St Ives was delighted to host a mini Moodle moot last Tuesday. A number of folks had expressed an interest in visiting to see a little more of how we’ve been using Moodle, and it made most sense to get everyone together on the same day, so they could hear about what each other had been doing, rather than just our own stuff. We had folks up from the West Sussex Grid for Learning, as well as people from Surrey and Alton College.

We’d very kindly been lent some Breeze space for the event, so also had folks joining us from a little further afield, including Germany. I was so impressed by how easy Breeze was to set up for our meeting, and how Adobe/Macromedia had thought through all the functionality that’s needed for something like this. Alas, the licence fees are prohibitive for a school like us, but I know some of the more forward thinking LAs are providing it for their schools already. I’m keeping an eye on the development of Red5,  and look forward to the day when there’s a viable open source alternative to FlashServer.

I think the meeting itself went very well, and I was really impressed by a lot of the work happening elsewhere with Moodle. I liked the way Alton College have customised the look and feel, and their learning resources course puts our own ‘Internet Resources’ course to shame. Really impressed by Veronica Carter’s work at Camelsdale, where she’s using Moodle with her Reception class (five year olds), as a way of offering interactive resources for her pupils to access from home, but also for discussion forums, in which parents type the responses of their offspring – so inspiring! Also good to see some of the work from Buckinghamshire, especially the way one school’s using Moodle to support the digital arts curriculum.