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A colleague asked me to recommend some school websites built on SharePoint, that they could share with others. After I’d finished it for him, I thought I’d pop it into a PowerPoint for others - and then go further by popping up a quick blog post too. Here’s my take on 10 School SharePoint websites that are worth looking at for design ideas and inspiration - or simply because you want to nudge another colleague towards seeing that SharePoint beauty can start at skin deep.
Click on any of them to link to the live website
Note: The reason I listed this twice isn’t me cheating - I simply wanted to make sure that you saw their amazing interactive curriculum pages, and I know you’d kick yourself if you hadn’t seen it at No.1
Download the PowerPoint version of Top 10 School SharePoint websites
As I mentioned on Friday, I’m currently reading “School performance in Australia: results from analyses of school effectiveness”, a research report published in 2004.
When the report starts to take a look at the comparisons between secondary schools, using the main data sets that they have available for school-level analysis, there are five factors which they isolate as being key ones. In the statistical analysis, they call these the ‘control variables’, but they key message is that these are the five things external which have a big impact on the attainment of students. If you remove the influence of these from school-level analysis, you can then analyse the difference in performance between secondary schools more effectively.
By taking these factors into account when looking at school performance, you are able to get a better idea of how each school is performing compared to other schools, and a better idea of the ‘value added’ to individual students. (You can read much more about this from page 28 of the report. You’ll also see on Page 29, that they used a different set of factors for primary schools, which included density of indigenous students and transient families).
The question I have in my mind now is:
If you are a school leader in Australia, do you have the right performance data available, in your analysis systems, to allow for these 5 key factors? Do the reports that you receive help you to allow for these factors?
Read the full 'School Performance in Australia' report
NB I know that there will be readers who will see this as an over-simplification of the analysis. My aim isn’t to reinterpret it, but simply to share what I’m understanding as I’m reading it. And I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong - either by adding a comment below or hitting the ‘Email Blog Author’ link at the top right.
After the list of school websites built on SharePoint from earlier in the week, here’s another handy (and subjective!) list of Ten University SharePoint websites. These websites are all public facing, and by building them on SharePoint, it means the universities can manage the content in exactly the same way as they manage their other resources - and use SharePoint’s workflow to manage the publishing process. But enough of the SharePoint Content Management story - let’s get down to the pictures:
Click on any of the images to link to the live website
Download the PowerPoint versions of Top 10 University SharePoint websites
Last week ago I shared my list of “10 of the best school websites on Sharepoint”. And the opinion around the office was that the Twynham School Sixth Form website was the most astonishing one (in fact, half a dozen times I was asked by Microsoft colleagues “Are you sure that was done in SharePoint?”).
My colleague, Ben Nunney, who’s an ex-teacher, paid it a massive compliment when he said on Twitter “I know I'm too old to go back to school, but if I could I'd go here - PURELY based on their amazing website”
Mike Herrity from Twynham School talks on his SharePoint in Education blog about all of the things that they’re doing with ICT in his school, and it makes a useful resource if you’re thinking of doing some SharePoint work yourself.
He also wrote a series of short articles about how they have created the Sixth Form site, which were published on his blog. The series actually walks through the whole process, and describes the challenges (including the need to convince the Leadership Team in the school that you can make a good looking site in SharePoint).
If you are in any way involved in using SharePoint in a school, I think it is a must read series, either for you, or for whoever is providing/developing your SharePoint.
The whole series, and a lot of extra detail, is also available in the Twynham School Learning Gateway 2007-2010 ebook
Do you want to start creating your own learning packages for use in a Learning Management System? And want to find free tools to create online courses? I might be able to help…
The Microsoft Learning team create and publish a wide range of online courses for IT professionals and developers using the free Learning Content Development System (LCDS). They have developed over 2,000 hours of e-learning courses themselves, and have built a series of 20 templates to allow you to quickly create e-learning content in a number of categories. And then allows content to be played through a browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox) using Silverlight for interactivity, including animations, demonstrations, videos and simulations. And you can also embed Flash content into your courses.
The finished courses are packaged as SCORM objects, which mean that they can be played through a range of Learning Management Systems, and can also include SCORM assessments - including multiple choice, true/false and essay questions. Your finished courses can be uploaded and shared on your Learning Management System, or can simply be shared on a website or download link.
There are no shortage of SCORM creation tools (see this list on the Moodle site for example) but many of them are either basic convertors that simply take a PowerPoint presentation and put it into a SCORM package, or can be costly. If you want a simple tool set to create more interactive content, then LCDS is worth considering.
Learn more about the Learning Content Development System
I have to admit, I thought my days of programming were behind me. But thanks to AppMakr and the Windows Phone 7 App Hub, I’m reliving the heady days of my first job (whilst in Sixth Form) of being a programmer. And I’ve created a free app that gives you this Education blog on your Windows Phone 7, along with the live feed of the worldwide Microsoft Education case studies, and direct access to the official press release news stream we provide for journalists.
It’s my first app for 20 years, and was published on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace on Friday night. The experience of creating the app was pretty smooth - mainly because I was aiming to bring together a series of existing RSS feeds. In fact, the most time consuming part was creating all of the graphics needed - the WP7 tiles in 3 sizes, the splash screen, a header graphic, and the screen shots needed for the marketplace. But once they were all in place, it was pretty seamless.
If you’ve got a Windows Phone, then hopefully this makes keeping in touch with education blog news easier - as well as connecting you to the education case studies that are published on the worldwide Microsoft Case Studies website.
To get the free app on your phone, you can either use this link [Australian Education Partner Blog] or search for ‘Education Blog’ in the Marketplace on your Windows Phone.
