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Technology not made easy in Norfolk

A few weeks ago I had an excellent day at the John Innes Centre for he Norfolk ICT Conference, in the company of people like Russell Prue and John Davitt. Russell Prue gave an inspiring speech about 21st Century Education which put very broad smiles on people like myself.

However to move ICT forward in Primary Schools in Norfolk, there has to be co-operation, a good example is today I tried to download the new release of Internet Explorer 8, which has some good quick tips for our users such as IE Accelerators, only to find that we are 'blocked' by ICT Solutions Bluecoat technology. Next we recently changed our office PC reinstalling the Star accounts software on it, only to be told by county that 'we don't support Windows Vista and you should roll back to Windows XP'

My question is how can we develop 21st century education when 'doing the basics' often leaves us with our hands tide?????

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Comment by Paul Williams on June 8, 2009 at 12:02pm: Hello Kevin,

I'm sorry to hear that you have been having problems accessing the download for Internet Explorer 8.
The Norfolk Children's Services filtering system for Norfolk Schools is set up to block advertisments and the direct link from the Microsoft homepage for IE8 falls into this category unfortunately. However you should be able to download without problems by following the "Downloads & Trials" link from their homepage and find the files from there.
If you are having problems accessing certain websites because of the filtering please get in contact with the ICT Solutions support team and they will be happy to help.

The Children's Services recommendation for operating systems is currently Windows XP Profressional for maximum compatibility and support. During testing Windows Vista proved to cause problems with some legacy applications. From an educational usage and end user point of view Vista has few advantages over using Windows XP Pro. We are however carrying out intial investigations with Windows 7 Release Candiates and Windows Server 2008 and it is looking very promising although legacy software is likely to cause problems but Windows 7 has a Windows XP compatibility mode which should counter that.

Comment by Kevin Sait on June 9, 2009 at 7:04pm: Hi Paul

Thanks for the comment, I was probably having a bad day at the time, but the message I was trying to get over was one of 'why should the simple things hold back teachers in Norfolk'. For example - when a primary teacher see's the Microsoft website and Click here to install Internet Explorer 8 she should be able to do that - ICT should be that straight forward. Instead she gets frustrated with the 'this website is blocked page' and then makes a support call which in turn takes time and at the end of it money.

I agree you can go to the downloads link but a busy teacher does not have the time or maybe even the patience to drill down through a website - so I guess it from that point of view I was writing about technology not been made easy. My own view is that schools should lead technology not been two steps behind, its like with Windows Vista I agree with your points again but ' the rest of the world can move forward' but when we buy a PC we have to downgrade to XP just to support legacy applications like 'Star Accounts'.

I must confess we do have a few Vista laptops humming away quite well, making use of power management, and Bitlocker to keep data safe and even running legacy apps in Vista's XP compatible mode, and I am looking foward to the release of Windows 7 on Oct 22nd. I do wonder however that when a school buys a new machine in October with Windows 7 and there is no down-grade option to XP what the official line will be then?

Once again thanks for your reply. Kevin