beeswax

if you want to display some examples of what can be done in Moodle, there's a demo site here Moodle Demonstration Site which is interactive and you can download the course and upload it to your own moodle site for staff to play with. Our school moodle is here, but I don't allow guest access. PM me if you, or staff want to look round.

I'm still having difficulties with this. Are we talking of altering the 3 files in the MRBS\web folder? When I've applied the changes the room booking system page fails to load, I just get a blank.

Or so said the other half. Ended up doing it on New Year's day. It was good to try the full blown way, and after some headache inducing moments I managed to sort it. Did try WAMP as well, but couldn't figure out how to set the password to access PHPAdmin.

because I'm not the NM. We use MS exclusively. Curently have Apache2Triad, which is no longer supported and need to move up to something more appropriate. Host the website and VLE in house.

I want to do it the hard way, installing each individual component rather than use wamp. How good is wamp as a fully blown server environment, rather than a testing environment?

I've free day tomorrow and was hoping to use some of the time to set up Apache, MySql and PHP on an XP laptop and have a run through turning it into a WAMP server before moving up to a full server environment. Can anyone point me in the direction of useful online documentation, please?

You could start by looking here - Communities of practice which neatly defines what we do. As for the how have we come to this position, I feel part of it is down to human nature, enquiry and sharing what we have learned, and having built on that knowledge we learn again that by applying more than one mind to a problem we are more likely to reach a satisfactory solution. It would be difficult to pinpoint the exact time that an online forum became a community of learning, and how we as techies came to discover this for ourselves, but we weren't the first, and we won't be the last. I feel that humans are generally social creatures who appreciate dialogue. What we are doing here is in part what educationalists are trying to move towards in primary and secondary education (I can't speak for higher education). When you look for an answer on the internet in general, or Edugeek in particular, do you feel that you're learning, extending your education, or simply solving a problem? It's when learning becomes something you feel you have to do that you move from problem solving to enriching not only yourself but your organization.

I don't really drink much coffee these days, it's too much of a diuretic for me. The degree is here BA (Hons) Learning, Technology and Research; An online degree offered through the Ultraversity scheme at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. I get excited because I strongly believe that education and learning are important, and sadly for many education stops when they leave school. If you take the Edugeek community as an example, some have their MCSE, some have computing degrees, some have simply learned through experience, but the one thing I feel the majority of us on here share is the willingness to learn, to improve, and to share that learning with everybody else. For the most part people here are self motivated to learn. That may be because the schools you work for don't offer any training, or won't fund it, don't see the need for it, but in order for "things" to work properly we put in the time and research ourselves. That is important. You want to learn, to enquire, to experiment and to apply that knowledge to raise, for example, a static school website into something dynamic (cue sysman_mk and apologies to those not mentioned in this roll of honour). We're all the better for it.

I think this is the full document to which Phil Neal refers - http://publications.teachernet.gov.uk/eOrderingDownload/6856-DfES-Teaching%20and%20Learning.pdf I think I'd better read it before commenting any further.

I think you'll find that some "enlightened" councils are now reconsidering taking up the sort of rubber matting found in park playgrounds and putting tarmac down again for the very reason that children shouldn't be over protected and thus gain a false impression of how easy life is. As you say, children have to experience pain at some point in order to learn important lessons. It doesn't make you neglectful.

Sorry webman, didn't mean to appear patronising.

Just who are these technological advancements supposed to benefit? Government targets? Or the pupil? I'll hold up my hand here and admit that a lot of these proposals excite me, to the extent that I'm putting myself through an online degree course in Education, Research and Technology. I'm not trying to promote myself here, but this self motivated learning is what the government is seeking. Learning to learn. How do you bring people to such a pitch that they spend half of Christmas Day thinking about such problems?

You're going to run into the same problems here as currently exist in school. The parents of the bright pupils are usually the ones who turn up for parents' evenings, whereas the teachers will tell you they aren't the ones they need to see. We've just conducted a survey of both parents and pupils, 54% of pupils responded, 16% of parents replied. This isn't about the technology; if throwing a stone at their bedroom window at 03:00am got them to take an interest in their child's education then I'd invest in stones. For some parents school is nothing more than cheap child minding. How do you engage with these people? As a former school governor and head of the PTA I've had first hand experience of trying to bring in new faces to these bodies, and most of the time without any luck. Some of these people I was trying to attract didn't have "long working hours", in fact, some of them didn't work at all (I apologize to those who are out of work and looking to get back into employment). They are not going to play the game of "getting involved" no matter that they've been given a laptop under the government's current scheme to enable them to do just that. You might just be better off with a pointy stick, but then that's making them do something under duress, which is the first step on a very rocky road. Some people are simply not interested. They've been through the system and it's done very little, or nothing for them; why should they throw themselves willingly into this mix again? Their experience of the education system has left them unimpressed, so I suggest that instead of all this expensive technology we instead use the money to pay parents to come in to school and discuss their child's progress.

I feel the greatest impediment to these will probably be the teachers, though not for idealogical/political reasons. Take the example of IWB's. That "I" stands for Interactive; how many are simply used as substitutes for white board and marker? The education has to take in the teachers as well; schools have to become places where everybody learns. By "schools" I mean the the wider community which makes up the school. Teachers, pupils, parents, governors, TA's and so on.

Good point webman. Unfortunately Capita are a commercial organization, and whatever we may think, do invest a lot of money in Research and Development. Licensing is one way to continue the funding of R & D.

Give that man an old stogie and a snap brim fedora. That's real grownup newsroom talk Russ.

You're going to get some breakages when stuff falls off the back of a lorry Zak.

Thanks again. Hadn't realized you'd spoken to HW.

thanks Zak. At the moment I'm not looking to brush up my Mac skills, but simply to have some control over what gets added to the network. I'm in next Monday and Tuesday. Have a good Christmas.

A few days ago I was called to one of our faculty teachers who was having problems getting his wireless connection to work. When I got to his (XP) laptop I found that Airnet(?) had been installed. It later transpired that his department had bought several Mac books (don't know how many, they didn't come through the IT department) and I assume they had set up, or attempted to set up their own network. I don't know much about Macs and I don't want to get into a which is best battle here. If they (Arts) feel better using Macs then so be it. What I really want to know is what you think these mac books can access. I don't feel there's any problem them getting on the school network, but I'd be concerned if they were accessing the internet without using the LEA filtering. This has all come about at the very last minute before the school holidays, and if I didn't know the people involved I'd say it was planned this way. Neither the NM or us techies have the first idea about Macs (I've used one but that's different to configuring it for the network).

We had a situation earlier this year (May/June) where we had the money for a new ICT Suite but couldn't go down the traditional desktop route because we couldn't install any more aircon units (not very green) so we opted for thin client. On the whole the room has been very well used and looked after. Staff were told of the differnces between desktop and TC technology and for the most part they've gone along with that. Our admin machines are all desktops.

I know that in our school pupils are taught what copyright means before they begin designing anything.

I've created this factsheet for our staff.BBC_iPlayer_Fact_Sheet.pdf

I heard the oil price slump had gone from $140 a barrel in June to less than $40 yesterday.

That's the way we've gone, dedicated storage.