Some thoughts from Cessnock........
Tony
Basically I just paid for our own domain using my credit card (about
$400 US for 2 years) and then as Head Teacher claimed that back from
the section by writing a purchase requisition signed off by my manager.
We have 15 primary domains and 75 sub domains that we can use and
about 3000 email accounts. We are also just starting out with running
Web online.
Each student who enrols in the course gets their own web space in the
form of name.cessnock-ict.net with email address and ftp access. We
initially had some problems with opening up ftp access from one of our
rooms but that has been resolved. The quality of work varies and we do
conduct rolling enrolments so some of the Part Time students have not
uploaded anything yet as they have only just had their account created,
and of course others have done some work and since left the course.
There are some interesting graphics however.
Our numbers are not large either but we are widespread having one
student who initially started f2f with us now continues from her new
location in Perth.
Our web site is http://www.cessnock-ict.net and when you go there you
will find a splash screen that was designed by one of our students.
There are 3 links to Web Design, Level III (not much in this one) and
Moodle. We have not done a great deal with Moodle yet except convert
some of the modules from the ANTA toolbox into this platform and top
comply with licence requirements I have to make it hard to get to,
hence the requirement for a key. If you want to have a look at the
moodle site just fill out a registration form and it will email me and
I will give you the key to get in. I am keen to do more in moodle when
I can get the time. So I am really interested in what you have been
doing with moodle.
Here is a thought for you all. What if we all collaborate on a moodle
platform and develop the resources etc for each of our own specialist
areas for all of us to use and contribute to? Kind of like our own
version of a wiki. I would love to have more input from people who
know more than we do about some of the subject areas and so on.
We can then experiment on setting up our own groups on that space to
use the gathered resources.
I have a blog but have not used it very much but am always open to
change.
Cheers
Michael Nelson
I'll definitely be talking with my H/T about the possibility of setting up something similar. Just the ability to give participants a chance to use _real_ ftp from the beginning would be unreal (I currently have people using ftp to our own internal server until they get their own domain).
I had a look at your IT course website... it's great to be able to view your assessments etc., and get an idea for how you're running the course - I find this kind of stuff invaluable!
I've used Moodle for 2 semesters, but am currently using it less than in the past as we've been trying to re-structure the course. You can read about our reflections of teaching Web Design, if you have time, but the main thrust of the re-design was to break the course up into a number of mini-projects that integrate different modules as well as build on the skills of the previous mini-projects. All this while trying to encourage students to work on their own projects rather than setting the specs for them (hoping for increased motivation etc). As I mentioned, to facilitate the communication for this, we've been using our WebDesign blog in conjunction with Moodle-based assessment materials. If you get a chance to look, you'll notice that (1) it's pretty empty now, and (2) I liked the Moodle Workshop module (you'll need to request a logon to access the workshops, otherwise you'll just see a "Not Available").
As for you idea for collaborating for resource development, I love it! We should talk about this further - we could either go for a platform such as http://teachingwebdesign.wikispaces.org/ (I just set this up, feel free to edit it etc. to get a feel for the wiki), or something more closed (requiring a logon etc.) such as a moodle wiki for working on the ideas, then structuring the course material from this. I too would love to have more input from more people so we can in turn expose our participants/students to the best opportunities for learning!
Here's a resource you might find handy: We recently had a Russ Weakley (Sydney-based web designer, also member of WebStandardsGroup. Read more) come and do a step-by-step tutorial demonstrating the way he uses CSS to layout his pages. He then made the material available online on his MaxDesign Presentations and Articles page. Hope it's useful!
Thanks again!
Michael
Tony Lorriman
information from Russ Weakley and forwared that onto a couple of my PT
web teachers so I hope they will also have a look. I will certainly
have a browse thru it shortly. I chose Dreamhost is USA
http://www.dreamhost.com mainly because it seemed a good deal at the
time and yes we also went the ftp to a local server, but then they
could not access their work from home etc. Dreamhost currently have a
sale on for their Code Monster plan which might be worth a look, but
even if you sign up for the $7.95 a month plan, you can always
upgrade. That's the way we strated and then found that our students
were running out of storage space so we upgraded.
I am pleased that you are interested in the shared resources idea. Is
anyone else interested in this as well?? If so we can get started
pretty quickly and just make it a constant work in progress. and then
if necessary we could mirror the info to other people's servers or
whatever way they want to appraoch it.
Cheers
Stephe...@tafensw.edu.au
At Bathurst we had the same or greater issues with FTP access and the
restrictions on file types students (and teachers) could access from
the classrooms.
Our Head Teacher, after much discussion with all teachers involved,
decided to run our own web server & Internet access for the Computer
Lab & Apple Mac Classroom. We registered a domain,
http://www.bathurst-tafe.nsw.edu.au, which is hosted on our own server,
running Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP/Perl/Python. Students, and teachers,
are allocated user accounts and can upload files from the two
classrooms and externally. Teachers are teaching to W3C Standards
including XHTML, CSS & WAI and students are required to comply with
XHTML, CSS and WAI standards and validate to these standards. We have a
30 GB per month 1500/256 ADSL link for this. All web content is
filtered through a Proxy Server to comply with DET guidelines regarding
inappropriate material.
Steve
Computer Support Officer & Teacher P/T
BA&IT
Bathurst Campus