Setting up VLE staff accounts, permissions and roles

Starting things up again, like a new VLE, takes time. More time than even a pessimist like me expected! So here’s a little summary of what we’ve done over the last few weeks and what we plan to do. I’m not sure this will be exciting reading but it may be of use to other […]

Starting our VLE / Moodle from scratch

So a year wiser and another year on I’m about to start Rickypedia again from scratch. Our pilot VLE was set up at the cost of about £40 a year using hosting from Siteground. It did a good job but I lived in constant fear that we would overload the servers and have the whole […]

An enthusiastic new class of year 7s

Our Rickypedia VLE is still very much a pilot website with only a selection of students and teachers on the system. I’ve added new students and classes as I’ve been ready to experiment with them or as I have had requests from other teachers. One of our student teachers (or beginning teachers as they are […]

What to do with RSS feeds?

Today I rely on RSS feeds to provide me with the information I want when I want. I can’t believe that a year ago I didn’t really know what the point of an RSS feed was. RSS is an acronym for really simple syndication, it provides automatically updated feeds from websites, blogs and news sites […]

Personalisation, online identities and avatars

. There are three things that I ask students to do when they first log onto our VLE at Rickypedia. 1. Change their password 2. Fill in the profile information (see previous post on customising profile feeds) 3. Create an avatar (an online picture representing them) The instructions I use for students are publicly available […]

Keyword and Glossary Fun

One neat and simple feature that Moodle has is a glossary. (I’m sure you could replicate this functionality easily enough using other features of other VLEs). The glossary lets the teacher or students put definitions of words, hence the name glossary. As it’s such a simple and easy to understand tool it’s one I have […]

Customising Profile Fields

Setting up custom fields on users’ personal profile is really easy. The standard fields in a moodle install are things like skype, msn, icq, e-mail, website. I felt a bit uneasy about encouraging students to put in all of those personal details which I or the school could have no control over, particularly personal websites […]