mighty.grey.eagle

@SimpleSi Most of the Carr Hill front page is produced by adding various labels. To do this you need to go to Site Administration/Front Page and then turn on the "Include a topic section". To really customize the page you will need to play around with the different themes and be familiar with CSS.

This would be like having minimum standards for worksheets! A school or college can try to impose a standard but it would be very difficult to police. Far more critical is the copyright (or not) on the materials if teachers are going to start sharing their courses.

Import the SWF into Flash. You can then do whatever you want.

A new competitor has thrown their hat into the ring and it looks very useful (and free!). Go to http://www.jingproject.com Creates videos and/or a series of screenshots. It is intended that the output should be hosted on Screencast.com but you can save them locally as SWF files. After that it is up to you. Software written by Techsmith who also wrote Camtasia/Snagit so the quality should be good. Enjoy

In the good old DOS days there was a little program that turned the display up-side-down. Set this up on one of the languages teachers PC's. She phoned up complaining. Told her that she would have to turn the monitor up-side-down to correct it. You guessed it - she did.

I object to being called a relic! But, to answer the original question - 1984 with a RM 480Z network. BNC connectors. thin ethernet and a 10MB Winchester (hard drive to the young ones) to store the work from 16 stations and a couple of GCSE groups. The operating system was a networked version of CP/M called CP/Net. The "server" was basically a 380Z (Z80 processor) but I can't remember how much memory. Probably only 16 or 32K. Now if you want to talk about paper tapes and writing your own boot programs, then burning them on to a PROM, I'm your man. But not now, I need to take my tablets and have a sleep........

Ilaughed

A few points. With regard to speed we have the advantage of hosting our Moodle installation in school - obviously faster than using any external connection. CLEO (our RBC) then reverse proxy it so that out of school hours it is still available and, because there are less users on it at any one time, speed is less of a consideration. Our Moodle is running on Linux and "Geoff" makes it run smoothly. So what would happen if he left? I would hope that one of the other technicians could continue to make work but CLEO offer a external hosting solution so there is a fallback position. CLEO are also involved in various Moodle developments that will make it easier to use in a school environment. Teaching staff don't find the Moodle interface difficult. Even the technophobes can add resources and link to websites. They may not use all of the features but I am sure that as they gain confidence they will. As a final consideration I have seen so many presentations that promise the earth and, expensively, don't deliver. Moodle does deliver.

Somewhere I have a VBA program that I wrote for Excel. Goes up and down a list of names and then chooses one randomly - or at least that's what the little one's thought! Fixed it so that it didn't choose the same name twice. I can dig it out if anyone is interested.

Just spent the last hour or so re-listening to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (by the Beatles if you didn't know). According to Wikipedia it was the most influential album of all time. What do you young people think?

Whatever next? Start off with two brilliant concepts and then join them together. Check it out here.

Have you customized your theme? You could knock it back to a default one and check if the problem continues.

Administration/Security/Site Policies You probably have the "Force users to login" option ticked.

No easy solution at the moment if you are using SIMS to hold your class data. We use enrolment keys to assign students to courses. Seems to work OK.

Just to add something to my last post. It looks like changing the role of guest (users/permissions/define roles) on the front page is favourite. Go down to Forums. You probably want "Reply to posts". Possible "Spam" issue though. I'm looking at a live site so I don't want to make any changes to check.

Not tried this but I suppose you could create a new role eg ForumPoster which has the normal guest rights + rights to post in a forum. Then make this the default guest role. Alternatively just adjust the the guest role. This supposes that you are using Moodle 1.7 or 1.8.

Might be impossible for you but this seems a perfect situation for a VLE (eg Moodle). Create the quiz in there (or import it), get the students to answer it in there and then let the system mark it! Ultimately less work for you. Even better if you start to share quizzes with other teachers.

One of my colleagues started using this program with a Year 9 group a couple of months back as a one lesson "filler". Now they are continually asking to go back to it! Gave the group their own course on our Moodle where they could add programs of their own, add to a WIKI with ideas, etc. The ultimate in learning through play.

Very good. I could have guessed at most (or even all) of these but the important thing is that Becta (or some other recognised authority) haven't defined it! We are at the same stage with e-portfolios as a couple of years ago where there were multiple definitions of Learning Platforms. We might disagree with Becta's view of a learning platform but it gives everyone something to aim at. Looking back at your definition I would remove something very important ie Word files. There is no way a definition should include proprietary software.

Have you got a definition of an e-portfolio? As far as I can see no-one has defined it so no-one can provide a solution.

There were lots of "knowing looks" on the faces of the Becta people. I think that they were as much in the dark as the rest of us.

Although I have put my vote in the "Green" box I am a little disappointed in the lack of Labour support. You may not always realise it (especially when our budgets are cut) but the amount of money going into education over these Labour years is enormous - far more than the Tories ever put in. Of course they have made mistakes and cocked things up but I always feel that they feel a little more embarrassed about their failures than their rivals.

Several Edugeekers (including myself) attended a Becta "Standards Review Workshop" today (02/05/07). The basic idea being to look at the Learning Platform Technical Specifications and see if they should be updated or modified. My notes are pretty sparse so I hope some of the self-confessed "lurkers" will flesh them out. Rather than write too much the pdf document (and the requirement numbers) should be referred to. Looking at the major points in turn. R1. IMS/QTI. This was accepted as being important but also the LP should have some way of marking the tests. Obviously m/c questions, true/false, etc should be relatively easy to implement. R3. SCORM was discussed for a while. Again all thought that it was important. Sometimes content providers didn't always implement all of the SCORM 2004 features. R5. Metadata. I don't think that I was the only one who yawned at this point. More useful I think for the content providers. R13. Accessibility was accepted as important and Becta are in consultation with then RNIB - so guidelines will probably come out on this. The content might be a different matter. R21. Access off site probably caused the temperature to rise. Several Edugeekers recounted tales of RBC's/LA's being less than helpful opening up ports/giving access to reverse proxies. R22. Shibboleth. This seems to have died a death. Always seemed like a good idea to me. R27/28 SIF looks like the one that seems to have been adopted. Even Capita have signed up - I think. Other general discussions revolved around authoring tools for SCORM and the need for LP inter-operability with management systems. The lack of a definition of an e-portfolio was also mentioned. Overall an interesting day and thanks to Becta for opening up the loop to get a wider view of the issues surrounding LP's.

Just got a quote for Citrix and the suppliers mentioned Ericom as a possible, cheaper option. It doesn't seem to have been discussed here. Anyone know about it, what it can do and how it compares. Thanks

Ric. Have you been drinking?