"With electronic document management, all users can post and retrieve class agendas, events, student progress, assignments and correspondence to the proper folder from their existing intranet."

How to manage knowledge and facilitate learning with Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server

The Challenge
Most school districts are made up of multiple buildings and educational departments for each grade. Instructors maintain their own filing system and indexing scheme. Unfortunately, these systems and schemes are not consistent from instructor to instructor, let alone between departments or in other grades. Some are filed by chapter; others by curriculum date; still others by student. Teachers are not collaborating, sharing best-practices or co-creating lesson plans, so they are not leveraging the experiences and intellectual assets of the school district. Each new class is conducted without reusing the information gathered in previous years. Instructors from one eductional branch have little or no access to other instructors’ files, and it is difficult to track educational progress without a consistent agenda available to guide students, parents or educators. School districts need to move to a digital storage paradigm to enable the transfer of knowledge from builing to building, from faculty administrators to facilitators, and ultimately from teacher to pupils.

The Solution
Implement a Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server document management and imaging solution and eliminate the need for paper storage. Store and retrieve digital documents by leveraging existing copier and scanner investments. SharePoint is a central document repository for all administration records. The file structure can mirror the educational department structure within the school district. Each education area can create their own file folder. Sub-folders can be created for additional information based on the administrator, teacher and eventually students. The document repository is the final source for all documents and document changes maintained to facilitate version control.With electronic document management, all users can post and retrieve class agendas, events, student progress, assignments and correspondence to the proper folder from their existing intranet. Using a multifunctional copier/scanner/printer schools can implement a simple, walk-up scanning solution to enable document capture for paper-based assignments and reading materials.

One of the major SharePoint features is subscription services. Instead of copying, mailing or e-mailing project documents to every faculty member, contributors merely post documents to the repository and SharePoint notifies the applicable instructors of the added, changed or deleted file. Teachers can build off one another’s experience, which results in higher quality lesson plans and, most importantly, a better education for students.

Benefits Summary

• Saves time
• Saves money
• Saves space
• Increases collaboration
• Increases communications
• Increases document security

Reference:
www.microsoft.com/sharepoint