What does your name mean?

This month is the first birthday of rickypedia.org. Rickypedia is the inspired name I registered for our school’s Moodle VLE. The best thing about the name is that it wasn’t my idea. Last year while spending regular lunchtimes with year 8 students in webdesign club some students decided to make a page about the local area and call it rickypedia (our school is based in Rickmansworth and commonly referred to as Ricky school) . The website was never quite completed but I thought the name was great. When it came to setting up a VLE Rickypedia was the name I decided to go with. (Rikipedia was already taken by someone else!) Thanks to Lawrence, Ed, Jo and the others who came up with the idea!

Looking around at schools’ VLEs as I often do I can’t believe how many have long hard to remember URLs (eg vle.mylongschoolname.mylea.sch.uk). Not only does a short and snappy URL make a website easier to type in, it also makes it easier to remember and most importantly gives it an identity. Here’s a few examples I’ve come across, not all have great URLs, not all have great names, but they’ve all got identities!
Chuckle 2.0 http://vle.carrhill.lancs.sch.uk/
Merapolis http://merapolis.co.uk/
Doodlehub http://doodlehub.co.uk/
http://www.thsvle.co.uk
http://www.mgsvle.org.uk/
http://www.mgscentral.org/

If you’ve not got a domain for your VLE why not give it a try? It costs about £8 a year for .com .org .net address or £4 a year for a org.uk .co.uk address. Why not hold a competition at school to see what ideas the students come up with? If you’ve any great ideas or examples post them below (but maybe register them first in case someone borrows your idea!)

Published by D Needlestone

Teacher

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3 Comments

  1. I made ours hard to remember. That is, the kids remember it easily but most of the staff have problems it seems…or maybe the problem lies elsewhere?

    Check out the MOLE

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