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Posted

Ok, so one of the staff at my school was at a meeting last week and they saw this new platform called MOOPLE.NET. Apparently it will be free to schools and does single sign on to Google Apps, Moodle, Wordpress and some other Web2.0 apps. My colleague said it looked easy to use and had lots of tools and had a flexible UI.

 

For him the attraction is FREE and the fact that it supports Moodle which we use anyway and the Head hates Sharepoint.

 

I've been on their web site and looked at their videos but I wondered if anyone else had seen it and what you thought?

 

Ta

 

Alistair

Posted (edited)

All the kirklees schools are being offered this, its a huge upgrade from the old squirrelmail system... personally don't like it though, and can't see most of my primary admin ladies using it at all!

 

Did you not get an invite to the technical forum where this was discussed? If not, drop Karen Jones an email: karen.jones at kirklees.gov.uk – with your name, job title, and school name.

Edited by Dom_
Posted

Just spent the last half an hour looking over the MOOPLE site (and it's parent site, innovicity), and still none the wiser!

If you check 'Announcements' on the Innovicity site you'll see that Google Apps is being used by 75,000 students in Kirklees.

As Google Apps already integrates with Moodle, both of which are, as already noted, FREE, I don't quite see the need to introduce another 'front end' into the equation?

The use of embedded widgets (most free) to add a vast range of extra functions to a web page, whether it's a Google Site or Moodle Site, is nothing new.

The site itself is clearly fairly new (registered in May 2010, must be shy, as the owners of the domain are hidden) - some of the links don't work, or not in Firefox, and, for what is being touted as an Educational site, spotted at least one grammatical error.

I'll expand my thoughts when I've had time to look more closely at what they are actually offering.

Cheers

Brian

Posted

There is no such thing as a free lunch!

 

Moodle is free but the total cost of ownership must include having a tech department that can support it and the training that staff need to embed it in the teaching and learning of your school.

 

The embedding bit goes for any VLE and Moodle is very flexible so its easier than most systems to encourage staff and students to use it.

 

Non free systems usually come with some tech support to integrate it with your network (ie ldap or similar sign on, access to shared areas, users files etc.)

 

Moople doesnt really do anything that cant already be done with Moodle and a few plugins which you can get from the Moodle site. Personally, I would rather do away with the adds etc and have a more standard Moodle set up.

 

Just my opinion, of course!

 

Phil

Posted
Since I started this I thought I'd let everyone who contributed know what we have decided. We're going to try a pilot with MOOPLE, basically the Head wants to see whether it makes it easier for staff to start doing things on line and since its free he sees no down side since the staff we will test it with don't use the current VLE anyway. I also got access to their dev site which seems much better than the current version - I'll let you know how it goes.
Posted

Morning,

Thought I'd pipe in about this one, work at a number of primaries in kirklees and we dont have the option to opt in or out with moople. this is because it is replacing the squirrel mail system so if we dont take it we dont get council email addresses.

I dont have a problem with replacing the mail system but they seem to have gone for a solution that trys to tick everybox for everybody and I'm not sure you can do that when your giving it to every level of education as the primary schools will have a lot less interest in this than the high schools, as I've already found out when one of my heads asked me to bypass the main moople page so she could go straight to gmail.

The guy who's doing it seems pretty good, he's done similar things elsewhere in the country, not sure whether we're allowed to name him on a public forum.

yeah i agree about the sponsors not sure i'd want that in school, but it looks like we wont have any choice. although i think it may be just staff that get accounts in primaries, please correct me if that wrong.

Posted
i think it may be just staff that get accounts in primaries, please correct me if that wrong.

 

You can pay an extra £100 to get student accounts set up.

Posted

Dont have .sch.uk addresses, if we did i wouldnt be bothered. council emails only, so thats @kirklees-schools.org.uk at the minute then moving to @edukirklees.net once we're on moople

the admin staff arn't happy as they are going have to redo all signs letterhead and anything else that had the old email address on, which they keep telling me is going to cost a fortune. like i have any real say in the matter, i only found out about this last month,

google sites is part of moople as well, at least thats what they said at the meeting

Posted
To me it looks like you could achieve exactly the same result as that portal with your own Moodle installation and then have control over the design and be assured that your data isn't being disclosed to third parties...
Posted

So if Google sites is part of Moople and Moople probably uses Googles email and they are adding adverts why not just use Google. It costs about £10 to setup a new Domain or 15 to setup a .sch.uk Domain and your done.

 

Not trying to stop you but from my point of view it does seem a bit odd

 

so if we dont take it we dont get council email addresses

Also why do you need CC email address? if you buy a sch.uk or any other domain and use live@edu or Google for education you control you own email.

 

Is it only me that looks at it like this, can someone else post a comment.

Posted
Dont have .sch.uk addresses, if we did i wouldnt be bothered. council emails only, so thats @kirklees-schools.org.uk at the minute then moving to @edukirklees.net once we're on moople

the admin staff arn't happy as they are going have to redo all signs letterhead and anything else that had the old email address on, which they keep telling me is going to cost a fortune. like i have any real say in the matter, i only found out about this last month,

google sites is part of moople as well, at least thats what they said at the meeting

 

They were telling me that they were looking into keeping the @kirklees-schools.org.uk addresses whilst still using the edukirklees.net domain - so tell the admin people not to jump too quickly.

  • 4 weeks later...
  • 4 months later...
Posted (edited)

Well I thought time might be a healer on this one . . .

 

What get's me is that every staff member in every school in Kirklees has to login to their new email via a duff looking website, full of content nobody cares about, riddled with primitive bugs.

 

One thing I did manage to extract from the website was the amount of staff required to produce this great pile of garbage. Unfortunately I'm unable to visit the 'meet the team' section again due to a bug that prevents me from going back to the home page!

 

How primitive can you get?

 

Wait, I can do one better . . . these guys haven't even configured their DNS settings for moople.net so only Moople works!!! And every member of staff is expected to login through this site??

 

How primitive can you get? Let me know if I'm missing something guys . . .

Edited by mrstephenw
  • 5 weeks later...
Posted
Well I thought time might be a healer on this one . . .

 

What get's me is that every staff member in every school in Kirklees has to login to their new email via a duff looking website, full of content nobody cares about, riddled with primitive bugs.

 

 

No need to if you don't want to. Just go to www google com/a/edukirklees net (I can't post proper links - that's my first post here) to login your Google Apps account.

 

One thing I did manage to extract from the website was the amount of staff required to produce this great pile of garbage. Unfortunately I'm unable to visit the 'meet the team' section again due to a bug that prevents me from going back to the home page!

 

About Us section works fine, shows the team members ...

Posted

Great.

 

Maybe you should publicise the link, at least until you get the Moople website sorted out? ;)

 

https://www.google.com/a/edukirklees.net

 

Having to close the browser to log back into email again isn't acceptable for any users - geek or non-geek. People work within their browser nowadays and the last thing they want to do is close down their browser unnecessarily. :mad:

 

How about getting http://moople.net/ sorted so it works? Another thing that would save me valuable support time and instill confidence in your portal. :rolleyes:

 

'dedicated in-school support for specific periods of time'. So you're treading on the toes of other ICT technicians, competing beside them. I guess you guys have a slight upper hand already given that you encourage everyone to login through the portal that advertises your services? :eek:

 

How about spreading some monopolised love and adding a link to my school support services? :o

Posted

I tend to agree with the main portal, its clunky and not really very useful to be honest. I just bypass it like mehow said

 

Most of my admin staff across my sites havent used the web based stuff anyway, they like their outlook express haha =-)

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