The following notes were taken at the Sydney Moodle User Group 8 event at Macquarie University.

Margaret Fitzgerald, the Centre Director at the ICT Innovations Centre at Macquarie University, hosted this month's Sydney Moodle User Group meeting and it was well attended by interested people from around Sydney.

The focus was once again on a showcase of the local Moodle site, including projects conducted across NSW Department of Education (DET) schools in an effort by the department to sponsor effective teaching using Information and Communication Technologies. the NSW DET pays for the ICT Innovations Centre to operate in conjunction with the university.

Some points made during Margaret's presentation included:

• www.macict.edu.au is the main website for the centre
• the centre does not run traditional online courses but operates a face-to-face training centre with online courses used to supplement, especially when attendees travel back to their schools
• there is a link to the Moodle site from the homepage
• users are given logins when they attend training at the centre
• Moodle is used in a less organised fashion but still for effective sharing of materials. An example was given of the eMints program run with girls schools.
• schools that can't facilitate their own Moodle site can start their courses on the centre's Moodle site. This was done with Epping Boys High School and a brief synopsis of the benefits was given by a teacher, Peter Hill, who had been using the Moodle at Mac ICT for his classes. There seems to be a need for other schools to have a shared Moodle site at no or low cost as part of an accessibility to technology for teachers initiative.
• A demonstration and explanation of LAMS was given by Ernie Ghiglione, who works closely on the LAMS project, an initiative of Macquarie University
  • LAMS has been partly integrated into Moodle provided the administrator of the site can make changes to allow LAMS to author Moodle activities.
  • LAMS plugin can allow it to act as an activity in Moodle
  • Drag and drop features of LAMS was demonstrated as well as the ability to sequence and add conditional gates to lesson plans. The audience was impressed with this ability to break from the lesson conditional aspects of Moodle and look forward to the conditional activities being built into Moodle 2.0, which is in development and available for download from the Moodle website.

Also on the night a demonstration of using roles to hide and show blocks to different users was given by Adrian Norman from EVD (Educational Video & Design). This simple idea was well applied on the Kaplan Moodle site developed by Adrian to train people in real estate education. It provided a way for Kaplan to deliver two types of courses depending on fee structure.