shadowx

Depends. If you use coal to cook the wood you get something like 6-8 pieces of charcoal per coal burned. Havent played in a few days though, addicted to the Rift BETA, even more addictive than WoW and MC!

Who needs coal? Set up a tree farm and cook it in a furnace, infinite $$$$$ (i mean coal) you jelly?

Interesting, I know the price will be higher for a secondary school like us but it is still looking to be below the cost of SLG... I take it you are permitted/able to use third party, free, themes for Moodle? If this is so then i can easily hack one of the themes about to get what we want, im no designer but i can fiddle with code Other than that we have someone that we can give a couple hundred for a nice design hopefully. Sounds interesting...

Superb info, i will definitely look at the ZiLink site, i never buy anything (be it games, software etc...) without a trial and the ICT manager is the same so a demo would be nice. With regards to cost, Mullaney18, is that £3k/3yr for the schoolanywhere or their Learnanywhere software? Cost is obviously a massive factor at the moment and if the school is SLG (which i think is £3k+ per SINGLE year) we can easily recommend something that will cost up to that amount, but i fear Schoolanywhere will be the same as SLG per year. What do you intend to use moodle for eventually? Are you going to use it to manage every class (eg year 5 maths group B) or just subject/year (eg year 5 maths) ? Secondly, do you all run a full AD which handles authentication for the moodle system? As it stands our students arent members of the AD but are managed purely from a Novell E-Directory/LDAP, the staff are only part of the AD for the sake of SIMS so a system that revolves around an AD may be tricky (which is why we really want an on site time limited demo) anything that can take LDAP logon is fine though. Thanks

Hello again, hasnt been long... Has anyone ever dealt with Schoolanywhere.co.uk? Their solution consists of a Capita partnered link between SIMS and moodle, full support and management etc... along with a nice interface and such. The school is now seriously looking at SIMS Learning Gateway (SLG) but *still* want moodle to act as a VLE, due to the cost of SLG we are thinking we can save money and get a more useful product by dealing with School Anywhere, we would locally host it on our own hardware (probably) but i was really hoping someone might have used their solution and can tell me more about it. Their website and downloads are the usual sales blabber and all they want is to chase the idea of us buying it without providing much info along the way. Even any links to schools which currently use the system would be handy as i can email them and try to find out a little more. Anyone?

I got it working but in the end it didnt do what i hoped it would do. I had a look at sims2ad but moodle and ldap have never worked here despite having set up LDAP and a helpdesk system (GLPI) with relative ease. I dont really see moodle being a viable system for us, it doesnt do most of what we need and while it does have a few things we dont have at the moment like forums and such it just doesnt tie in deeply enough. As it stands our intranet pulls everything from SIMS, bi-weekly time tables, gradings, attendance, parental contact details, SEN status, pupil photos, reports etc... With moodle the staff would need to manually open an in class session on their course, give it a name etc... just so they can then give each pupil a mark and estimate grades etc... and duplicate all the data in sims manually. Unless im missing something i dont really see the point in moodle, i have emailed a local 6th form as i know they use it just to see what they actually do with it. If anyone has a few minutes to post what they use it for and how i would definitely read it but otherwise i think moodle is getting dropped again. On a sider note has anyone tried the SIMS gateway stuff? Looks interesting from the POV of monitoring grades, attendance, behavior etc... but doesnt quite have the VLE content.

*massive sigh* Thanks guys, guess i will have to use a nice old version of software... Just as well since my moodle install has just become corrupt. I hate this thing! Any other premade CMS type system, fine and easy (well, except sakai....) but this is just a pig!! We are based in Essex so (thankfully) we are on our own to experiment which is better than having the LA take control IMHO. I will try moodle 1.9x and see how it goes. Cheers.

*sigh* Two statements: I hate moodle I hate CLEO even more. Story goes thus: School gets shown some moodle, certain SLT members think it's good without actually knowing what it is, ICT techs get told it is on the board to be implemented. I decide to take a look. I rage quit and ask for help. I have had moodle set up before, i dont like it but perhaps that's because of CLEO. We run SIMS and currently have a custom made intranet that links in really nicely pulling out timetables for staff and kids, allows resource booking based on rooms that are/arent in use for certain periods, loves our two week timetable etc... Cleo cant do all of that as far as i am aware, but what it should be able to do is import data but i cant even get the poxy thing installed. I have installed moodle 2.0 from scratch, the instructions for CLEO tell you to patch some files, not a problem. Except one of the files no longer exists in moodle (admin/roles/assign.html) so now what? Well there is another file on the GIT website, i think "woah that's confusing, there must be a little tutorial, ah there is!" *reads tutorial*... "Wait what?" That explained 0% of GIT and so i sit staring at this useless website and files, the author who posted a "here is a solution thread" just dumped the link, someone asked how to use it but eventually found the solution but didnt share, nice. So i save the data on the website (in the form of DIFF) as .patch files, open it in my patch GUI program and it cant find any of the paths, nice. Correct that, still nothing. Give up. re-install moodle thinking perhaps i missed something. Nope. I had CLEO installed before, perhaps on a previous version of moodle but i am so irritated that no-one seems to have any information on this, google gives me sweet FA, the CLEO website is less useful than my own attempts at beating the computer in submission and so i am here. Please, does someone have a nice instruction set for installing CLEO into moodle 2.0?!?!

