Things have been moving along steadily since my last posting regarding creating our own VLE.
After a chat with my HT, Google Apps is now set up and I hope to start testing it with a pilot group of children shortly to see how suitable it really is. I'm currently looking for examples of how other schools have been (and are) using Apps with their children, and just what it allows to be achieved.
For staff however, we may be using the LA sharepoint system that they are just launching. The advantages of this for the staff is that we may be able to mirror the contents of staff server space and make it available off site. This could be handy after we contacted the support desk and enquired about making the folders within our Active Directory space available outside of the school building and were told that was not possible. The county Sharepoint solution will allow staff to access their documents anywhere. Staff would also be set up with a "personal professional" email address to be used for school related matters, whilst keeping their "personal private" email address separate (removing the chances of inappropriate messages being sent on the corporate network).
Online reporting is still a thorn in my side. I've been trying to find out more information regarding the encryption of google apps files to see whether this would be an acceptable way of making a working document available to parents. The idea would be quite simply that the file is encrypted with a "key" within school, and the relevant unlocking "key" would be provided to parent so that they, and only they, could read the contents of the file. However with the recent announcements regarding education from 2011 my HT is starting to wonder whether online reporting to parents will take the form of the APP documents for every child being put online. Maybe Mr. Balls will clear this up during his announcements over the next few weeks.
The final aspect of our bespoke solution is space for pupils to store work, files and their eportfolio. Our website hosts (Typepad) have confirmed with me that they have no problem if every child in school is set up with their own blogging space. I like the idea that they build up what is, in effect, a four year diary of their development whilst at the school. They would have the ability to add their work, articles, thoughts and links to it whenever they wanted. The only downside of this idea is that typepad have no automated system for setting up bulk blogs at the moment, so it would be a slow process if we went ahead and set them up.
With regards to how to log into all these different aspects, I have tried to set each system up so that it uses the same login that pupils currently use to access the school network and their "school filespace" (this is NOT available off site), and have set each system to use the same password throughout for each pupil. Therefore the pupils need to remember one username and password no matter which service they are accessing. This also prepares the way for a single sign on solution in the future.
What does this mean for the portal page that I hope to eventually make the default landing page for the website? Well rather than just the three icons it currently has (website / wiki / Google Apps), it will actually need six icons (website / wiki / Google Apps / pupil blogs / staff access / online reporting).
