* their actual computer :)

[Tim Watts]

ah - that's "advocate" as in

Richard the Lionheart "advocated" christianity

;->

[Tim Watts]

Every day, mate, every day...

[Tim Watts]

It's like watching Kenneth Williams in a boxing match with Mohammed Ali...

[Huge]

Then there would be no homework. And when the child is reprimanded, the headmaster would find himself on the receiving end of my wrath.

Alternatively, you supply the completed homework in some obscure format; see how they like it.

Teachers work for us. About time they started acting like it.

[Huge]

At one time all the computers in this house were Suns.

[Tim Streater]

Is that as in mercury fulminate? :-)

[Bob Eager]

LOL!

[Bob Eager]

She has silver hair, but she's not quick!

[Mark]

The student would not be reprimanded; they would just miss the benefit of the homework.

They would probably treat this as if the homework was not done.

LOL!

[Andy Champ]

Don't recall whether you personally taught him. Certainly in your department, and you recognised the name. A couple of years back now though.

Andy

[geoff]

We are stardust, we are golden ...

[Steve Walker]

Yes, they teach different methods than we were taught - basically ours work, but theirs are easier to learn, despite the fact that they don't work at higher levels, so they have to learn again. At least that's what I've been told.

SteveW

[Steve Walker]

Not without a bigger kitchen! We use a little less now, but at one point we were going through 6 pints of milk a day!

Part of our problem is that I and two of the children are very faddy eaters, so although we can all have a roast dinner together or four of us can eat fish, on other nights we may well have five different meals - the co-ordination required for this is quite impressive!

We specifically do not want to kick up a fuss. When our eldest started at the school, there were plenty of spare places, when our middle son was due to start, we had to go through the full appeals process to get him in, as most of the road that the school is on had been let to an influx of East Europeans and the school was oversubscribed to over double its capacity. Our third child is due to apply in October for a place in the following September. We do not want to be seen as "difficult" parents.

Nope. Years 3 and Reception at the local R.C. School. I'm not Catholic, my wife is and she takes it seriously - but she's not one of those irritating, in your face, religious types.

The youngest is at a private nursery next-door, but from September he'll move into the school's nursery and hopefully into reception a year later.

There is (or at least was under the previous government) a scheme to provide computers and pay for internet connections for the poorest, but I've never actually heard of anyone involved in such schemes - and if they were common, my wife would probably know, as she often gets involved with people who are in very poor circumstances (she's a Community Psychiatric Nurse) and as well as their mental and physical health, she often liases with other organisations to get people financial and other help.

SteveW

[Steve Walker]

They don't have the funds, the time or often the expertise to sort out problems. They stick to an OS and software that they can get good telephone support for.

You may find a technician in a secondary school, but in primaries, there are a limited number of computers, generally overseen by one of the teaching staff as a small part of their duties. The school my kids go to has 7 classes, each with a teacher and an assistant in the lower years, plus the head and a caretaker. Computers have to be "fixed" by one of the staff or one of the governors. There is no funding for a technician.

SteveW

[Bob Eager]

Ah yes, I have remembered!

I would have taught him....

[Tim Watts]

It is a wise consideration. My kids are at a tiny undersusbribed school (for geographic reasons). They try hard, but aren't technical.

I will potentially send something back that comes in an unusable format, but I am happy to go in and show them how to click the right knob to produce something usable which is a skill easily taught and taking little time from either party.

Haven't had any document problems yet - they send out old style .doc files a lot - if they start sending .docx I expect a visit will be in order. I keep meaning to try and help them dump out the flyers as .pdf, but I didn't have ready access to Windows to pre-prep how to do it until recently.

The biggest problem has been the crappy School Portal (a rather lame commercial offering). It has no bulk photo album handling facilities - you can upload a zip of photos and it will import them - but you are expected to manually link them one by one into the page. A call to their tech support confirmed this.

Last year, I ran a series of client side perl scripts to grab the obsfuscated links off the site, then generate display HTML then uploaded that via the page TinyMCE editor in raw mode. Not exactly a solution I can leave them with...

The head's solution is to turn the photos into a video slideshow which is good thinking by him (easy to do) but not as nice a page full of clicakble thumbs. And the video sometimes doesn't play nice with FOSS depending on the options de-jour.

Cheers,

Tim

[Tim Watts]

Well, the exercise has gone well.

The old laptop is installed with Xubuntu 10.04 (the best choice IMO for this). It is hard-bonded to the wifi (she cannot "unclick it") and kerberize+NFS home dirs + /vol areas (she is in a different group to me+SWMBO so she cannot delete my large quantity of photos but can see them).

I've put a vnc server on and helped her prettify the desktop, build a new task bar panel from scratch, choose the widget styling themes and make a firefox quickstart button and set the fonts to something larger and readable.

She's been taught how to log in and hibernate it and I've done a remote assistance session over vnc which worked very well...

The crappy School Portal works about as well as anywhere now and I've installed the ubuntu-edu-primary package set of extra toys and games.

Admittedly, she has elected to go with the RedmondXP window decorations, but I have no issue with that - they are big and bright.

Thanks to the shared home dirs and common log ins, my son can borrow it for using googleearth occasionally.

I wonder how hard it would be to get windows to do all this - need an AD server and roaming profiles I expect.??

[Simon Finnigan]

There's an argument that someone who refuses to use the common standard should be the one making the effort to be compatible - if 34 out of 35 kids can open the file fine, why should the school have to change how they do things?