Moodle and help we can provide

What can Moodle do for your school?

Apart from being free, Moodle has another great advantage over ‘bought in’ VLEs in that it is highly customisable, fitting in with curriculum organisation and Schemes of Work as well as making use of resources that already exist in school.

There are three main aspects that it can address. First, it gives online access to resources and information for students (and their parents), allowing them to go over class work again, catch up on missed work and revise for exams. Second, it easily facilitates online working and assessment. Third, it can perform all of the functions of a school website: news and events, information about subjects offered, trips and visits, policies, copies of letters home etc.

Resources and Information:
Teachers can quickly and easily set up courses for each of their subject topics or modules. These can illustrate the teaching sequence used by the Scheme of Work and provide students online access to resources such as homework tasks, worksheets, student speak assessment criteria, presentations used in lessons, video and audio clips, animations and links to supporting websites. VLE versions of commercial teaching software can also be run from within a course.

Online Working and Assessment:
Teachers can upload tests and assessments in a wide range of formats, such as multiple choice, drag and drop, cloze, short answer etc, all of which the system will mark automatically and provide the teacher with individual and class scores as well as question level analysis of the responses, which can easily be exported into existing school recording systems. A straightforward interface allows teachers to see at a glance who has completed a test and when, as well as to control test start and end dates, number of attempts allowed and to output scores as grades, levels or whatever is needed.  It is relatively simple to convert existing tests and past exam papers (including diagrams) into Moodle formats. Students can also submit longer pieces of work, such as coursework assignments, as easily as attaching a document to an e-mail. Teachers can mark the work online in as much detail as is needed, send instant feedback to the students and receive redrafted versions. Final versions can be stored online or printed off when needed. Experience shows students much prefer this way of working, being used to it from Messenger and social networking sites whilst teachers love the change from having to manage large amounts of paper.

Moodle also provides several other facilities for interactive and collaborative working. Forums can be used for students to ask the teacher for help and guidance, as well as being used for collaborative discussions where each student contributes responses to a task or discussion point specified by the teacher. Wikis can be used for students to contribute to build up a group website on a particular topic by writing allocated definitions or subsections. Questionnaires and databases can be used to gather opinions and information for surveys and projects.

School Website
Most school websites seek to provide parents with background information about the school, announcements, news and upcoming events. As Moodle is a website, it is easy to use sections of it as the public face of the school. It is quicker and easier to update it than a conventional website and it can also be used as a file store for important documents needed by parents such as policies and those easily lost permission slips and letters home.