Moodle - overview needed

[Simcfc73]

Hi Guys,

Just wondered if you could give me an overview of how you use moodle in your school. I have looked at it and just started allowing staff to use Joomla but wondered if moodle is better for them.

They are pretty IT thick (no offence) so need it to be simple for them.

How is yours set up... subjects/courses etc. LDAP integrated? ease of use?

Its one of the golden gooses to get it accessible from the outside world but just wondered if Joomla is adequate of they aren't wanting to go too far.

I've go it running on vertrigo to test but it seems kinda complicated and its late Need to have a better look tomo.

Ta muchly.... police academy just started

[secretlife]

doesn't offer you the options of gradebooks and assignments and self marking tests and voting and all the other interactive stuff etc does it? I mean; I've never set up a joomla site myself but I figured it's more content management than VLE - unless you just wanted your Moodle to be like a website. We are 11-16 - we have categories as subjects and then courses as each year group, then split into classes. I know others do it differently. Ours is online; uploads csv file; have to connect to network then login to Moodle but no big deal as users have same logins anyway.

[alan-d]

We have been using moodle properly now for 12 months and there are now around 120 courses on the system with more being added each week.

The benefits are the additional modules available which most CMS systems don't have. This gives teaching staff more variations on how to put a subject across or assess how well a subject is being learnt.

The largest hurdle was to get the teaching staff to use it, but once a few workshops were set up during inset days and having a dedicated contact person for all the teaching aspects of using moodle has made a huge difference.

Ours is running on a Win 2003 box with full Php, Apache and MySQL and is linked via LDAP.

We still have a lot of work to do on it such as connection with SIMS and editing the look and feel of it but overall the popularity of the system is growing and the kids like it too.

[FN-GM]

The largest hurdle was to get the teaching staff to use it, but once a few workshops were set up during inset days and having a dedicated contact person for all the teaching aspects of using moodle has made a huge difference.

Who did the workshops please? Was it you or someone external?

Thanks

[alan-d]

Who did the workshops please? Was it you or someone external?

Thanks

It was all done internally. The ICT Co-ord and a few keen members of staff taught themselves and visited other schools. This experience was then used to spread the word. For example a teacher would try out a quiz then show other staff members how it was created, how the results are collated and the benefits of being able to receive feedback from the students.

Slowly but surely more staff are using the system, basic stuff at first but as they talk to each other and see demonstrations from other users become more confident in trying things out.

[bossman]

@alan-d:
Hi Alan yes agree totally with you on this, everything you have put in motion replicates exactly what we have done so far although we are not using in anger at the moment just getting everything ready for next September rollout to year 7s and all teaching staff.
So far so good:
Have a quick look if you want has only been up 2 months let me know what you think.
Bishop Barrington School: VLE

[alan-d]

Looking Good

We didn't go the route of starting with 1 year group, we left it to individual teachers as to who they used it with. In some cases the sixth form, via feedback to the teacher on the site made suggestions of their own which helped a little too.