mrweekender

Significant in house resources? Initially you'll need a member of technical staff who is trained as a Mooodle administrator and content creator. You can host you're site either in house or in the cloud. We pay around £300 a year for "unlimited" bandwidth and "unlimited" file space. If we ever max this out I'll talk to our provider to see what they can do. Like any other VLE you'll need department champions to disseminate info to their depts. You'll need to arrange staff training and guidance sessions with bookable one to one's or small groups. You'll find that once you start, members of staff will take on responsibility for their areas and require less training and support. I believe the Moodle 2.0 Google Apps SSO mod is now working. SIMS2Moodle - Enrolment Plug-in is a part preconfigured version of moodle's external database plug-in tailored for use with SIMS.net. Dashboards are distracting, trust me the quicker staff and students can get in, get what they want and get out the better. Speed of information access is both vital and critical. Intuitive course creation and simple layouts far outweigh glossy, shiny interfaces. Facebook, case and point. Just to add, Google Apps for education can provide all the comms and collaboration tools you'll likely need - for free and it promotes inclusion. We've been using it since 2008 - it's the best cloud based comms system I've seen to date. Everything else is miles behind. Hope this helps.

Check this out >> Upgrading to Moodle 2.0 - MoodleDocs << should give you the info you need.

I've been through the Frog sales pitch and to be honest it's similar to a lot of the other offerings - Moodle 2.0 is probably your best bet if your starting from scratch. It's intuitive, simple to use and you can manage it from in house. There's plenty of companies out there to help you set it up initially and provide training. I'm self taught and I found it relatively straight forward. Oh yes and there's no annual license fee.

We have Moodle 2.0 running on a hosting package with unlimited bandwidth and unlimited file space. Not using it to it's full potential as yet but it looks pretty smooth to me. We've just installed about 2.5Gb of MFL and English Pearson VLE packages into it and they're running great. Students currently accessing resources via enrolment keys. Module support not as comprehensive but new features are looking like they'll more than make up for that, for the time being.

Still not worth the money and still has major usability issues regarding file uploads. Still miles behind the competition in terms of intuitive design and usability. Moodle 2.0 is the way forward - why are schools still paying RM for this janky platform?

Thanks very much. The template is based on the Afterburner template available on the Moodle site. We've done some serious rewrites of the css to get this all to work. I'll make the template available once it's all been tested and we've gone live with it.

We can argue about the mechanics of this all day but it still doesn't change the fact that there's not one single "virus" been written for Mac OS X and therefore anti-virus software is not needed on a Mac at this time. It doesn't matter which way Symantec or Sophos or whoever try to wash it, it's just FUD from their marketing teams trying desperately to sell you a product you don't need. The excuse that I should purchase anti-virus software for the Mac's because I might infect a Windows PC from a pen drive or try and make out that I'm not a conscientious user if don't - oh please, that's just plain ludicrous and a tactic that will most certainly cost me serious and unnecessary money, and lets face it if the Windows machines on my network are properly patched with their latest anti-virus patches installed this is a mute subject. Oh no wait that's right you can't stop 100% of Windows viruses FUD FUD FUD lol.

Oh yes sorry it's an image 54px - 24px right at the bottom of the email page - it's tiny. After all it is called Google Apps. The Main logo is our own and there are no adverts. I know hard to believe isn't it? Microsoft co-branded - oh please more like Bill Gates has finally run out of ideas for making money so he's just going to sell advertising space in an education platform and brainwash our kids even further. And I didn't think Microsoft could sink any lower!

No offence but I think you'll find we're talking about a virus attack here ie. the redistribution of malicious code through propagation - not a direct brute force system hack. Exploits can be written for any system anywhere, it's what they can do that counts. Windows viruses can redistribute on such a massive scale due to inherent flaws in the system architecture unlike UNIX which was built from the ground up with security fail-safes. Ask any web admin what they're using to deliver their web packages and apps, what the number one system is for delivering secure web content, UNIX. Then ask em what anti-virus they're running and watch as they answer "what for the windows clients?". Lol. Same old same old. Fact - there has not been one "virus" seen in the wild for OS X. Fact - there are over 144,000 "viruses" seen in the wild for Windows OS. Also by your logic how would you know the anti-virus software that you bought could protect you if nothing has been written yet that circumvents the admin permissions to allow for propagation? That must be some sparkly Sophos crystal ball they've got there! Face it, it's a lie based on fear of the unknown - something that's used as a basic marketing strategy the world over every single day. Y'know what put anti-virus on your Mac if you like, I personally don't care, it's your choice but don't be a mug and pay for it because at this moment in time it's about as much use as an ejector seat in a helicopter.

That's £24,288 for us and if that's annual then I'm sorry but Microsoft can shove it because that translates to about 70 iPads/Chrome Netbooks every year with no licensing costs and everything flowing through the cloud.