At present we use NetStorage from Novell which allows remote access to files in school based on the permissions given to the user when they login to the Novell servers, and it works fine, if anyone ever uses it. But it has the old problem of download the document, edit it, re-upload it which is a bit annoying so i was wondering if there is a "local" google docs type online editor that can be installed to a LAMP server in the DMZ and allow users to edit their documents in real time over the net from home? Haven t seen much on the net but it's worth asking.

It's not even a convincing scam... I wouldnt hate them so much if they didnt insult my intelligence.

Superb, the fix works as it should I did have to add the system.net section and it worked first time, now time to get to grips with the thing. Cheers (and thanks to podium too i guess!)

Thanks i shall take a look at the MS site and give that a try. It does seem they are good on the support side, still doesnt mean i like their software though But i suppose its target audience is several years younger than me!

possibly being a bit stupid but i cant work out the config file. I was expecting some nice XML like: blah And so on but alas no.... Instead its just nasty! Have you tried this fix? If so can you tell me exactly where to put the code. As it stands the CONFIG file goes something like: (thats from one of my machines, not a workstation but it looks the same) that is the section "system.net" and there are no other occurrences of "system.net" in the file. I tried inserting the code in the middle of that block (obviously not breaking the tags) and it just gave a .net error report when opening the podium settings app. Thanks for getting this bit of info though.

Do let us know if a solution arises, podium is never going to get used here anyway but its on the list so i suppose i should at least try

I expect FTP is an option, like i say ive only been in the game for a year and its not my decision to make. The boss is back next week so if theres no fix ill let him know the situation and see what he says. I dont see it being a problem though. I will look into the direct IP solution and see if that gives any luck. Much appreciated! Seems a fairly stupid idea t leave out manual proxy config in podium if you ask me!

As it so happens we use a smoothwall device here a UTM-1000 to be precise Podium does pick up the proxy settings from IE but that is the problem. IE is set to our filtered IP address which, even though the podium address is added to the "allowed" list, still seems to be stripping some of the data or otherwise modifying it. Podium connects fine if i put in our unfiltered proxy IP in IE but then the kids and staff get unfiltered internet access which isnt an option. We use Ident to authenticate to the proxy so i dont see a way of having separate auth for podium. From what i gather podium is sending off a username and password, probably via http POST to an ASMX script at the far end. the asmx is then authenticating and presumably passing on our token to further scripts to allow the uploading of podcasts. Another option is to look at opening up the proxy to forward on FTP connections but as I've only been here a year and the boss aint around id rather see if it can be worked via HTTP. Podium reports a http 417 error which i dont fully understand but im guessing that smoothwall is adding in this "Expect" data as when we go through untouched it connects fine suggesting that podium isnt expecting an "expect" but smoothwall gives it one anyway. Just a guess though... Is there a way to tell smoothwall to automatically pass through a connection to a specific address/ip so we could add the podium address to an exceptions list and have smoothwall just pass it straight through? Strangely enough our LEA bought this too, if it was up to me they would actually learn how to use computers and use audacity (which is already installed) but it seems the educational authorities would rather baby the students into using diluted software for the sake of grades. Or maybe im just cynical... Who knows?

The school has decided it would like to use another piece of software that never gets used, much like the 7 or so other bits installed. This time its podium. I have all of the details and it is easy enough to setup unless you use a proxy which i guess 95% of schools do. The recommended action is to use "USER [email protected]" in the Username field and the PROXY address in the address field which unfortunately doesnt work here most likely due to the proxy not forwarding it on as it hasnt got a clue what podium is trying to tell it to do. Is there a hack to get around this stupendously large pitfall in an otherwise already flaky program? We have two connections to the proxy, one we (techs) use which is completely untouched by the proxy and goes straight out which works fine for podium of course, and the other for staff and students. I can use the untouched line for podium because the settings are encrypted so no-one can get at the proxy IP, except of course podium doesnt offer a proxy option so is there a way of hacking it to go through a proxy with a certain IP or am i flogging a dead horse?

