Today was another successful day.

David and myself discussed setting up a forum to enable the leadership team to communicate both in and out of school. We agreed to create a leadership forum and promote its effective use to the leadership team. A forum was setup in under 1 hour using 'Create a Forum.' Its quick and easy and much of the procedure is the same as creating an email account online.

The challenge now is getting the leadership team to adopt it. Upon my return on Monday, I shall organise a meeting and training.

Also on my agenda today was the use of the open source virtual learning environment - Moodle. We have currently been in talks with a company called School Anywhere. Last week we held a conference call with the company and they took us through their configuration of Moodle. They've done a great job of setting up Moodle to suit a younger audience. Unfortunately the price they quoted to us in the meeting didn't reflect what was discussed in today's phone call. Quite unfortunate for them really as we would have been a good addition to their portfolio. The only addition in Kirklees, as far as I'm aware.

Thankfully, we had already discussed a plan B! We now plan to host the VLE (for the short term) using an account on loan from a friend's marketing company - ID30. ID30 are mainly a (web)design company but have a very strong portfolio of clients and I can be sure that they will remain in business for the foreseeable.

In the long term this is the better option. Using School Anywhere's services would have cost the school £1000 to start off with, then a further £200 a year. Quite an expense for the school to outlay. Plan B would involve NABB hosting the VLE themselves.

I've had my eye on a configuration of Moodle setup by Robert Clarke of Jolesfield school. He's a competent ICT user and has setup the VLE himself. He has used a template that goes against the grain of Moodle's default template. It's clean and much more intuitive. Eventually I hope to configure it in such a way that both visual influences are taken from School Anywhere and Jolesfield.

Create a forum
http://www.createforum.com/

School Anywhere
http://www.schoolanywhere.co.uk/

ID30
http://www.id30.com

Moodle
http://www.moodle.org

Jolesfield School
http://learning.jolesfield.w-sussex.sch.uk/