School World

Virtual Learning Environments should meet the specific needs of the individual school and come without a high initial purchase and monthly maintenance costs.

Parents should know everything they need to know about the school, and should not phone the school office asking about things they’ve already been told.

Such are the ideal situations to which many schools aspire. But reaching these positions is not always so easy – although it is certainly possible.

Take the licence-free VLE, Moodle. It is a superb system that many schools are already using. But the system is not instantly intuitive and so it is possible to use Moodle without realising that there is a lot more that could be achieved by the system.

So, the solution is to make sure Moodle is set up to reflect the way things operate in your school, right from the way in which the Moodle interface looks in terms of incorporating your school’s existing online appearance, through to ensuring courses are easy to set up and use.

Appropriate training and consultancy can often pave the way for opening up new ways of using Moodle as well as looking at how it may be possible to integrate with your Student Information Management Systems with a view to making sure that parents can access important information about their children (reports, attendance, performance, etc).

But still, many parents avoid school websites when seeking information (calling the school office instead) either because they can’t find what they want quickly enough or because the website can’t be read on a mobile device. The result is that your administrators get interrupted by calls that they needn’t get.

Sometimes, therefore, it is a good idea to re-work a site and have separate pathways within the site for different groups of people… one for existing parents which caters for their requirements for information, one for potential parents – throughout with the thought that today more people access websites from mobile devices than computers.

If you would like to talk about how your school can respond to organising the information it carries on the website please do get in touch. You can find out more about us on http://www.inco-education.co.uk/article-what-makes-a-brilliant-school-website.php

If you prefer, email us the details of your website and your phone number (and let us know a convenient time to call) and we will come back to you with our thoughts on what changes we might suggest to your website.

And of course if you want to talk about using Moodle, do call or email us on info@inco-education.co.uk

Click here to see what other schools have said about our services.

Alternatively, if you would like to talk through what we could do for you please call us on 01902 784 800.

Sometimes when writing a notice like this there is a temptation to string the message out, to keep you reading.

But with this topic that’s not really an option, simply because the answer is becoming increasingly well known.

Students will devote themselves to programming when the programming involves developing games.

They love it because they enjoy playing games online, and (in some cases at least) they see game development as a way of getting a job which pays well and involves doing what they enjoy.

The good news is that full 3d game development is now possible with the latest release of Unity. The even better news is that Unity can be downloaded for free. All that is needed is the help and support to show students how to use it.

And therefore, this is what we have produced – all the resources necessary including models, textures, etc, complete with text, pictures and videos.

At the same time, through the TOM simulator students will gain a firm understanding of how computers work in deep way, interrupts, memory mapping, logic gates – all via a safe and easy-to-use WYSIWYG system.

It really is possible to have an entire class writing programs that achieve outcomes that the students find interesting and meaningful – all within the first session.

One further bonus is that most of these materials do not need to be installed but can be accessed via a browser – see our blog for details of this (accessible from our main web page given below).

In fact, I don’t believe that any other package offers this breadth and depth. From programming the fundamental computer operations to 3d graphical game implementation, this gives you everything you’ll need, and everything the Secretary of State wants and expects.

As the Parents and Computing review said of the TOM Simulator: “It’s authoritative, accurate, entertaining, non-threatening and yet informative. I don’t want to give it back!”

There is more information on this on our website at www.keylinkcomputers.co.uk/Tom/tom.htm

Alternately for more information call us on 01926 850909 or email us at sales@keylinkcomputers.co.uk.