We've also been working on a test template http://www.webhabitat.co.uk to replace our current main site template http://allsaintsccfl.org.uk. We've integrated a YUI menu and a Javascript image rotator with translucent pop up menus and active url links. We'll be rolling this out in January but we originally developed this on Moodle 1.9 so it'll have to be ported to 2.0 first. Still needs a bit of tweaking but it's getting there. Hoping to fully integrate single sign on with Google Apps in Q1.

Sorry but that statement is just plain wrong. Mac OS X is completely different to Windows it's based on UNIX and for a start it doesn't allow applications to access to the core system resources without physical intervention from the administrator. This is why Mac OS doesn't suffer from "drive by" installations unlike Windows which by it's very nature has to allow applications to directly access the registry. At present the only time you'll get a "virus" on a Mac (if you can find one) is if you yourself install it and give it permissions to access key system resources and even then it's impossible for it to propagate any further, thus causing no further risk to other Mac's. I've had Mac's for years - most recent one 3 years, guess what, no viruses, no malware, zip, nada, zero. I wouldn't call it sensible I'd call it a misinformed knee jerk reaction to FUD. It's been argued a billion times by Windows users but I'll leave it up to this rather eloquent guy to sum it all up (read Linux - read Mac OS): I was very, very disappointed to see a respected company such as Sophos being a party to the promotion of continued misunderstanding of key concepts in computer security. Whilst precise technical definitions are not necessarily important for end-users, that is not an excuse for the use of imprecise language when discussing specific security issues, and I note that Cluley's article (hotlinked from this story) is very careful to avoid stating that Mac viruses do or do not exist - he refers to Mac "malware" and Mac "threats", but keeps referring to "anti-virus software" to address these. No. It's bad enough that the uninformed seize upon the existence of ClamAV and the like to bleat that "there must be Linux viruses because anti-virus software exists for Linux" (we can't stop people from demonstrating the extent of their ignorance), but it's shameful that he is attempting to promote Sophos anti-virus and anti-malware products by leveraging that ignorance. By all means he can promote his company's security products for the Mac, and there's no objection to them calling it "anti-malware" and/or "anti-spyware" software. But it's not "anti-virus" software unless, like ClamAV, it's software for dealing with Windows viruses that happen to reside for whatever reason on a Mac platform, in the same way that my Linux servers deal with Windows viruses being sent through my Exim MTA, destined for Windows-using end users. Quite frankly, it's about time that Trading Standards officers or the Advertising Standards Authority prosecuted Sophos for misleading anyone who buys "Sophos anti-virus for Linux" in consequence of the belief that Linux can be infected by a virus. Or have they successfully claimed the cash prize offered by Eddie Bleasedale's NetProject Limited to anyone who can successfully infect one of their properly-configured Linux boxes with a virus - i.e. malware that is self-replicating, the key criterion for software to be classified as a virus?

Nothing ironic at all. Microsoft are about 4 years behind Google with cloud applications yet as always they sell their version like it's the holy grail. All you have to do is take a quick look at their marketing info. Tag lines like "Works with the programs students know and use most – Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote" hmmm if that's not attempting to tie schools into continuing to buy the Microsoft Office products I don't know what is. Also "co-branded for your school at no cost." co-branded - sounds like advertising to me. No adverts or "co-branding" in Google Apps. As my old mentor used to say we should be teaching word processing skills not word skills, spreadsheet skills not excel skills. Openness is the future, docx etc. is most certainly not. Does 365 support ODF? Google does. I believe Microsoft is not the future where schools are concerned, their 80's style mercenary business model is hard to stomach these days especially when there are far better offers on the table.

The trick is a rather nifty piece of code called the YUI menu system. Look it up on Google if you're interested in it's history.

365 is just another bandwagon Microsoft are jumping on after seeing Google take education by storm. Google Apps is by far the best cloud collaboration platform available to schools at this time and the price isn't bad either - free. Don't believe the FUD, 365 is just another way of Microsoft to steal our budgets at a time when we could all do with a few freebies to keep things ticking over. I've been using Google Apps from the start and I can wholeheartedly recommend it as a service. Sign up for Postini before the 31st of December and get some free industry standard security addons that will help with Data Protection and content control. Cheers.

Mac OS X does not need anti-virus software - period. Unless you're downloading pirated software, in which case tough luck.

I have seen the latest incarnation of the bilge that is Kaleidos. It's an appalling example of how not to build a VLE. Staff switch off when confronted by this non user friendly, poorly implemented, restrictive garbage. Did I mention it's also an absolute rip off - as is the rest of the RM stuff - CC4 anyone? Trust me when I say you're better off using Moodle which, after you read the fairly cheap O'Reilly manual, is a breeze to set up, use and manage