(no subject)

[jcaswell.livejournal.com]

Our school is running a pilot scheme for Key Stage 3 exams. Today is the first batch of those exams, so we've got all of year 9 (aged 13/14) in IT rooms running this new software we've got for it. Each of the four of us has been allocated a classroom to make sure there're no technical problems etc. All well and good, we expected teething problems, and were prepeared for that. What we (or at least me) were unprepared for was the abuse we'd be getting from the little angels. I''ve been called fat, told I'm not qualified to do my job, and been told to "fuck off", "piss off" and been called a "fucking idiot". The last three were all by the same student. An incident report will be raised. I am not prepared to put up with that.

Comments

[omicron32.livejournal.com]

Jesus, the kids at my school aren't that bad! I've been told to "get a fucking haircut" once by one of the little fuckers, but that's about it.

I'm the guy who installed the Internet filter though (DansGuardian (http://www.dansguardian.org) - nothing better out there!), so it wouldn't surprise me if they hated me. :D

[omicron32.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I think we're getting that KS3 software at our place too. The other techs are handling that though, I have a hard enough time supporting four primaries as well as the high school... :S

[jcaswell.livejournal.com]

It's from QCA, can't remember the name of it offhand. Seriously buggy though. I expect large parts of today to be post mortems about how bad it was for the teachers. Mind you, had they read the bloody info pack they were all given a week ago, things may have been smoother.

[jcaswell.livejournal.com]

Our web filter sucks. We have to use Websense via Atomwide / LGfL, which means we have no control over it whatsoever :\ Hopefully we're moving to a real ISP soon though, which'll mean we can do things ourselves.

[omicron32.livejournal.com]

We're using NTL, methinks, which goes via an RM-based filter thru the council.

Doesn't stop us having our own, stricter, filtering in place though.

And I highly recommend setting up your own DansGuardian box on a spare machine. It doesn't require that much hardware (we're running it on 2x800MHz P3 machine with a gig of RAM for about 300+ concurrent users). It also functions as a caching proxy (via Squid) which our LEA are pushing for anyway (all schools need caching proxies by the end of this year).