Moodle Blogs - Transition Day

[apoth0r]

Hi guys, it's been a while unfortunately!

 

Ok, I've been asked by our business manager if it is possible to provide a blog feature for our Year 7 > Year 6 (transition day pupils) to let them ask questions and for the Year 7's to answer.

 

The business manager asked if this was possible to use within Moodle and I came up with a few reasons why it shouldn't although it would be handy to use Moodle for this kind of thing.

 

Reasons why not -

Usernames & Passwords - Have to be setup for each transition day pupil

Monitoring - Making sure blogs aren't abused.

Moodle - Not easy to navigate for blogs and leaving the blogs open for all to view may give all students the opportunity to voice an opinion - not neccesarily a good thing.

Never used Moodle - Would need introductions to Moodle which may take up time teachers would want for something else.

 

Reasons for -

Keeps everything in one place without using other means (although other means would involve similar password/username issues).

Getting the kids used to Moodle as I hope we will continue to use Moodle in the new year (Academy change year).

We don't have to implement new/more resources to learn/teach staff and students.

 

 

In general I'm not sure where I can go with this. Has anyone done anything like this in Moodle before and does anyone use anything else (preferably free and with good child protection). I previously used an email system which was free which allowed children to send emails to other students, all emails went through the admins/teachers to allow the emails to be received by the student. Does this sound easier and more viable.

It's early stages of the project, just trying to gather more opinions from the great Edugeekers.

 

Thanks for your time.

 

Steve

[p858snake]

Doesn't moodle have a forum interface which would be much more suited for questions/answers?

[alan-d]

Hi guys, it's been a while unfortunately!

 

Ok, I've been asked by our business manager if it is possible to provide a blog feature for our Year 7 > Year 6 (transition day pupils) to let them ask questions and for the Year 7's to answer.

 

The business manager asked if this was possible to use within Moodle and I came up with a few reasons why it shouldn't although it would be handy to use Moodle for this kind of thing.

 

Reasons why not -

Usernames & Passwords - Have to be setup for each transition day pupil

Monitoring - Making sure blogs aren't abused.

Moodle - Not easy to navigate for blogs and leaving the blogs open for all to view may give all students the opportunity to voice an opinion - not neccesarily a good thing.

Never used Moodle - Would need introductions to Moodle which may take up time teachers would want for something else.

 

Reasons for -

Keeps everything in one place without using other means (although other means would involve similar password/username issues).

Getting the kids used to Moodle as I hope we will continue to use Moodle in the new year (Academy change year).

We don't have to implement new/more resources to learn/teach staff and students.

 

 

In general I'm not sure where I can go with this. Has anyone done anything like this in Moodle before and does anyone use anything else (preferably free and with good child protection). I previously used an email system which was free which allowed children to send emails to other students, all emails went through the admins/teachers to allow the emails to be received by the student. Does this sound easier and more viable.

It's early stages of the project, just trying to gather more opinions from the great Edugeekers.

 

Thanks for your time.

 

Steve

 

Last year we used our LEA offering which the staff here didn't like so we have created our own moodle offering for this year.

 

The user names are not really an issue as the school is sent a CSV file listing all the successful applicants from the LEA, you could adapt this to import your names.

 

We are trying it out using the current Year 7s and some 6th form to mentor and monitor the pupils etc, even giving restricted editing rights.

 

Our site isn't 'live' yet, waiting for staff to fill in some blanks, but I can pm you a link for you to look at if you like?

[apoth0r]

We've had Moodle in place since Feb last year and it's been fantastic, however the blogging and instant messaging had to be disabled because that is all the kids did during lessons.

I don't particularly want to allow the blogging feature again because it is too hard to control from my office - classroom control would be better but well you can't have it all can you.

 

Was thinking of using blogmeister as it offers some control from the teachers POV, teacher maintains publishing control over what children write. Which is exactly what I am looking for. After this first use we will perhaps do it for a couple more years and then have a good document to publish RE: FAQ's.

 

Forum would also be a pretty good idea but again I don't have the time to train. This blogmeister seems a much easier approach to what should be a simple task.

[alan-d]

Our Transition site is a seperate moodle install. So it does not effect the main VLE (also moodle). Training is an issue but we have had moodle for a couple of years now and the staff running this new site are reasonably competant users.

[secretlife]

seriously - I agree with the moodle forum idea - much simpler to set up and contained within one course in moodle (moodle blogs cant' be commented on anyway and are attached to user profile not a course) We do this every year with y6 and y7 - set up a course and a forum -enrol current y7 and y6 and they can ask and get responses to questions. Teachers can subscribe and get emails when something is posted so it's easy to moderate. As far as training goes -there's nothing really to train - pupils will learn it in seconds -as long as the forum is set up by you in advance it takes a couple of minutes to show teacher how to moderate /edit/delete anything unsuitable.