Moodle Virgin

[AWicher]

I will get this out of the way, My school has no VLE!

.............

We have just had our head of ICT retire and the new head of ICT seems keen to have a school VLE, About time, cool.

To help i have been to several other high schools to see how they have made it work and at what level i should get involved.

To start with i was asked to "make it" (Not much to go with, is it!) so i ignored that and have gone and made a front page.

I got a lot of help from a colleague of where to start, and that week setup a sub domain on our website (hosted offsite, not lancs.sch.uk). I was recommended that i find a nice theme, alter it, add what i want to make the front page how the school wants it. then give it to county to upload. But to get it right 1st time, as county will get pissed off and start to ignore my requests after a time. (Not like we pay them, is it )

Im after some advice on how other school have gone about starting there moodle. I have a test moodle vle.garstanghigh.com installed on our hosting companys' server but can it stay there? or to host within school or at county level?


Thank you for any help any one can offer!

[secretlife]

Hi there Happy to offer help but just on Manchester airport wifi at the moment waiting for a plane - will check back later to see what others have suggested and see if I can add anything - lots of good Moodle people here and you seem to have been around the area's school Moodles. (Have I met you?)

[kmount]

I'd host internally if you can to take advantage of ldap authentication for your user accounts back to your AD.

I'd also suggest getting some interested bodies together to have a think about what they want the VLE to do ... We used to have a VLE Working Party (didn't get any work done mind you ... ).

Plenty of moodle'rs on here as secretlife said, we'll all chip in

[beeswax]

Don't lgfl offer Moodle to all schools?
try this link here

[bossman]

@AWicher:

Ditto here keep it local then at least if your internet goes down you can still use internally.
Get a teacher to manage the content and you do the technical.
start by getting the teaching framework in place and then get the heads of depts to volunteer a champion from their dept to input the required data after they have been given training by the person managing the content who themselves will have been on a Moodle training course.
Initially start with one dept and one year group such as Art and year 7 and then gradually move to other depts in turn and then when all year 7 done move to year 8, 9, 10 and eleven, by this time all the teaching and learning the teachers will need to provide the curriculum learning will be on the VLE and being constantly updated all the time.

Good luck have a look at ours which has only been running for 4 months http://vle.bishopbarrington.net

[kmount]

Good luck have a look at ours which has only been running for 4 months http://vle.bishopbarrington.net

I love this moodle every time I see it

[AWicher]

@bossman

Nice VLE, love the AUP on opening.

So you have your hosting site point http://vle.bishopbarrington.net/ to your school moodle webserver. How do you go about firewall, protecting your school from external attack... A box with astaro gateway (or such like) installed and just have that in-between outside and moodle?

I realy don't like the idea of having county hosting our moodle, to much work to get the basicest thing done.

[sandeep2504]

@AWicher:

Ditto here keep it local then at least if your internet goes down you can still use internally.
Get a teacher to manage the content and you do the technical.
start by getting the teaching framework in place and then get the heads of depts to volunteer a champion from their dept to input the required data after they have been given training by the person managing the content who themselves will have been on a Moodle training course.
Initially start with one dept and one year group such as Art and year 7 and then gradually move to other depts in turn and then when all year 7 done move to year 8, 9, 10 and eleven, by this time all the teaching and learning the teachers will need to provide the curriculum learning will be on the VLE and being constantly updated all the time.

Good luck have a look at ours which has only been running for 4 months http://vle.bishopbarrington.net

I love your website; how did you create the room map of the school?

[znova]

I love your website; how did you create the room map of the school?

Ditto that, the website is simple and easy to navigate, well done! Willl be passing the link to our new website guy!

[AWicher]

If you have your Moodle in house, how are people preparing CLEOs' Midas? they are saying that users will be able to (using there service) have a single sign-on for parents. But as information on Midas is hit or miss.

Be interesting to find out how the pilot school get on in April!

[webman]

(I work with bossman so will answer some of the posts about the school things)

So you have your hosting site point http://vle.bishopbarrington.net/ to your school moodle webserver. How do you go about firewall, protecting your school from external attack... A box with astaro gateway (or such like) installed and just have that in-between outside and moodle?

We have two firewalls - one is on our ISP's equipment and the others is our own, and we just use simple TCP port-forwards. Although there is a DMZ zone between the two boxes, our webserver with Moodle on is still internal on the LAN. Web access is provided externally via an Nginx reverse proxy (also does webmail and access to other web stuff we host).

I realy don't like the idea of having county hosting our moodle, to much work to get the basicest thing done.

That doesn't surprise me at all Can't blame you for wanting to host yourself.

I love your website; how did you create the room map of the school?

The school map image itself was created in Microsoft Visio. I used an aerial photo as the background layer and then created the walls/structure as lines and rectangles based on that.

As for the web/tooltip side of it, it's a CSS technique using positioned hidden layers.

Ditto that, the website is simple and easy to navigate, well done! Willl be passing the link to our new website guy!

Thanks

[penfold_99]

I would recommend having integration with your MIS. This will allow you to automate the management of classes and courses.

What MIS do you use?

[jdmeades]

Now, this is going to sound a bit like a reality check! The good news is that, at last, a VLE is going to be implemented.

This is a major project - if the implementation is going to be successful (and it will be, if the students and teachers want it) you need to sit back and have a think about how it actually going to work. Once all the technical issues are out of the way - how is it going to work in your school? Get some support from interested teachers, make sure the senior team is on board, make sure you're realistic about timescales.

It's all too easy to get focussed on the technical without giving much thought to how Moodle is going to be used by teachers and students. Both aspects go hand-in-hand but both aspects come under a wider heading of Integration.

You need to think about how Moodle is going to be integrated technically with your existing services such as Active Directory, web site and management information system. You also need to think about how Moodle is going to be integrated into teaching and learning. Each of these aspects comes with its own set of sub-issues - all of which have to be resolved if the integration of Moodle is to be a success.

Hope this helps.

Jeremy