-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I've done some academic reading on MISs in schools, but I can't claim any experience or involvement with the commercial offerings - we still use Excel & Access (awaits notification that list membership is to be terminated...). There remains a feeling that the expensive MIS have not actually had a huge amount of impact in the classroom, in part because it's been quite unusual for actual teachers to have been involved in their design, development or impementation (I can find the references here if anyone's interested). It has often struck me, but it seems precious few others, that the open source, community involvement, approach is just what is needed to harness the technology so that schools can become knowledge-based rather than merely information-rich organizations. My own feeling is that it's the VLE area which is going to have more impact in the classroom, and I'd be very eager to explore ways of adding MIS functionality on to Moodle, one of the particular strengths of which has been the involvement of educators and educationalists in its development. As we're an independent school, we're spared the worst of the DfES and LEA data requirements, and we don't educate anyone older than 11, so I'm afraid I'm not the best one to help out with specific data exchange stuff. Nevertheless wearing my deputy head hat (mortar board?), I can give some insights on school administration if that's of some help. One big plus though is that at least at government level, the existing standards are open ones - a good place to start finding out more is http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/management/tools/ims/ particularly in regard to 'common transfer files' and 'common basic data sets'. Robert Jones wrote: | Hi. | | I'm the project admin for FreeMIS - the blurb says: | | |>FreeMIS - the free web-based MIS for schools - has made it's second public |>release, which greatly improves the functionality of the reporting module, |>and provides a full set of dummy data to play with. If you are looking for |>an open source alternative then download FreeMIS here |> |>http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/freemis/freemis_0.85.tar.gz?download |> |>and get involved. | | | FreeMIS development seems to be taking off, with lots of offers of help. As | there is clearly a gap in the market for a quality, comprehensive FLOSS | alternative to the commercial MIS's, I want to make sure that FreeMIS gets it | right. | | So I'm looking for advice. I'm a humble maths/computing teacher who saw a | need at school for a decent web-based electronic reporting system, and made | it happen. Now I'm beginning to realise that there's a whole world of | issues that will need to be seen to be covered if FreeMIS is going to stand | up in the big bad, lucrative world of school MIS's, and I'm not quite sure | where to start. | | Is there anyone out there who's got experience in the UK MIS field and would | be willing to help me with this? I'm thinking about compliance with | Government standards, security of data, exporting/importing to/from Edexcel/ | ScotXed etc. | | If we can get it right, we will be plugging one the the big remaining gaps in | the package for schools to move entirely to FLOSS. | | Thanks, | | -- Robert Jones | | - -- Miles Berry Deputy Head St Ives School Haslemere www.stiveshaslemere.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (MingW32) iD4DBQFChQLqr4l0LSzscoQRAjBlAJdcs58dtDVf4h4ALIt084yYYA4tAJ0Z480a 3xHRiajOWt+2kywO4jMSuQ== =RxAe -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----