Students ?

Q: Does anyone know of a site where you can create an online class for your students. I am looking to compare what is offered to what I have now. This is what I am looking for. 1. Calendar 2. Posted lessons, discussions, links, photos 3. Student capability to upload finished work upon direction from me 4. Online test with feedback in form of student results to the teacher and feedback to student on grades. Also the capability for students to see what progress grades are. 5. Parent access to student grades 6. Student email within the class. Very reasonable price for high school teacher, where district does not want to invest in campus access. So I will be doing it solo.

A: This message is from the UK, so forgive me if this suggestion is inappropriate in your circumstances - which I do not understand. However, it sounds as though you need a whole Virtual Learning Environment. Luckily there are open source VLE's out there, i.e. they are free and used by a large community of entusiastic and very vocal members. One I use is Moodle, which is easy to download and does not require more than a normal up-to-date spec computer to act as the server. It works with Apache and MySQL, which are also free, and is reasonably straight forward to install and configure, although you may want someone with a some computer network experience on the phone, as well as the documentation (perhaps you are such a person in any case). It will work very nicely just for one class and at virtualy any age level, individual college departments often use it over here because they are dissatisfied with the commerical solution used by the college. I think it was Kissinger who said that academic infighting is so fierce because the stakes are so low, well moodle is becoming the guerilla weapon of choice in the political wrangles in UK education insitutions. It has become so because it is easy to use and can be customised to appear in a number of attractive and friendly colour combinations. Pleae feel free to contact me at the address below if you want to chat more. To check it out : http://moodle.org/

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