SharePoint User Group UK

To support the growing use of SharePoint in Education we have created this Special Interest forum specifically targeted at Education.  

This forum aims to cover all areas of SharePoint in Education from the Microsoft Learning Gateway, SharePoint Learning Kit,  Community Kit for SharePoint : Schools Edition to 3rd Party VLE integration, best practice, general support and user wish lists.   

Out hope is the forum will be used by

• Teachers and Students who have a SharePoint solution in their school or college
• IT support people who install and manage these school based installation
• Local Authorities who provide managed solutions
• SharePoint developers and consultants who work in education 
• solutions providers to support there products and looking for ideas on new features

to share experiences, pain points, and just help improve what we can achieved and through its inclusion in the SUGUK we should see some cross over in support and expertise.

The forum is open so please use this to ask questions,  make suggestions or generally talk about what's hot and what's not.   

Want to see something specific in your school?  ask the question - someone may have an answer, have the code to share or just might be willing to write something.

Are you doing something really great that you want to share?  

As is the rule with the SUGUK site all 3rd party products/presentations must be posted to the Third Party Products/Presentations forum.

I think this can be a great place to share out tutoring-experiences when it comes to SharePoint.

Personally I am currently a consultant, consulting mostly in SharePoint 2007 (All areas) as well as consulting as a tutor (MOSS 2007 Development) and think this place can be a good place to share my own experiences with you as well as learn from you all!

Cheers

Tobias,

I think it would be useful to share some ideas about how you introduce SharePoint to new users,  although this needs to focus on how this would work in a School or College to fit in with the focus of this forum.

Andrew

This is ideal, I'm doing a work placement at a college, who are hoping to building a VLE using sharepoint server 2007.

At the minute we are planning and I have a virtual system running MOSS 2007 for testing purposes.

saved to favorites :)

Excellent stuff - we've just rolled out MOSS 2007 as our Student Portal, with the Staff side of things going live today (fingers crossed).

Eventually we hope to integrate Moodle into the whole thing, so a lot of work coming up.

Plissken, 

Would be great to hear about your experience of integrating Moodle.

Best of luck with your staff portal,   care to share any of your lessons learnt?

Andrew

Certainly will put together some kind of blog entry/article once we've got things done. At the moment, we've simply set up a sort of Student Portal, with the students logging on to see announcements, their own diary/class timetable and learning resources.  Still ironing out the wrinkles, then it will be Moodles turn.

Regards

Mike

Salford College

Plissken wrote:

Excellent stuff - we've just rolled out MOSS 2007 as our Student Portal, with the Staff side of things going live today (fingers crossed).

Eventually we hope to integrate Moodle into the whole thing, so a lot of work coming up.

Why in heaven's name would you want to integrate Moodle? Just use MS's Learning Gateway (built on MOSS 07) with oodles more features than Moodle.

NanoRuler wrote:

Why in heaven's name would you want to integrate Moodle? Just use MS's Learning Gateway (built on MOSS 07) with oodles more features than Moodle.

I had very quick look at Learning gateway, how useful is it and is it pain to setup?

Thanks

Its very easy to set up - download WSS v.3 from the Microsoft website and install onto your Windows 2003 server.

Download Microsoft LG web parts from www.codeplex.com/lg and follow the instructions.  Theres about 200 pages to help you.

Alex

Hi everyone

Our school is currently implementing the LG based on MOSS2007. We're the first school in the area to do this, thus litte bit longer rollout time.

Here's the list of core requirements (both educational and operational)we have for the LG

- Curriculum management tools - tools for our school's faculty to manage curriculum. We're writing our own curriculum, so tools which are 'out there' are not really suitable. These toold were developed using .net 3.0 and allow teachers and administrators to manage curriculum data both vertically and horizontaly. they also include unit planning template which allows teachers to plan their units of teaching, link them with curriculum, learning resources and class sites. administrators can monitor curriculum and unit plan usage and get up to date reports

- Link between Student Information System and LG. This also includes creation of student accounts in AD, exchange mailbox, MOSS premissions, class site access rights. Ultimately, all assesment done on LG (which will be linked to our own curriculum) will be stored in our SIS. This tool is using custom built web interface, to manage student data flow.

- Technology competency. Students are required to show certain level of technology competency before graduating from HS. This tool allows online assesment based on predefined set of criteria of students' tech competency. This is linked with SIS.

- class site management; automatic creation of class sites and assignement of students and teachers to those sites.

- operational. typical usage of MOSS for document and knowledge management with out of box workflows. Only tool developed for operational side is Helpdesk which allows easy management and up to date monitoring of help requests. it is linked with inventory database and online KB center.

That's rough description of some addons we created. We'll be going online with some of developed after 8 months development pretty soon. Hopefully, I'll go on vacation after that.

I am interested to hear about your requirements for the LG and how much additional development did you do. Driving force behind our administration's support for the project is ability to track student achievemet based oun our custom written curriculum.

Cheers

Damir

damm Damir, sounds good! hope it goes all well for you. We are doing exact same thing, just 1 month in though.

Damir/Adam,

I would be really interested in talking to you about these customisation, the details of what your doing to extend MLG/SLK and the reasons for taking the custom route compared to the current market solutions.

Perhaps another thread to open up this discussion?

Andrew

Hi Andrew

That is good idea. I do have a lot to write about, but also to ask.

One major guideline for custom development and hosting of these services inhouse is our geographical location (China) and unpredictability of internet access. Development of curriculum management tools instead of using already existing one (e.g. Rubicon Atlas) is one good example. There were times when online curriculum management tool which my school was trying to use was completely inaccesible from here, or service was painfully slow, and both issues had nothing to do with the service provider.

Development of tools which would link our student information system with this framework was a basic nessesity for this project to kick off. There were no other solutions in the market at the time so we had to develop our own.

Cheers

Damir

Why in heaven's name would you want to integrate Moodle? Just use MS's Learning Gateway (built on MOSS 07) with oodles more features than Moodle.

One step at a time... :-)  Due to various supplier delays over the summer (the servers/software was supposed to be done mid-July, eventually completed early Sept) we just ran out of time and went with what we have.  Now the academic year has started, it is difficult to swap systems on people.