Sharepoint Organisation - your suggestions please

[jrubinstein]

Hi all

 

I'm hoping for suggestions. I am setting up a Sharepoint 2007 installation to replace our class server setup. I'm hoping to script automatic teacher/student mappings from SIMS because that's what we've got at present.

 

I have a number of issues/problems/routes.

 

1. I could automatically create sites for every SIMS class. This would use the Sharepoint's Learning Kit as intended. The teachers would get links to their class sites and could assign work from those sites to those students. Student membership of the site would be automatically updated every night.

 

The first problem with this is that we would need to delete sites on a regular basis, when this happens the resources are deleted with them.

 

2. I could set up a single site with groups for each class within the site so that the teacher can assign learning resources by group for all sites.

 

However the list of classes is likely to be so long that it will become unwieldy. Even if I reset the permissions so that each teacher can only see their own classes the list of learners will include all the students in the school.

 

3. I could set up separate sites for each year group and the classes as groups within that, the problem here is that we have vertical tutor groups and the post 16 groups are complex too.

 

Any ideas?

[rpwillis]

Hi,

 

This is a copy of my reply in the CodePlex forum, but I'll post it here as well for those who don't visit that.

 

As always the best solution depends on how your users are going to use it. If there's going to be a lot of class specific use such as discussion lists etc, then one site per class will enable this best. As David has recommended above, you don't need to store the learning resources within the class site, they can be in 'library sites'.

 

If there's not going to be any use of the individual sites then you may be better off with a site covering multiple classes.

 

Other possibilities to keep the number of sites down which I've implemented are:

* A Site per Subject Year combination e.g. Maths Year 7, Maths Year 8, English Year 7

* A Site per Subject

* A Site per class, but these are hidden so no-one can access them. They are then purely used to populate the list of sites to choose to assign an assignment to.

 

One other thing to consider is that different parts of the school may have different needs, for example in Year 7 if everyone is doing similar work you may only need a site per Subject Year, but higher up years have individual sites per class.

 

Finally, for those not interested in developing their own, the product which I have developed handles all the possibilites discussed and more. If you would like more information, please visit

http://www.salamandersoft.co.uk or email me at [email protected].

 

Richard

[zag]

Are you actually using SLK? I installed it but found loads of bugs and missing features in it.

 

Does it actually now work properly?

 

We use sites based on the subject area not on actual classes, its alot easier to manage and you can set up sub sites or document folders underneath its parent site.

 

So we have sites for all Subjects like Maths, Geography ect and underneath that a document storage area, links to MMS videos, announcements and discussion groups.

 

Seems to work well for us.

[NewOrder]

to support Richard W. I have SLK working in over 100 schools. I also have his utilities creating sites for classes.

 

My problem is trying to explain to schools that sims or cmis might have 400 to 600 classes but you do not have to set up a class site for each.

 

What you need to consider is what Richard said is how the learning is delivered. KS 3 you will probably create year groups for a subject but theses will be in fact a number of classes. So for year 7 maths you will have a site but it will have 6, 8 or as many as you want classes. When you use slk eLearning action you will have a choice to send work to all in that site or to classes or individuals or a mixture.

 

Yes we have it working.

[jrubinstein]

We are currently using Class server - in which I've built an automatic translation of sims classes to class server classes. The reason for this is that we use it for all the school's cover so even though some classes will only be used occasionally the cover staff have to be able to pick the students through their classes rather than finding them within the year group.

 

I've got this covered now - I think. the SLK works well except that most of our cover material is in the form of word documents with a word/powerpoint response required so I'm now looking to see how to make this work.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Best wishes

 

Jay