Allow parents to send messages

[dezt]

I've been asked to look into the possibility of allowing parents to send messages to us through the school moodle we have. Is this possible? if so how would i go about setting it up?

I was wondering will i have to create user accounts for all parents to allow this, or is there a way of creating a form in moodle to send messages to a certain email address. Oh we were thinking of something like a forum for parents, but then decided that we didn't want parents viewing what other parents had written.

[secretlife]

Hi there
(see you are not a million miles from me!) Well;there are several workarounds you could do - although I am sceptical of any way being better than parents simply emailing the school to be honest.
You could give them all a Moodle account (you'd need that if you ever went down the Parent role /mentor route anyway) and then set up a course just for Parents, shut off from others with an enrolment key/ Then if you don't want a forum where parents can see each others' postings, use the journal - it is private and we use it for pastoral communication between pupils and their Heads of Year. (Or the online text assignment which is its successor) I wouldn't use the messaging in case of the risk of them communicating with others in the Moodle and in fact I would turn off all the side blocks and just have the one activity - the journal - in the course. The other way to do it - simpler I suppose - would be to create a parent login: username: Parent - password - whatever you want - and ensure they cannot change the password. Then they all use the generic log in to post a message but they need to be made aware they have to state whose parent they are. Or... you could just make an html block on the front page with a mailto: link to your school email or whoever will be taking the messages and then parents click on it to email school. To be honest I think that might be the best.
If I can think of other, better ways, I will get back to you.
Mary

[EduTech]

i dont use moodle so cant say for definiate, but would something like this work?

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss....4&parent=59834

James.

[Sylv3r]

I suppose you could just setup up an additional page as a contact us?

Using something similar to the following:

Contact Us Script