How Salamander SharePoint helps to turn SharePoint into a Virtual Learning Environment

A virtual learning environment is designed to support the teaching environment, by enabling teachers and pupils to interact online in an educational setting. It normally provides an assessment tool, the ability to collaborate and discuss and a way to provide and share documents and assignments.

Salamander SharePoint can help to turn your SharePoint portal into a learning environment by integrating the data within your MIS system, whether it is Sims.Net, Facility CMIS or another, with SharePoint.

Some of the key ways Salamander can help are by:

Identifying students for particular areas

When teaching or learning online, one of the key factors is determining who to interact with. Salamander has a number of tools to enable this:

SharePoint Groups

Salamander can create SharePoint groups based on data within your MIS, such as Class/Teaching groups, subject groups, registration groups. Salamander will automatically maintain the membership of the groups as they change in your MIS system.

SharePoint Lists

Salamander can maintain SharePoint lists containing the same data as for groups.

User Profile information

Salamander can update the user profile with data from your MIS. So you can add properties to the profile and have Salamander automatically update them. These can then be used for audience profiling and to form the backbone of social networking, especially if you have multiple schools hosted.

Creating collaboration sites

Salamander can automatically create collaboration sites based on the information in your MIS system. This is typically a site per class/teaching group, but can also be sites for subjects, subject year combination or anything else you can think of. It can also automatically set up the permission on the site exactly how you require. See How to organise class sites in Microsoft Learning Gateway for more details.

Set permissions based on a user's details

In addition to creating new collaboration sites and setting permissions on them, Salamander can also set permissions on your existing sites. This is useful if you only want certain types of people to have particular permissions on sites.

Enables SharePoint Learning Kit

SharePoint Learning Kit depends on SharePoint being provisioned in a certain manner to enable its use. This was the original reason Salamander SharePoint was created and as you can imagine it excels at it. It will create the sites, set the required permissions and link the classes/teaching groups to the teachers, all automatically

For more information please email info@salamandersoft.co.uk.