Moodle Muddle...?

[ridpool_John]

Right Head Teacher has today asked me to investigate the possibilities of setting up a VLE from scratch in time for September. I've used moodle before and wondered if any other brummie schools had encountered any issues with Link2ICT or Moodle. So if any body can answer these questions I'd be very grateful :-)

1. How do the schools host there moodle some seem to be on the myvle.org server or hosted locally via the schools site, which is the better solution...?
2. How is the management of the moodle delegated in your schools...? Whose responsible for content uploading teachers or Network Managers
3. How supportive are Link2ICT with setting up Moodle and does any one have a contact as I've tried the service desk on 3 occasions and been told we'll get back to you.

Thanks
john :-)

[stephenwelch]

Right Head Teacher has today asked me to investigate the possibilities of setting up a VLE from scratch in time for September. I've used moodle before and wondered if any other brummie schools had encountered any issues with Link2ICT or Moodle. So if any body can answer these questions I'd be very grateful :-)

1. How do the schools host there moodle some seem to be on the myvle.org server or hosted locally via the schools site, which is the better solution...?

Do you have inhouse expertise? If so go for school hosting. You are in control and integration with other network ON SITE network resources will be a whole lot easier. An entry level server will do a for a primary school. If you are secondary then you need something more resilient.

2. How is the management of the moodle delegated in your schools...? Whose responsible for content uploading teachers or Network Managers

Teachers get involved but in my experience it will be ICT tech, ICT manager. Although when you get the kids blogging its a big step forward. Another thing about hosting on site is you can link this content (on your moodle) to other resources in your school like a digital sign-age system through rss feeds. Try and involve head to subject to help with the planning of how you want to do use your moodle. Small steps and success is the key if it doesn't work (as in make their Job better, easier) for the teachers you might as well forget it.

3. How supportive are Link2ICT with setting up Moodle and does any one have a contact as I've tried the service desk on 3 occasions and been told we'll get back to you.

Enough said!

Headteacher says September!! Hahaha. It is not something to be rushed into. And the effort required to cover all the curriculum areas and topics and add resources for all of these is quite considerable. Sure you could get a site up and add some decent functionality and integration with existing network infrastructure but the cross curricular resources and planning for the whole thing must come from people like subject leaders as wellas ICT bods.

If you have any more questions feel free to PM if you want.

Good luck.
Stephen

[witch]

Ours is hosted in-house and in reality although I have admin access it is the ICT co-ords baby. He does ALL his ICT teaching on it now and is slowly bringing in the other teachers.

[Tricky_Dicky]

I'm no massive fan of Link2ICT but the Moodle implementation is really good. The main person who looks after it all is Edward Higgs, if you ask to be put through to him or least to have a message sent he gets back to you quite quickly.
Once you have got Link2ICt working on it, Eddie gets the colour scheme and some images from your existing website (I presume you could specify different) and then away you go. They can set up the users for you but the best way I've found is to set up LDAP (you have to do this) and then manually setup courses. Once the children login for the first time it will create the user and then they can enroll in the course. It's the same with teachers but then you add them as a teacher to the appropriate course.
If you want to have a play with ours then feel free to get in touch.
Rich

[gshaw]

The main thing with hosting Moodle internally depends on whether you want to be responsible for maintaining upgrades, backups, underlying OS etc. Personally I'd prefer to leave that to someone else so I can better spend my time developing the site, working with tutors etc rather than routine maintenance.

[ridpool_John]

Thanks for all the help and comments guys much appreciated as always :-)

I'd thought I'd post abrief update before I go on my holidays... As a school we've decided to host it internally, (Cost, Freedom to build something that met the schools needs, access and hosting of resources...) Yesterday started on the basics, I'm planning on using Moodle 1.9 as its stable and has worked well in other schools that I work with. I've installed it locally to the old curriculum server for now, I want to fine tune the structure, themes and navigation before I even think about uploading it to the schools web server. Just thinking about how to set out the menu's and basic pages at the moment... Any ideas? (personally I like the individual class homepages, but the head prefers a single home page with subjects...)


Have a good summer holiday

John

[pritchardavid]

tbh I would have went stright to moodle 2.1, thats way its a good clean install for example if you was to upgrade to that later, you may get many problem, 2.0 changes a lot exspically the file structure of the files, well worth just using the latest to begain with

[gshaw]

Yup definitely, unless there's a plugin you desperately need that isn't available in 2.1 go with the latest release

[ridpool_John]

Okay, think that'll be a job for when I get back... is there much difference between 2.0 and 1.9...?

[CyberNerd]

Okay, think that'll be a job for when I get back... is there much difference between 2.0 and 1.9...?

yes. big differences. The main thing for me is that you can use external repositories - ie mounts of your shares or dropbox, google apps accounts instead of painfully uploading every file and making it easier to share resources between courses.
I am upgrading from 1.9 to 2.1 this summer.