We have set up a moodle install as a portal for our teachers. Why use Moodle? Well we liked it for the following reasons.
- Calendar
College calender is now online. Date effecting all staff are posted here
- Department Spaces
We renames "courses" to "spaces" in the lang files to give each department its own online space. These are used for storage of meeting minutes and agendas, forums for inter department chat, file storage, etc.
- Year Spaces
As above, each Year group has their own space for the same reasons as above.
- Targeted Calendar
Now that spaces were created, dates in the calendar can be targeted at users. For example. A Yr 9 Geography excursion is put in the year 9 Year space as course event. This way all year 9 teachers will know students are out. Likewise, an English inservice is liste in the English Department space.
- New Bulletin
The homepage has the latest college news for teachers. Better than the old printed format we used to run
- Communications Channels.
Rather than using all staff email spams, we have used a mixture of forums and social format courses to facilitate communication. These channels have included:
- IT Area - IT communicates outages, provides documentation and also FAQ's in a course format
- Cappuccino Corner - A forum for general staff chat
- MonteBay - Our own online posting board for items to buy or sell.
- Social Club - A course in the social format providing infor for upcoming events and photos from past events
Best thing about these "channels" is that teachers/staff can also choose to receive this info as email ro as
RSS feeds providing easier access to info for power users.
It should be noted that apart from the CMS addon used for Rosters, all the rest is done using unaltered 1.6 Moodle code.
Feel free to check it out at the following
URL http://compass.monte.nsw.edu.au