Office 365 - is it for us?

[speckytecky]

I'm just starting to have an explore on the whole Cloud thing and pointers where to look would be mighty handy please.

We are a Key Stage 3 all boys special school with circa 70 students who have various levels of behavioural and emotional difficulties plus we have circa 50 staff. A small handful of the boys are very IT savvy and sadly some are at the other end of that spectrum.

[speckytecky]

54 viewings so far and no answers. Did I word my question badly - or something? Be gentle I'm older and more fragile than most of you young uns

[ZeroHour]

Erm it depends on what you would like to do tbh.
How do you currently deal with email etc?
Do you have a vle already or is the idea of sharepoint something that interests you?
How reliable and fast is your internet link?

[kernewek-sam]

I've just read @GrumbleDook latest blog post here Is Change Really That Hard? | Grumbledook thinks where he mentions https://twitter.com/jamesbmarshall. Not sure if thats what you're looking for though?

[Michael]

I've currently setup three schools to move over to Live@Edu at the end of the month. This is essentially just the e-mail part of the whole package which is being re-branded Office365.

For the moment I would recommend sticking with the local version of Office 2010 as Office365 is still very new, but maybe just using the e-mail part. This is essentially Exchange Server in the cloud and has been around for considerably longer.

[GrumbleDook]

To some extent the questions you should be asking yourself is around what do they need to a) support the curriculum, b) to help them develop ready for KS4, c) to help the school run as a school and d) what budget / time / expertise do you have to do it?

In most secondary schools the needs of the students and the needs of the staff overlap quite well, but in some (but not all) secondary special schools this can differ. This is because you have to take into account how the school supports collaboration and shared work with the students, how much effort is needed in school and out of schools to support and keep an eye on what they are doing, the abilities of each child has to be catered for which can be very difficult and not forgetting that the impact of something going wrong can be far larger than in other schools ... especially when it comes to behaviour.

To be honest, whether you run services in-house or on the cloud makes little difference, apart from perhaps the activity tracking (email filtering, amount of access, etc)

Using a VLE to control student to student discussions is a good way of tackling some of this as it promotes the appropriate language and attitudes due to being a semi-public space (i.e. the old walled garden!).

If you look on the TES forums SEN area you will come across a good number of SEN specialists who can give their experience of using various VLEs and tools, and this is likely to be more helpful than a techie conversation.

Most services can deliver pretty similar functionality but it might be the extra bits, the filtering, the access control, etc that make the difference what you go for.

I can't see any reason why Office365 wouldn't be a good thing to use ... but, like every tool out there, if not planned or used right then it can be a problem ... not the fault of the technology really, more the application of it.

HTH

[hit]

Hi @speckytecky. I'm a network manager for 5 SEBD and PRU schools and we did trial cloud computing at one with very little success! It boils down to (as you probably are well aware) if it doesn't work straight away then all hell breaks loose. On one occasion when we lost our connection mid lesson one student got so miffed at losing his work chairs and tables went flying and the reinforced LCD display proved to be not as strong as the manufacturer claimed.

Just saying!

[andrewshelor]

Agree with some of the responses. It depends on what you want to do with 'The Cloud'. My recommendation would be to write down what you want, then look at Office 365 and see if one of your needs lands in the Office 365 bucket of services.

My guess is that you would surely utilize Exchange Online and SharePoint Online piece of O365. If you can get your current user's email exported to individual .pst files, migration (email) to Office 365 is very manageable.