If  you’re a ‘Microsoft Learning Gateway’ School or are planning on deploying it, the following video might help. The video is quite slick and provides information about how Microsoft products had transformed the example school - Shireland Language College.

Shireland Learning Gateway

The Microsoft Learning Gateway is a great product. However, it is vital that the benefits of other learning platform products are shared and explored before committing to such an important purchase. In order to find the solution that best fits your school’s needs.

New research from the British Educational Suppliers Association (Besa) – “Personalised Learning in Schools”, conducted with the National Education Research Panel, illustrates the most popular VLEs in use in a sample of secondary and primary schools. (see graphs below).

The report says: “The results show the prominence of Digital Brain and My Grid 4 Learning in the primary sector and Moodle and Kaleidos in the secondary sector. In both sectors the combined use of Moodle is significant. Fronter and UniServity also have significant exposure in both primary and secondary schools.”

“Personalised Learning in Schools”, £250 from the British Educational Suppliers Association
www.besa.org.uk

For everyone involved in SharePoint and Education this is a must have download.

http://www.codeplex.com/LG

This refresh is designed to deliver a set of web parts that will make SharePoint 2007 immediately relevant to the education and training market. To minimize the amount of time you need to spend configuring components, these web parts have been built to work together, and a new deployment guide designed to simplify deployment. Significant in this release is new information architecture that more clearly supports a diverse set of sites and workspaces, as well as better customization and use of in-built MOSS capabilities such as blogs and wikis.

You should also look at the SharePoint Learning Kit

http://www.codeplex.com/SLK

SharePoint Learning Kit is a SCORM 2004-conformant e-learning delivery and tracking application built as a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 solution. It works with either Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and has the following core features:

• Supports SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, and Class Server content, allowing users to store and manage this content in SharePoint document libraries.
• Supports learner-centric and instructor-led (assigned) workflows.
• Allows assignment, tracking and grading of both e-learning and non-e-learning content.