john_brum

I hear Progresso has failed badly in Birmingham, with none of the three sample school being able to adopt it at all. I hear the one that did try and go live has erm, well died. Is this hearsay and gossip, or is this product really not ready at all? Is it that Birmingham are not managing it properly? Who knows. If you do, let us all know please, I'd hate to be recommending a dead duck to my school. Thanks John

news from the front line here in Birmingham. Frankly this is a total balls up. Redstone do keep changing their minds, and it all seems to be about their finance and cost models. Here's a typical example - Birmingham’s learning environment. We were first shown ITWORX - some Egyptian piece of share point, they then three weeks later said there was no way this would be ready in time, so they said we would probably get RM kaleidos. Week or two later, we wont get RM because it's too expensive. Back to ITWORX, this time working with moodle. Funny really link2ict (bgfl) were at the meeting regarding this and they looked like they were going to bust a blood vessel over the integration with cmis. Seemed to be the first thing they knew about it. After all was said and done, Birmingham is expected to sign up for a learning platform nobody has seen working, sure we've seem a few schools in Egypt and the like, but it's nothing like the Birmingham situation, or complexity. Also here's something people might not realise, lets say your a phase 1 school, but still a year or 2 from actually being hit by this. Once the 1st school has been done we have to start paying for it £65 per student per year. Hmm, actually it could be £63. anyway, remember this could be for a few years with no benefit to us or any other school at all. Now they do say the systems will be available for use to use ie, the learning platform, but frankly who going to rip their network apart to utilise the learning platform at this stage. I mean it's bad enough that staff and students hardly have any storage space on the thing, and we wont be able to home any curriculum data locally any more. To sum up, our systems will be removed and replaced with APP-v and a share point solution of types. From a school who has 1 nn and 2 technicians we're down to 1 tech and a 6th former. Still according to our figures we’ll receive sh*t loads of those little eeepc’s when this is all over. Seems to be cheapest way to boost the student to computer ratio. Oh goody. I guess it wont be my problem by then. Oh well.