In the last week of June, we launched Office 365. As the next wave of Cloud-based applications, it’s a service that will grow over time.
According to iTnews Curtin University were the first Australian customer to start to move to Office 365, and plan to move 10,000 staff onto the hosted service over the next four months. The first phase, started before the official launch, was for 100 pilot users with ‘complex variations’ of needs, with a goal of ironing out the different scenarios before moving the deployment across the campus. This move, for university staff, follows the decision a few years ago to move their 200,000 student and alumni email mailboxes to the Live@edu Cloud service.
In the case of Curtin University, they are aiming to switch users from their on-premise Exchange servers, to the Cloud service - which will save them money and administration time. But other universities are using the opportunity to switch from Lotus Notes to Office 365:
Learn More about the Curtin University move to Office 365
OneNote, which is part of the Microsoft Office Suite, is one of the best tools for teachers and students in the Office suite. It’s also a bit of a hidden asset, because many people haven’t used it before as it wasn’t in many of the earlier versions of Office installed on classroom computers. I’ve seen it used for all kinds of learning activities - student notes, teacher lesson plans, student record files, ePortfolio, revision notes - all kinds of different things.
One of the smart things that it does is allow you to sync your notebooks with the internet, so that you can have files synced across different computers (it uses the Windows Live services to do this, so you don’t have to have all of your devices online at the same time). And you can also share your notebooks with others in the same way (so, for example, a teacher can share revision notes with students) - which they can see on any device running OneNote. Which means they can see it in OneNote for Windows, OneNote for Mac, or in OneNote on their Windows Phone.
We’ve just announced that OneNote for iPhone is now available in Australia. Which means that you can sync, edit and create new notes on your iPhone too.
And because this is a newer release, we’ve added to the list of things that it can do on the iPhone - including allowing you to search all of your notes, sync shared notebooks and choose which notebooks to sync.
Of all the improvements listed, the one that got my attention is that this new version is free on the iTunes store for a limited time period.
Read more about the announcement here (and for links in other countries), or if you’re in Australia just click below to go and get the free app in the iTunes store:
Sometimes it is difficult to imagine what the ‘Cloud’ looks like. We know it means that the data is somewhere out there in ‘the Cloud’, and that means a data centre somewhere is looking after it. And we use those Cloud services all the time - whether that’s to check our email, search the web, use a social networking site, or even just a plain web site. And they run services like Windows Live, Windows Azure, Xbox Live, Office 365, etc. Somewhere, up ‘in the Cloud’, there’s a data centre running all of this…
The Microsoft Global Foundation Services team have just released a video which looks at today’s data centres, and the construction model behind them - for example, how they are cooled, and their physical configuration works. These cloud data centres support over 200 online services, and serve more than a billion customers and 20m businesses in over 70 countries every year - and you’ve definitely used them today. But very few people actually get to see inside our data centres, so the video is a chance to see it for yourself.
Building these Cloud data centres isn’t just about the conventional ‘IT’ aspect - there’s a also a huge amount of work that goes into the efficiency of the building, and especially the power usage. Data centres can be huge power-hogs, with as much data used for cooling and lighting as for running the servers. The video talks about PUE (Power User Efficiency - the measure of data centre efficiency), and how they are now building data centres which are made from recyclable materials, with a low PUE of 1.15 (about 85% more efficient than today’s ‘average’ data centre). So, although I’ve focused on what a cloud data centre looks like, what is more important is the design features that have been built in to improve energy usage, and maximise flexibility (and as you can see, to my uninformed eye, the answer to ‘What does a Cloud data centre look like’ is ‘Quite ugly’).
So, hopefully, the next time you login to Xbox live, or a student completes an online assessment, you have a better idea what’s going in the ‘Cloud’.
Imagine you’re a big IT supplier. You build a successful business by being responsive to your customers, and giving them what they need. If the customer is a big one, then normally their budget is too. And so, their list of requirements is big too. Which means that when they want to do IT projects, they are normally big ones. And you have all the expertise needed to give them advice, support, consultancy, implementation and deployment.
Then along comes the Cloud. It means that small companies can offer a very specific service - not a big IT system - to one of your customers. And instead of buying a big computer system to do everything that they can imagine, they buy a service to deliver a small part of their overall IT service. At first, it’s only a small nibble from a big IT pie. But over time, the nibble can become a bite. And eventually some of the pie disappears.
And it’s a good thing for the customer - they can solve business problems with speedier and more targeted solutions and quicker procurement.
At the Microsoft World Partner Conference, Janison were finalists in the Education Partner of the Year Awards.
A small Coffs Harbour company was sandwiched between two global giants - Desire2Learn (6 million users) and Cornelsen Publishers (3,000 employees and a turnover of 450 million Euro). They’re a small regional Australian business that’s competing against the world’s biggest and best.
They can do this because of the Cloud, because they can focus on their core competencies - eg software development - and leave the job of running the big infrastructure that you need to administer an exam for 100,000 students to somebody else (in their case, the Windows Azure service).
Wayne Houlden, the Janison CEO, puts it succinctly on his blog:
This doesn’t mean that the end of the big IT projects/suppliers is coming, but that instead we’re going to see things changing. Smaller companies will compete with bigger ones, as they always have. And big projects will continue to be developed and procured. But the way that things are done will change. When it’s quicker to build the product than it is to write the specification documents, it means that software development, and IT procurement, is going to be fundamentally different in the future.
We’re going to see more nimble projects, with a chance of keeping up with the more nimble users (as you’ll be seeing, if ‘corporate IT’ can’t keep up, they’ll just go out and use a public web 2.0 service).
All of our business models are going to change. And the Education IT business is going to look very different in five years time.
Perhaps these articles might help?