Access the Neale-Wade Moodle

We have chosen to use Moodle as a main VLE, but rather than just continue to use a basic Virtual Learning Environment we have been developing lots of exciting solutions in consultation with other schools. These are both local schools together with contacts nationally and internationally.

Within Cambridgeshire, Neale-Wade were founder members of the Cambs Moodle network. This is a group of schools working collaboratively to explore and support the use of Moodle. We held the immensely successful launch conference in July 2007 which was attended by over 80% of seconday schools within Cambridgeshire.

Together with Linton Village College, we presented our findings about the Cambs Moodle network at the MoodleMoot 2008 at the Open Unversity. This took place in October 2007 where we put together two videos to showcase the work that had taken place.




We have actually been using Moodle since 2004 when ICT began experimenting with the potential. At that time we setup an external site so students could access it from anywhere. This worked for a while but then we discovered it became too slow and clunky to use within school itself.

Thus in the Autumn term 2007 we moved to an internal Moodle server. This has been useful within the College, but the difficulties with remote access has meant its real utility has been too limited. We are currently exploring additional solutions to help us make the VLE really work. We are determined to make further progress with Moodle as we've been involved and supportive in so many Moodle-based developments that we really want to put all these great ideas into practical success.

Our current plan is to move to an external Moodle server again, but this time establish a dedicated server to support the required size and bandwidth. I do have concerns about the quality of our internet connection and actually suspect this is our major issue. Nevertheless, we are making signficant progress towards a fully functioning and useful Virtual Learning Environment.

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As students and staff are well aware, the move to the exernal server for Moodle was the ideal solution. Whilst we weren't able to continue the automatic login to Moodle, we instead established our http://www.neale-wade.net providing our e-Learning eco-system linking to our Moodle at http://www.nwvle.net.