Teaching used to be about chalk and talk - the teacher would stand holding a piece of chalk and talk to the blackboard while the pupils ignored him. But this is the 21st centruy and things have moved on. Now we have “interactive whiteboards”.

These are truely marvelous things - its a huge projection of your computer screen on the wall and when you touch it, it acts like like your finger is the mouse pointer. So we can now have lovely colourful things dancing around on the board. We can have animations and videos. We can have sound effects. We can watch DVDs or play computer games on the massive screen.

The thing is though, to do it you need a computer. In a glorious piece of mis-management, our science department was equiped with four white boards that replaced the old fashioned and out of date blackboard, but we were only in posession of three computers. Somebody was left with a completely useless £1000 piece of equipment and no blackboard.

There was a time when each school had its own computer guy who would install things and fix things if they went wrong. There was a time when if you knew what you were doing that you could fix your computer (if you were lucky enough to have one in your classroom) by yourself. There was a time when, if the network went down you could still use your computer.
Not anymore, BT syntegra have taken over.

Edinburgh City council have given the contract for all the computers in schools to BT Syntegra.
They maintain the servers, they install the software, they fix things. They replace old computers when they die. Our school recently went through the refresh (pronounced ree-fresh for some reason) of all its computers. During October break all our machines were upgraded or replaced. I got a new laptop. We all were issued with new usernames and passwords.

One man in our school was given the job of overseeing the whole process, on top of his other duties. Every new username and password, both students and staff, had to be tested and checked in one week. BT Syntegra had to be notified of any problems by Friday afternoon or THEY would fine US.

Yes, if they made a mistake and something didn’t work, BT Syntegra would fine the school.

All the machines had pretty much the same spec and the same programs on them. Of course it didn’t cross BT Syntegra’s mind to install the software that is needed to run our interactive whiteboards, so yet again most of us were back to the old days of Chalk and talk (well, that assumes that you blackboard hadn’t been removed to make space for the interactive whiteboard).
They have also made it so that your desktop icons and things aren’t actually stored on the machine, but on the network, which is nice - if I log in in the library I have the same desktop as in my classroom.
However, if no network connection is available, I cannot log on to the machine. I cannot have local access to the files that I have stored on the harddrive. It becomes a big pretty paperweight.
So for the first two days after getting my new computer I could turn it on and look at the log in screen but could do nothing else, my interactive whiteboard was not so interactive.

Eventually my network connection was fixed and I was able to log in - yipee! I instantly downloaded lots of software I use and tried installing it, I got the whole way through the install process, right to the end and up popped a little window telling me that I did not have administrator priviledges and couldn’t do anything with my computer but read my emails.
Tremendous.
For the first week that we had the computers, there was one login for the school that was allowed to install things.
One.
For a whole school.
Not even the computing teacher could install things.
I’m not sure why teachers aren’t allowed to install programs. I believe the argument is “ah, well, you might install viruses and then where would we be?” but the system comes with outlook installed as standard, and isn’t that where most viruses come from?

So if I want a specific piece of software installed I need to email my business manager who passes the request onto an information technologly officer who will come and install it at some date in the future.

OK rant over, I like my new computer really.