Teaching with Moodle

Just in case you've overlooked it - there is email, which is completely stable, reliable and useful. Every user profile has an email link for this purpose, so sending an email is only two clicks from anywhere a user's picture appears. In addition, simply replying to email sent from the forums will send back to the user.

Secondly, Ray's Dialogue module is pretty good already and might be worth a try if things are urgent. It provides better tracking via the web.

I don't know of any other methods that will work well with Moodle ...

I don't know if its any help but the way we solved it is to use ICQ (they have a webversion so you never have to install anything) or use something like that to do that private messaging if email isn't good enough.

Hi Martin and Patrik,
 
Thanks for your replies.
 
Unfortunately, we really need a way for teachers to administer the student-to-student communication, so regular email wont work for our purposes (unless we ask students to CC the teacher for all posts).  I followed you advice and installed Rays Dialogue module and am experimenting with it now.  It looks great so far, but I need to figure out how to change the variable names to something meaningful (Im sure I just overlooked the documentation on this somewhere).
 
I checked out ICQs web version (ICQGo), but cant seem to find any way to allow a teacher to administer posts sent between students with this software.  Maybe I missed something?
 
Thanks again, and any other suggestions/advice will be very much appreciated!
 
Matt