Google Forum/Student Forum

[matrixx]

Hi there,

Our independent secondary school currently runs a google domain and each student has a personalised school email address. I am looking to expand that feature, is there an opportunity, preferably within the google features to create a forum for students and teachers which is secure and can only be accessed by students in our school?

I am also interested in setting up a moodle site, how would I go about doing this?

P.S. I am not the ICT technician and we currently do not have one.

All suggestions and ideas appreciated.

[soveryapt]

The only way I can think that you could easily implement a secured forum is to use the Google Apps arsenal, which I presume you have access to if your using Google for things. Failing this, you could look to install something such as or similar to vBulletin (which is what EduGeek uses) at which point you can have users needing to log in and then allow users different access rights to different areas based on their groups and even have public accessible forums within all of that.

Moodle, this is a fairly simple process in terms of the setup so long as you are familiar with PHP/MySQL. If not, there are many hosts (I'm not sure if Google sites is included in this or not) that offer 1-Click-Installs for things such as Moodle, osCommerce, WordPress, Joomla, etc, etc.

If you're not really familiar with all of the various things, then you might be better employing the services of someone who is.

[AngryTechnician]

Google Groups for Business. Included with Google Apps for Education, may well meet your needs.

[matrixx]

Cheers for the information, I will certainly look in to some of your suggestions. It is a relatively small charity school on a tight budget so your suggestions are very interesting. I thought the forum idea might go down well and teachers can use it almost like a VLE. I am pretty IT proficient so I can maybe find my way round technical data, however, is it possible to access a link to creating a moodle site?

[soveryapt]

A good place to start is the Moodle site itself (Moodle.org: open-source community-based tools for learning) or more specificially Installing Moodle - MoodleDocs.