pazman

is Gagglemail no good then? I see the benefits of email integration but only if it your existing exchange mail addresses? In all honesty, I really want them to sort out the single sign-on situation as this would be a really powerful and easy way of staff and students engaging even quicker with one less thing to do before being able to use everything on the VLE thoughts?

always a good way to get things done I'd say!! recommend having a browse of sites on the school-portal network to get ideas if you want some more details about how ive done things then am happy to converse by email - we won a UniServity Excellence Award in July 2009 for our eBuddies work, and have been the secondary in the LA that has really been making headway with this agenda

it is worth shopping around I agree but UniServity is good value for money, and after some years of persevering with their staff, building up a good working relationship with them is just as important. For example, I am able to contact my CSM anytime from about 6am if we need support (and last week with the snow that came in very useful!) My colleagues have really seen the benefits over recent times, and the snow day hits were a real confidence booster for them and the students. if you have somethign established and working then it might be a little too radical to change. if you are still in the infancy stages then I would investigate possibilities. I did this last year at BETT and we chose to stick because there was nothing that offered "the full package"

true enough - we are coming to the end of our current LA contract with them and their new standard issue seems to be 5GB of storage per school. this is clearly not enough still (think ours is about 17GB in size at the moment, and growing a quite a rapid rate!) broadband speed is imperative to keeping it live, though I agree with a previous post about performance issues at times. They have taken the north-west off onto a different server and this has eased capacity down here but still some way to go my concern with them at the moment is parent portal/online reporting as it doesnt look like they are as sorted as they claim to be! feedback from colleagues who have been to BETT today was not positive. I'm going tomorrow and will make a judgement for myself at that point...

dsummar, patience is the key. I've been responsible for it at my school for a little under 3yrs now and its a slow process selling the idea to colleagues. I set up small working groups (10-12 staff) of interested staff and then used a trickle feed / cascade training model during the recent snow days we have had, staff put work up for students to do - in 4 days, we had almost 13000 hits, with an average of 7 subjects per student accessed all the VLEs on offer are much of a muchness I have found. this one offers the collaborative aspect of learning, and is good from a learning and teaching point of view have a look at our site if you would like - search for Maiden Erlegh School on www.School-Portal.co.uk**** (I'm in the process of redesigning our homepage so ignore that bit!!)

Hi I'm Parras. teacher