I was reading in the paper this week that the Government are considering mandating that all schools make pupil's timetables, assessment results and attendance information available to parents and carers online. Now, I know that some schools are doing that, but it's certainly not the majority, and there is a long way to go before that becomes available to every parent. Many schools are doing it using the Learning Gateway, a group of our technologies which enable ICT systems to talk to each other, share data, and most importantly present it to the user securely - whether that user is a teacher, student or parent.
One of the easiest ways to see what is possible is to look at what other schools have done. We publish lots of 'case studies' on our worldwide website, and I had a quick look to see how many examples are there for UK Education insititutions, using SharePoint (the core technology that makes Learning Gateway possible)
The Microsoft Worldwide Case Studies database is where all of our written case studies are stored - they are available to view online, or download in Word format. Currently, there are 93 UK Education case studies in the database, and 35 of them have been produced in the last 12 months. It is pretty easy to search - here's some subsets of the total base of case studies
93 results - All the UK Education case studies 35 results - Those published in the last 12 months 16 results - That are about SharePoint
For Learning Gateway, one of the best is the Shireland Language College:
In November 2006, talking at the Specialist Schools Conference in Birmingham, Tony Blair described Shireland’s Learning Gateway as “one of the most remarkable ICT systems in the country.”