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Enhancing Communication with SharePoint

Published September 11, 2008

It goes without saying.  Communication is a top priority for Williamson County Schools administrators and staff.  In an effort to improve communication between teachers and students, Williamson County Schools is using a new communications tool called SharePoint, which gives teachers an opportunity to post documents, homework assignments and announcements online. 

"SharePoint allows teachers and students to communicate real-time using 21st Century skills such as Wikis and discussion boards," said Instructional Technology Coordinator Belinda Moss.  "Honors students can even communicate with their teachers by posting completed work."

Because Williamson County Schools switched to Microsoft Office 2007 over the summer, some students might have trouble opening SharePoint documents from home if they have a different version of Microsoft Office.  Fortunately, there are several ways parents and students can fix this problem:

Tip #1

First, teachers and other faculty members are being asked to save their documents in a PDF format.  This creates a normally un-editable file that can be read by both MACS and PCs.  PDF readers such as Adobe reader can be downloaded by the person receiving the file at no charge from http://www.adobe.com/.

Directions:

  • Click on the Windows button in the top left corner

  • Hover over Save As

  • Click on PDF (or XPS)

  • Choose the location to save the file

  • Click Publish

  • You can access this document to move or post to SharePoint from the location it was saved

Tip #2

Microsoft has provided a compatibility pack users of Microsoft Office, Office XP and Office 2003 can download free from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en.  Once installed, the users of older versions of Office listed above will be able to open files created with Office 2007.