We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the users that reported the issue and remind you all that we take any problem seriously and act on them as quickly as we can.

If you discover anything that you think is wrong with any of our services or you’re still having issues accessing any of our services, please report it to us via our support website at http://support.primaryt.co.uk and we’ll do our best to help rectify the situation for you.

Cheers,

Ed

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We will get the issue resolved as soon as possible. Thanks for understanding

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What does this mean? 

We’ve added academyblogger.co.uk, schoolblogs.org and secondaryblogger.co.uk to the options that are available when signing up for a new blog, which means academies and secondaries can now have a blog address that reflects their status.

Here’s an example

What are we trying to achieve?

This was a direct result of our users’ feedback and is part of a new committment to develop PrimaryBlogger as a service for all educational establishments.

Can I move my current blog to the new domains and can we have more than one?

At this time only new blogs can use the new domain names, and each blog is limited to one domain. You could however export your content, create a new blog and import your content again, creating a duplicated blog. Check out our guide on the matter.

Blog Address Availability

The new domains give you the opportunity to register a blog that may have already been taken under the primaryblogger.co.uk address, allowing a more memorable address to share with others.

Has anything changed?

No, nothing has changed. We have just added new domains completely free!

Use Your Own Web Address

Did you know you can use your own domain name to personalise your PrimaryBlogger experience even more? Once you’ve bought your domain name you can follow the instructions in Tools > Add a Domain. Want your own domain but don’t know how to get started? We can take care of it for you… Use our support site if you need any assistance.

Suggest A Web Address

We love to hear from our users. If you’ve got any domain name ideas that you think would benefit everyone who uses PrimaryBlogger, let us know.

What Does The Future Hold For PrimaryBlogger?

We’re looking to add more addresses to differentiate blogs thoughout education, we’ll update our blog each time we add a new address. We hope this makes people feel more comfortable and allows PrimaryBlogger to be accessible to every teacher, lecturer and educator.

One More Thing

You can now create a fully customised school website, directly in PrimaryBlogger for only £20 a month! Check out the PB Pro Themes area to check out 60+ customisable themes and counting. All PB Pro School Websites members get unlimited upload space, phone support, set up help and lots of special member only plugins. Judge that against your current website provider, how does it fair? Check out our features page and contact us for more information.

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The employee had decided that he could not work his 30 day notice period and also would not communicate with us. In response, Primary Technology sent the employee a letter reminding him of his contractual obligations and asked him to re-consider opening communications with us.

The employee sadly did not re-consider and instead, one month later, initiated employment tribunal proceedings on the grounds of constructive dismisal. At this point he became the “Ex employee”.

Given that we had been accused of constructive dismisal, we decided to seek legal council. I don’t want to go into too much detail about how we used legal council and the approaches used, but it was safe to say that in my opinion the whole case was not handled very professionally. For example, the Ex Employee’s solicitor neglected to mention that the Ex Employee had actually stopped using their services some time before the tribunal hearing, despite the solicitor being duty bound to do so.

We arrived early and fully prepared for our tribunal case. Our legal team and senior managers were eager to hear the truth, myself especially because I was the main target of the accusations.

10AM came and went. At 10.30, we went into the chamber but our opposite hadn’t turned up; neither had his legal representation (we had the delay because the tribunal secretary had spent 30 minutes calling all the contact details available for the Ex Employee and his solicitor).

The case was dismissed with no orders for costs meaning Primary Technology were considerably out of pocket due to legal fees and time wasted. Unfortunately the truth was never investigated

So here it is, evidence that we went through the process only to be dissapointed that we didn’t have our long-awaited day in the tribunal courts.

We believe in transparency as default in Primary Technology and public records often aid us in fulfilling this so with that in mind here is a copy of the public documents that was published from the tribunal.

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Why do we have two servers?

The traditional setup within primary schools has been two physically disjoint networks, one for curriculum users (teaching staff and pupils), and one for the administrative staff. This provided two sets of ring-fenced resources, both servers acting as file and print servers for their users, with the admin server also hosting the SQL databases for MIS systems. The security of these databases was often cited as a reason for keeping the two networks disjoint. However, using robust security practices will be just as effective at protecting sensitive data, and much less restrictive to users authorised to use that data.

What’s changing?

The changes in the way technology is utilized mean that there is more and more cross-over between traditional admin and curriculum use.
Members of the senior leadership team, who have traditionally needed to connect to the admin network, may be teaching and also need access to the curriculum server resources; this would require logging on to a different computer, one connected to the curriculum network, with a different user name and password.
Teaching staff might wish to have access to the MIS systems on the admin server, whether this is for something simple like desktop registering, or more advanced, such as pupil progress recording.

So how is it changing?

