John K Mitchell's blogger

I have realised that recently I've been talking about educational matters in my blog. My interest relates to both ends of the educational spectrum, I lecture at a FE college and am a governor at my local primary school Peakirk cum Glinton C of E Primary School (the "cum" means with).

This is school in the village (Glinton) I live in and covers both Glinton and Peakirk. It currently has just under 200 pupils across 7 years (reception and Years 1 to 6).

As a governor I was appointed by the LEA (Local Education Authority) and am the only LEA governor on the board, other governors represent the church (it's a C of E school), the parents, staff and parish councils. The Governing body meets on a regular basis and as governors we are encouraged to visit the school. If this is something you would like to be involved in why not contact either your local school or LEA and see if there are any vacancies. You will probably have to undergo a CRB police check and also training for the role, but it's very worth while.

With the latest repossession statistics showing a large percentage increase in the number of repossession orders made by the courts in the UK against home buyers (nearly 20,000 in the 3rd quarter) it might be time to think about mortgage protection insurance, especially if your job security is not terribly good.

The good thing about the figures is that they are not the number of repossessions that took place, apparently many orders are suspended so that the home buyer can continue ot live in the home as long as they make the normal repayments and pay something towards the arrears.

I gather that there is more personal debt in the UK than the national debts of the whole of Africa and South America - I find that a very frightening figure (more than £1,000 billion) and wonder if this is going to dent consumer confidence even more.

One of the other lecturers in the college (in the building section) was asking me about UK insulation suppliers on the web. A quick search produced Knauf Insulation's website that as well as containing details of their products contains a useful page on "why insulate". He is going to ask Knauf for permission to use this as a resource sheet for his students.

Do I need a site map - Forest Software

You may have heard people talking about site maps and be wondering if your website needs such a thing. This article discusses sitemaps and their uses.

What is a sitemap ?

As a designer, I am asked this question by some clients. A site map is not a map of your office location (as one of my clients thought) but is a page (or sometimes more than one page) that contains links to all of the pages on your website..... more

Using the latest in educational and computer technology, Pentland Trainings' business analysis training means that they can train your staff in the latest techniques and methodologies.

Their course is principally targeted at Analysts, Business Analysts and Systems' Analysts but is also appropriate for Project Managers who develop their own business cases.

Sainsbury DVD rental on the Glinton.Net website introduces a new idea in dvd rentals.

For a flat rate monthly fee you can rent as many DVD's as you want in a month and keep them for as lonk as you want.

There are several packages that control the number of DVDs that you can have on rental at any one time. Prices start at under £8 per month.

A project I am working on at the moment involves moving a client database from one system to another, as you may expect the old database has several duplicate records that have been spotted and the question has been raised about how many other duplicates are on the database (there are about 65,000 records in total - too many to manually check).

This company say on their website that they are able to deduplicate databases containing names and addresses.

I did think about doing this myself, in theory it would be possible to do this using Soundex rules etc, however with with a database of this size, and the time constraints I think it would be worth looking at using a third party to do the work.

ONSPEED is the way to wake up your dial up, transform a narrow band dial up connection to near broadband speeds.

This is a product that I used before broadband arrived in my village and have continued with - it even speeds up broadband connections!

This company, based near Peterborough, is an AV equipment rental and sales specialist.

Looking at their website they can provide a hire or sales service for professional standard AV equipment to cover everything from a small (25 people) meeting to a large conference (3,000+) anywhere in the UK or Europe.

They have even provided the AV equipment for theatre productions, outside concerts and an event at the Tower of London.

The UK government have changed the rules relating to OFSTED inspections of schools yet again. It seems that schools will be inspected on the basis of a self-evaluation form where the school rates itself and then provides the evidence for the rating.
To quote the OFSTED documentation "Inspection provides an independent, external evaluation of the effectiveness of a school in promoting the standards, personal development and well-being of its learners, the quality of its provision and how well it is led and managed. It is also designed to help schools to improve the quality of the education they provide and so raise standards." Quite how this can be done in the case of the smaller schools where the inspector may have been allocated between one and two days to inspect the school and a further day to produce the report remains to be seen.