SCHOOL ICT NEWS BULLETIN No 160 - 15/03/2010

Published by Children’s Services

ICT in Schools Conference – World Class ICT for Norfolk Learners 24^th & 25^th March 2010

Have you booked your place at this year’s ICT in Schools Conference? There are still free places remaining for teaching staff and school governors.

Do not miss the opportunity to visit a demonstration of the e¹ Norfolk Primary Tracker where you can raise all your questions concerning attainment tracking.

Learn more at this year’s conference including how Norfolk is leading the way to achieve single sign on for Norfolk Learners in a true world wide sense by booking into ‘Increasing Access to Valuable Resources’ breakout session.

Norfolk took the challenge to Implement single sign–on for all users:

Providing key benefits of:

• Time saving
• Accurate information
• Pluggable infrastructure
• Improved security

By addressing Norfolk County Council’s constant concern about access to a wealth of online resources and maintaining many different logins and personal information by it’s

• 130,000 learners
• Teachers
• Support staff
• 450 schools

Norfolk sought to find a solution, capable of providing each person with one identity regardless of the number of times they exist across Norfolk’s learning establishments.

Whilst undertaking the research and development of such a solution, Norfolk acknowledged it was imperative that one of the key standards within its schools technical strategy would be to embed a Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF) as the integral standard to deliver a flexible and efficient 5th utility, capable of providing world class teaching and learning in Norfolk.

As a consequence, NCC’s proof of concept (PoC) focused upon the needs of five Norfolk rural primary schools, all using the same MIS and learning platform, ensuring that real time data sharing certified children and staff were always in the correct groups and with the correct identities.

To raise your understanding of the emerging technologies in 21^st Century learning to find out more about the experiences of the 5 primaries and the next steps to achieving single sign on in your school, book to attend this year’s conference.

We are running the same one day conference on two consecutive days so you can choose the date that suites you best from 24^th or 25^th March 2010, the venue is the John Innes Conference Centre, it’s free to attend and lunch will be provided.

Visit the following link and book a FREE delegate place open to all Norfolk Head Teachers, Governors, ICT Coordinators, Teachers and Network Managers. ICT in Schools Conference 2010 or call the ICT Solutions Service Desk for more information on 0845 303 3003

Author: Judy Houghton

The Norfolk Internet Service

The Internet service used by all Norfolk schools will be undergoing an essential upgrade of the hardware which provides virus protection when using the Internet. This work is scheduled for 22^nd, 23^rd and 24^th March. We have been advised that this will not impact the current service levels whilst the work is carried out, however, should an issue arise on these days please contact the ICT Solutions helpdesk on 0845 303 3003.

Author: Mark Carway