The first step in closer integration is the physical joining of the two networks, to allow data to pass between them. This allows for the crossover of data between the systems, but doesn’t allow for some of the greater benefits that can be achieved through the joining of both servers into a single domain. With all machines at a site belonging to a single domain for the whole school, it doesn’t matter whether a user is a curriculum or an admin user, they can log on to any client machine, with a single set of user credentials, and have access to their data, whether it is stored on the curriculum server, the admin server or both. There is also potentially simplified access to shared resources such as printers, as well as greater flexibility in the event of a particular printer failure.

So can we just have one server?

The answer to this question is simple enough, yes, yes you can. With the relative power and storage capacity of computers increasing all the time, many schools who are keen to make budgetary savings see moving their current curriculum and admin servers on to a single machine to be an excellent way to cut costs. Essentially all you are really adding to your MIS server loading is the file and print server role for the curriculum users, and a little overhead for handling things like user authentication. Given that your new server will have a more powerful processor, more memory and probably a better disk subsystem, all that you need to do is add sufficient storage capacity for the curriculum users and you can happily run your school on a single server.

Should I have just one server?

In many ways this is a trickier question. The single server approach, whilst seeming attractive, does remove some of the potential resiliency you could achieve through retaining a two server architecture. In theory it would be possible to make the servers fully redundant with data being mirrored across both servers. Then in the event of one failing, a few minor configuration changes would allow the school to continue on virtually unaffected in the event of server failure, something which would be impossible in the single server school, (or even the traditional style two server school).

It is unlikely that the complexity of such a high degree of resiliency is necessary (or even desirable) in a primary school environment. However having a second server to help maintain the core server functions such as active directory, DNS, DHCP etc., would allow many I.T. functions to continue unaffected within the school whilst a failed server was replaced. This is something well worth considering in the current environment where the internet can provide access to teaching resources and applications in the event that local server based applications are unavailable.

Weighing it up. . .

Single server offers potential savings on hardware costs, and systems management overheads, only having to administer a single server. Its potential weakness is that the server becomes a single point of failure for the whole school, rather than just the curriculum users or admin the staff. However so long as the school have reliable backups, both of it data and active directory, a recovery shouldn’t take more than 48 hours (assuming access to replacement hardware).

Twin server systems have the advantage of maintaining the active directory in the event of a server failure. This will allow users to log on, and with a little forethought in implementation allow access to the internet, shared printers and whatever user data is available on the remaining server whilst awaiting the install and configuration of the replacement server.

Article by Steve Dulson, schools network engineer at Primary Technology

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Today we are pleased to announce the launch version 1.1 of our popular School Holiday Dates website, My School Holidays.

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We are moving some of our servers physical locations. This requires the services to be shut down during the move, the service will be back online at the latest of 8PM.

Here are some questions you may have:

Q. What will happen to my emails during the downtime?

A. During the downtime the School Email connectivity will be disrupted. Any emails sent to users during the downtime will be held by the SPAM filters until the service returns then all emails will be delivered to your mailbox.

Q. Will this lose any data?

A. No. The service will return with everything work as before.

If you have any concerns about the maintenance then please contact support@schoolemail.co.uk

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Just a note to say thank you for the excellent two packages I have used today. As you are no doubt aware that today was a strike day and unfortunately our school decided to close. Without politics being discussed I decided not to strike and used the Internet and two of your packages to host my lessons – run from the classroom, but with children in their homes. The technology worked seamlessly. My only issue was not having names on primary paint.  The software was quality all over and made my interactive lessons almost as they would be in the classroom. Thanks again.

So not only did we get some positive, quality feedback we also got a bug report Thanks to the sender!

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Personalised learning needs a smooth transition between various service providers who are
offering learning content and activities. With continual password prompts being a barrier to this
style of learning, and putting off many schools. Single Sign On (SSO) should be one of the
underlying technologies that removes this barrier, yet it is failing to live up to its promise and the
hard work that many people have put into it. This endangers the whole thrust of personalisation
mediated by technology.

Schools have both a want and a need to try to personalise students’ online learning. Since 2006
the majority of schools, districts and local authorities have tried to accomplish this by accessing
web based learning resources using a Single Sign On system called Shibboleth to avoid
remembering and having to enter multiple passwords on multiple web applications. At
Government level this system is called “Federated Access Management (FAM)” but as the scope of
my report covers a specific mechanism I will not be using this term. This system isn’t achieving its
goals, in this report I will try to explain why and how we can go about making Single Sign On a
more natural experience for schools. If I was reading this report I would have given up before now,
thinking “Meh, its someone else’s problem” but really it isn’t. I hope you can take some time to
read on and to find out how we can all work together to solve the problem.

Download the report: PDF, Microsoft Word, Open Document.

See previous revisions of the report: http://john.primarypad.com/ep/pad/view/single-sign-on-writeup/latest

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