Teaching to my children

Teaching to my children

by Pablo Povarchik -
Number of replies: 7

Hello,

I am new to the community, or actually making a decision about it.

I am a parent of five kids of ages comprised between 9 and 16, trying to find the best model to teach them English and other courses. Home schooling only is not an option.

I have both the IT infrastructure and knowledge to administer Moodle, but it looks like the amount of time invested in managing the platform would be justifiable only for a large group of students (100+)

My goal is to find/construct a model that I can use to teach them in a way that is fun, engaging and collaborative, investing my time on working with them, rather than managing an over-complicated platform.


Is Moodle right for me?


Thanks for taking the time for reading this (and responding smile


Pablo

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In reply to Pablo Povarchik

Re: Teaching to my children

by Mike Verna -

I think Moodle would be a fine choice for a small group.  Most of my time is not spent managing the server, but rather managing the users.  Once the server is setup and working, you should be good to go.  Will there be server issues that you will have to solve, possibly.  With the Moodle community found here you are only a posting away from finding help.

It sounds like with this small of a group, you will have no trouble at all.

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In reply to Pablo Povarchik

Re: Teaching to my children

by Matt Bury -
Picture of Plugin developers

I agree with Mary. Give MoodleCloud a try.

The downsides are:

Advertising:

There's now the risk of drive-by JS attacks being propagated through syndicated advertising systems.

Advertising has always been click-bait but now there's the new problem of deceptive click-bait ads that lead to malware infected sites and sites with inappropriate content.

The solution: Use JS blockers, e.g. NoScript and use a blacklist in your firewall (or hosts file if that's too inconvenient). These guys have a good list (15,000+ URLs) that'll block a lot of "malvertising": http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

Basic Moodle platform:

You have basic Moodle, i.e. you can't install 3rd party plugins, but to be fair, basic Moodle is pretty fully-featured.

An upside: It comes with BigBlueButton (BBB) integrated. A good webinar platform is a must for distance language learning and BBB is pretty good for that.

I hope this helps! smile

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In reply to Matt Bury

Re: Teaching to my children

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

Re advertising on MoodleCloud - OR - you can pay to have the ads not display for your students (who are your family members I believe?) 



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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Teaching to my children

by Marcus Green -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

The danger from the ads is very very minor, and HQ somehow seems to ensure they are of the less awful type, I have yet to see any offers to give me firm abs or meet mature singles (just saw one for ford cars). 

But if you don't want them  a mere $AUD5  a month makes them go away. I strongly recommend you read the terms and conditions, not because there is anything dubious, but because it is one of the clearest and most concise examples of this type of normally obnoxious document..

https://moodle.com/cloud/terms-of-service/



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In reply to Pablo Povarchik

Re: Teaching to my children

by Kim Salinas -
Picture of Testers

Welcome Pablo!

As Mary has suggested the Moodle Cloud is a great place to take a test drive. Here is a bit from the site:

We’ve targeted the system towards small users of Moodle: very small schools or companies, or lone teachers with a few classes, or just anyone who wants a Moodle to experiment with.

Your database size is unlimited (which means unlimited text pages, posts, and activities). You can also customise the look of your own site via the web with our custom MoodleCloud theme, based on the standard More theme.

To keep things manageable our sites do have some limits:

  • 50 users maximum.
  • 200Mb disk space
  • Core themes and plugins only
  • One site per phone number

If you need more than this, however, just see one of our friendly Moodle Partners.


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In reply to Kim Salinas

Re: Teaching to my children

by Matt Bury -
Picture of Plugin developers

It's also worth mentioning that anything you create on a MoodleCloud site; activites, resources, courses, etc. and users' data; files, grades, forum posts, wikis, etc.; can be backed up and exported to another Moodle instance.

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