Feedback about Sharepoint

NOTE TO ALL CLASSES: This post is from a participant in a 2010 offering of this course. As she had more extensive experience than most with Sharepoint I asked her to provide some comments here. I keep this post up for all our classes.


From Lorraine Mockford (Twitter @LMockford)
Hi;
I understand completely... I have the same problem.


I have been a campus and academic school sharepoint trainer for 3 years, taking what the techs know and translating the practice out of geek speak into something my health and human services and trades faculty can understand.


We have a number of faculty members who use sharepoint in their blended classes, sharing class documents and continuing classroom discussions via the discussion boards in SP. I few have used the wiki tools for team collaboration -- which are not bad really. The calendar is very useful and can have pop-up reminders and active links embedded. The blog tools are a bit cumbersome and as such are rarely used. Announcements are wonderful!


Many of our faculty have started using SP documents and discussions for their program work experience times when students could be all over the province. I would like to see them have the learners blog their WE journals, but as said before this is not the easiest to use and set preferences. Discussions, announcements, and calendar are what the students appreciate the most as it allows them to stay in touch.


Training for faculty is usually a workshop followed up with mentoring to customize their purpose. Faculty are also taught how to provide the same support for their learners.


SP is not the best tool for these activities, but if it is all you can access then it can be made to work. It is not easy or intuitive, which further inhibits adoption. Our college (IT actually) has locked down a lot of the customizable features and trying to open some of these tasks my interpretive skills translating from ed speak to geek speak.


One campus (we are a provincial college with 13 campuses) has successfully cracked this wall and have a great SP portal for students and staff with interactive program calendars and pages. Someday!


Hope this helps!
--Lorraine

Case Study: Telus using Sharepoint http://janeknight.typepad.com/socialmedia/2010/05/telus-case-study-using-sharepoint-to-embrace-social-computing-and-streamline-formal-learning-.html