But why?! Everyone says it but few give reasons.

Certainly for end users who arent so techie and especially those who havent already got used to XP then windows 7 is the OS of choice but as i support the machines i still prefer XP to tinker with. I do like the UI of 7 but the start menu ruins it and im not a fan of the taskbar to be honest either. But personal preference doesnt make it good or bad i just dont like it. The point stands though that windows 7 is like a maze to get to relatively simple network features like TCP/IP control. and as noted already the control panel in general is pretty poor. *shrugs* i still like win 7 but it isnt perfect.

the new start menu is truly awful i have to agree! I love the idea of typing in "firefox" and hitting enter and not having to click my way through menus but at the same time i also love being able to browse the list to check if i have a specific program installed or if i forget the name of a program etc... and that pathetic scrollbox is absolutely useless unless you have a grand total of 3 programs or less! All it needs is a little "classic programs list" option, keep the search bar and the round icon but give me back my lists!

Are we still having Vista/every other OS?! Is there any argument here?! Damn! I have a reasonable spec gaming machine at home, 4gb RAM, quad core, 1gb gfx 64bit arch, it's not top of the range but its fast... Unless you put vista on it. Downstairs i have a laptop 1gb ram a crappy dual core 1.6ghz on board graphics, the usual... it runs XP and Ubuntu 9.10 and both of those were faster than Vista on the gaming rig, it was ridiculously slow, unusable, crashing constantly games pretty much didnt work it was awful... Whack the free upgrade to win7 on it and suddenly it zaps through boot up and general use, gaming is a dream. There is no other opinion, it is pure fact that Vista was slow, buggy and unstable otherwise why would MS say it themselves? Windows XP still, in my opinion, is probably the best overall. It is simple enough for end users, old enough that 99% of programs work perfectly on it and at the same time it is bare-bones enough that an advanced user or techie can easily get behind the scenes and change things a lot easier than with windows 7. Perhaps Win7 is better for an end user but overall XP takes it, and i'm not a microsoft fan. I still like the UI of win7 though... I just wish it was as easy to modify as XP.

Interesting, i did do a search for cleo and moodle and found nothing useful... I will look again. Cheers (if you are feeling particularly charitable and know where these threads lurk.... Just sayin )

Thanks for the link, ill check that out in the morning. What i essentially want is for the students to be auto-enrolled into all classes they are in. The SIMS data has a class ID field, which is then used in a many to many relationship with the student ID field, hence one student can be enrolled in many classes and one class can have many students. An image is attached to this post to show what i mean, im fairly bad at explaining with words... So looking at the graphic you can see that the student ID is linked to the course/class ID in the middle table. So our student is in the Art and Design course. What i need is for moodle to realise this, so i create a course called "Art & Design" with the shortcode "10A/Ar1" and when uploading the user data, or running a cronjob or whatever, moodle scans the database for all users who are in this class (which is seen because the userid of the user will be in a row with the "id" of the course as shown in the graphic) and automatically enroll them as a student... Clear as mud i am sure! I can probably write this myself in PHP but before i get dirty i was hoping someone had done the work for me. As a side question, where in the DB structure does moodle store the course/user data? I have found the individual tables mdl_user and mdl_course but i cant see any moodle table which links the two. If i can find that then i can probably start writing something up in PHP methinks, im sure it wont be that easy but time will tell.

I am playing around with a moodle install as the school is keen to get a VLE setup. Currently we have an intranet system which does a fair bit of the stuff we need, things like behaviour logs, grading, student and staff timetables/lists, room booking and email. What we need now is something to present course and lesson info to the students, our intranet does have some functionality but it is always worth looking at bigger and better things, that's where moodle comes in... I have used the CLEO tool to get the student's usernames/passwords created from SIMS and it has also nicely assigned them to their class groups as in SIMS (Eg 11xMA2 for maths group 2 of year 11 group X, if you see what i mean) This is all shown from CLEO when enrolling students to a course in the CLEO box under the standard moodle user's box. So, I know that CLEO has recognised the names of the classes so my next goal really is to get a course generated for each of those groups. For example: 7xma1, 7xma2, 7xma3 etc... as courses, then for moodle/CLEO to automatically enrole any student assigned to the group. In theory this setup would only require someone to re-run the SIMS report, and re-upload the TSV file for moodle to automatically update class lists, for example if a student comes in or drops out etc... I can manually assign teacher roles but auto enrolling the students is pretty much the only way i can see moodle being a usable system for us.