mleighton

Have you tried installing Moodle as your VLE and running it within SharePoint? You can use SharePoint web parts for Mooodle.

If you have a branded SharePoint site then you can send some screenshot(s) to The Kraal website and they will include your school in their gallery - to demonstrate where schools in the UK and beyond are taking their SharePoint installations. You can send a single screenshot, or if you want to send more information then include a copy of your school logo and whatever text you want to accompany your screenshots. You can see the gallery here.

Is this the case? In line with many others above, we report 6 times a year on progress, including targets, attainment, work ethic, and colour coded progress to target (or should it be progress from baseline?). We incorporate one full written profile each year. We also provide an individual online homework diary for every student, and a version for every parent to display their child's homework. All this reporting is wholly online. In the light of all this we have discussions in school about the worth of parents evenings - as parents already have so much data and information at their fingertips. Why do we need to regurgitate the same information to parents that they can already see online? True, parents are more judicious in who they choose to see these days, and often come with specific questions, not content with just listening to the teachers description of how their child is doing. But do we need these evenings? If as you say we have to have parents evenings, then perhaps we should be targeting parents - see who we want to see? Maybe tailor evenings to different groups of parents? As quality of reporting increases, so the need for parents evenings decreases....or does it?

We used to use First Class many years ago. We have been using SharePoint since 2006 - it is excellent and has allowed us to develop at the pace, and in the direction, that we wanted to. You can see some examples of school SharePoint systems at ICT In Education

I have used these people in the past to host a MOSS implementation for me - no problems and quite a good level of support. I believe they were intending to provide a free 2010 solution, but don't know if that ever happened... SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Hosted SharePoint Server by Fpweb.net Mark

You could have a look at The Kraal home page which has some info and screenshots form schools who are using it.

Interesting question - would also like to know what people are using. We use SLK.

Depends where you want to store the file. In the case of a page I would suggest you continue with http://servername/location/name_of_page.aspx as this will link to a page within your SharePoint site. You will find that if you specify the path as http://servername/location/name_of_page.aspx, the 'http://servername' is known to the system, and it will create a relative path for you. Thus renaming the server at a later date should not pose a problem. /_layouts/images/picture.jpg points to a file on the server itself - so the site images for example could be stored centrally there away from the site, if you prefer. Mark

Hi Richard, Is it not the case that targeting individual items in a calendar will only work in list views and not calendar view? I seem to remember this being a known issue in MOSS? Mark

Have a look at the kraal website for examples of other schools SharePoint installations, and for guidance on design. You can also contact us at Blatchington Mill if we can help you.... Mark

We are not in the north of the country, but have been hosting a sizeable installation of SharePoint and SLG2. You can view details on it on the gallery at The Kraal (Blatchington Mill School) or alternatively contact the school and we will gladly discuss it with you.

You could look at a few school's implementations of SharePoint on the Schools Gallery at The Kraal website....

Blatchington MIll School technical case study Videos - Blatchington Mill, Twynham, Monkseaton Schools Gallery on The Kraal

Have a look at The Kraal, where there is a gallery of screenshots from schools using Sharepoint. May help to give you some ideas?

Hi Laura, You may be interested in this site for some support in using SharePoint in school... the kraal - SharePoint and ICT in the Education Community

Do you want to add it to our gallery of SharePoint sites used in schools, so that others can benefit from seeing it? There are so many schools setting out to develop their own SharePoint sites, we thought it would be a good idea to illustrate some of the existing ones to show ideas of what you can do with SharePoint in your school. If you have any pages/sites you would like to showcase, then please let us know via our site at The Kraal. We offer to display your screenshots and your text on our gallery. All we ask is that you also provide an email address so that interested schools can get in touch with you direct. Edit: Fixed URL to Gallery

Just provided a link to the Exchange web front end.

Excellent idea Mike - particularly the videos. Which areas of the school population had a hand in designing this? Have you had much feedback from parents yet? Are you considering using SharePoint to provide a means of selecting the option themselves?

I would second all that James (Edutech) has just outlined.....we have run with SharePoint for 5 years, and would do the same again. Get yourself the SIMS web parts and possibly Moodle as the VLE component and you have everything you need for an all round robust and effective MLE. Have a look at the schools gallery on the kraal to see some examples.

If you want to see some SharePoint sites, have a look at the gallery on the kraal - SharePoint Design, Web Parts, and ICT in the Online Education Community Each school featured has a named email contact if you wanted to take up further information.

I think that the original question raised is very useful for getting us to briefly evaluate where we are with SharePoint and why we opted for it in the first place. If you want to use SharePoint as your Learning Platform I would urge you to also consider the SharePoint Learning Kit. Moodle is also a great vehicle for the teaching and learning, and perhaps more dynamic day to day aspects of your portal, although there is a new version of SharePOint Learning Kit about to be launched. With the integration of Capita's Learning Gateway web parts you will immediately meet the governments 2010 target for online reporting to parents, and provide real time reporting with hardly any extra work in school. If you want to see good examples of SharePoint installations in school have a look at Technical case study of Blatchington Mill School The Kraal (Gallery of school SharePoint installations) Twynham School SharePoint Hope this helps....

Go to your list and select Actions > Edit in Datasheet Now you can copy/cut/paste rows as you wish to get the order you want. When done, select Actions > Show in Standard View

Solitaire seems to work fine for everyone, but then the problems start when you try to create alternative content! Class Server used to work well for us, but MS no longer support this. Creating SCORM content for SLK/SharePoint has been a long running issue for us - I have yet to find an editor which I think is sufficiently intuitive to unleash on our teaching staff. Have looked at quite a few, but if anyone has a recommendation then I will certainly follow it up.....

Our class sites are mainly set up as blog sites, with a couple of extra web parts added - normally a content editor to provide a welcome message, and an announcements web part for the teacher to add messages for the class. In this set up the teacher can provide lead material to the class through blog posts, and class members can add comments. We also have a wiki library attached for any teacher that wants it, and a link to the assignment diary filtered for that particular site. Although that is a common platform for a class site, they are adapted where teachers want them to be.

You are correct - the Salamander web part allows 2 way integration with files. It also integrates completely seamlessly with SharePoint, so is very neat and unobtrusive. Simple to install. We have been using it for some time now without any problems at all.