School Chat Room

[SSFC]

The powers that be have decided it would be a good idea for our website to have a live chat room so new students who will be coming to us in September can ask questions and be answered by both staff and students.

 

I have installed a vanilla forum but management would ideally like a simple chat client that can be opened up at a certain time and used for an hour so that moderation can be done easily and students get responses immediately. (The best solution would be one of those chat clients used by companies so you can click a button and chat to a person at the other end.)

 

Can anyone recommend a free application along these lines? As i said before ideally it would be something we could host or plug into our website rather than simply using a external one.

[russdev]

Few ideas here

 

PHP Live Support | Customer Support Scripts & Programs | Hot Scripts

 

This is just php you can view the asp category etc

 

Russ

[powdarrmonkey]

We use the forum feature in our VLE so that we can moderate it a bit, and so that it's not reliant on somebody being there all the time.

[SSFC]

Thanks guys, we wanted something that a user could press a button and open up an instant messaging client. i've installed Open Web Messenger (Mibew Messenger) and its exactly what ive been looking for.

[User3204]

If your school signs up to the Uniservity VLE and the Primary schools do the same, then you can set up a shared group between the Year 6 and Year 7 groups to do a Forum.

 

I know this, as it's one of the "features" they used to sell it to us... or more precisely, to sell to the LA..

 

 

A live chat server, would mean that someone responsible would have to be logged onto it at all times...

[SSFC]

The idea behind the chat facility was to arrange a time with a feeder school so a operator/s could man the online chat facility. The open web chat program we have chosen to use allows an email to be sent to a designated address if a operator is not online.

 

Ideally we did not want a forum style approach as we did not want users to leave unmoderated messages on public display and we do not have the resources to constantly moderate the forum.

[powdarrmonkey]

The idea behind the chat facility was to arrange a time with a feeder school so a operator/s could man the online chat facility. The open web chat program we have chosen to use allows an email to be sent to a designated address if a operator is not online.

 

Ideally we did not want a forum style approach as we did not want users to leave unmoderated messages on public display and we do not have the resources to constantly moderate the forum.

 

I don't understand. Somebody has time to man a live chat, but not moderate a forum? I'd have said the latter option was the more time-efficient (review, click, review, click, coffee. Repeat thrice daily.). There's also no reason for making it a public forum, keep it internal if you don't want messages on public display.

[philterx]

I just thought I'd put my 2 cents in, with chat function sometimes you have to worry a bout what they are typing and to who, bullying can be big in schools so these are the measure I have used.

 

Live@EDU gives you option have a msn gateway to work with school live accounts. Live is free for K-12 schools, well in Australia so please read more on Live site for your region information.

 

and just use total traffic control or something similar to monitor chat, even go as far as monitoring emails sent using anti bullying modules with other applications than ttc.

 

Cheaper alternative you could setup a linux box and ircd server.

 

 

Hope this can help you out making decision.

 

Cheers,

 

Phil

Edited July 8, 2009 by philterx
spelling mistake.

[SSFC]

As part of the colleges marketing strategy we wanted potential new students to be able to chat to current students to ask questions etc. With the live chat option a school and college would liaise and give a time and date and the students would log on in this window and be supervised by a moderator (Plus only a small number of students would be given rights to use the chat program e.g. 6).

 

I agree the forum option would be easier to man if both were 'live' all the time but this is not how we plan to use the facility.