Alex Pearce (SharePoint MVP & Learning Gateway and ICT Manager for the largest school in Europe) and myself are pleased to announce that we are holding a conference devoted to Microsoft Learning Gateway on 15th July at the Belfry near Birmingham.
As far as we know this is the first conference dedicated to Microsoft Learning Gateway in the world and we are really pleased to hold it in the UK. It shows the strength of the Learning Gateway community in the UK. We’ve got an excellent set of speakers (and me) covering a wide range of topics.
Although there is a cost involved, £150 + VAT, we feel that it is well worth the money, both for the information you’ll get from the sessions and the opportunity to network with your peers using SharePoint in education. There’s more information and registration available at the conference web site.
Learning Essentials for Microsoft Office provides education specific tools and templates for pupils and teachers. Best of all it’s free for those of you on Microsoft Academic Volume Licensing.
The top features include:
- SCORM authoring tool. The SCORM tools are a component of the comprehensive THESIS 3.0 e-learning solution from Hunterstone.
- An integrated Content Development Kit with simple templates help teachers create their own materials for Learning Essentials.
- Templates with Project Assistance for teachers and pupils help you quickly prepare classroom handouts, grading rubrics, assessments, worksheets and more.
- Learning Essentials unlocks tools in Microsoft Office specially designed for foreign language study, providing templates for completing assignments in Spanish, French, and German.
- Click through tutorials and side-by-side Project Assistance from leading educational publishers provide academic guidance for students and best practices for educators so they can do their best work.
- Customized Toolbars.
You can find more details and how to download it at Learning Essentials for Microsoft Office.
Microsoft have published a series of “deep case studies” about four schools who have been using ICT in innovative ways. Although created by Microsoft the studies are technology agnostic – in fact they had to cut lots of content where interviewees enthused about specific Microsoft products. Each schools story is broken down into nine chapters which can all be read and digested independently:
- School Overview
- Change Management
- Student Experience
- Learning Outcomes
- Parent Experience
- School Administration
- Local Government View
- Use of ICT
- Where Next?
So you can read about just the issues which are most pressing for you, read an entire school’s story or jump around as you fancy. None of them are presented as the ‘right’ way to handle the changes or ICT, just how each school handled the issues, their approaches and the outcomes, good and bad.
The stories are good to watch if you are thinking about or making changes in the way you and your school are working with and using ICT.
Read the case studies at the Innovative Schools website or read a longer overview at Ray Fleming’s blog.
Yesterday I attended a meeting of the East Anglia SharePoint Network, where I had been invited to give an overview of SalamanderSoft’s products. The network runs as a series of regular, informal, face-to-face meetings and an on-line community for schools in East Anglia to share information / good practice / problems etc with their Sharepoint implementations.
This was only their second meeting, but the meeting was well attended with a good mix of schools who have been using SharePoint for years, together with those who were just starting to use it, or even just thinking about it. There was a lot of useful information, just seeing what other schools are doing with SharePoint raises all sorts of possibilities – I certainly learned a lot and have come away with some ideas.
If you are interested in joining, attending a meeting or just finding out more then just email David Wilson (david.wilson (at) swaveseyvc.cambs.sch.uk).