SharePoint in Education
I have been working with SharePoint in an Education setting for the past year or so initially working with RM on the Scottish Schools Digital Network project Glow Scotland; which at the time was regarded as one of the largest SharePoint Portal Server 2003/WSS v2 projects in the world linking Scotland’s 800,000 pupils and educators. I am currently working with Synetrix/I2Q upgrading the Leeds Learning Network from SharePoint 2003/WSS v2, the Microsoft Learning Gateway and Class Server v4 to the latest MLG 2007 platform on MOSS 2007 and the SharePoint Learning Kit (more info here); and the successful bid by Synetrix/I2Q for the East Midlands to provide the Infrastructure and ISP services to Education which has SharePoint and the MLG as a key component.
The interest in SharePoint in Education is increasing exponentially, the use of My Sites as the ‘approved’ MySpace or Facebook is starting to happen with early years pupils happily adding content to their My Sites.
If you have an interest in, or are working with, SharePoint in Education I recommend you subscribe to the Microsoft UK Higher Education Blog where Dominic Watts is posting some useful information and events, including the Higher Education Consortium which has been started to address missing, but critical, teaching and learning work roles and start the collaborative process for using SharePoint as the development platform.
There is a lot of information being published and these links provide a good starting point, if you have any more please add them as comments.
http://www.microsoft.com/education/default.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/default.mspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/ukschools/default.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/education/schooloffuture.mspx
I will be bring further posts on my work on the Community Kit for SharePoint, projects in Education in the UK and any interesting articles that I think will be useful to the community at large.
