Over the half term, all the Apple Macs on campus were upgraded to OS X 10.4 "Tiger", making our operating system concurrent with that of the Hampstead and Westminster campuses. In addition to this, all staff and students now have access to the Adobe CS3 Web Premium Suite (including Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver and Acrobat Pro). The advantages of having professional design software at the fingertips of Southbank members are plenty, most notably now that through Acrobat Pro we have a common platform for authoring PDF files across the school as a whole.

Class attendance is now being done electronically in ePortal on classroom computers in the morning and the afternoon. This marks the first of Kensington's forays into using the ePortal management information system, and entering reports will follow soon.

The majority of the Kensington parent body are now signed up to our electronic Weekly Mailing, and more are signing up each week, saving us time and resources in getting this information out to our parents. Thank you for helping us with this initiative. It has come to the attention of the IT department that some Yahoo!, Hotmail and Compuserve email addresses are still not receiving the weekly mailing. Having looked into this, we have determined that the fault lies with their servers and we are working towards finding a resolution. Therefore parents with those kinds of email addresses will get a direct email of the Weekly Mailing from me until the issues have been resolved.

Event at the Apple Executive Briefing Centre
Tomorrow (Wednesday, 21st November) the IT department will be giving a presentation on Authoring Blogs and Podcasts at the Apple Executive Briefing Centre in Hanover Street. Although this event is invitation only, we hope to develop the presentation and deliver it to other members of the Southbank community throughout the year.

In The Pipeline
We're currently working on building a media server that will push out audio and video resources to staff and students on campus. This will leverage the built-in music sharing feature of iTunes and deliver these resources to classroom computers on demand. Developing a central point of video resources will enable teachers to create video playlists in the classroom and be able to play them anywhere on campus (including on our two new interactive whiteboards), without the need to use extra resources such as TV, DVD and video players.

Posted by JCh.
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