Presentation: The presentation given on the night is embedded below (special thanks to Cathie for making her presentation available to the Moodle community).

The following notes were taken at the Sydney Moodle User Group 11 event at Cronulla High School

Venue: Cronulla High School
Website: www.cronulla-h.schools.nsw.edu.au
Host:Cathie Cashmere

Moodle launched in the school in the second half of 2008 and has rapidly developed thanks to the hard work by Geoff Street, Cathie Cashmere and other teaching and executive staff at the school. The school enjoys great support from the school executive and this has helped during early development through staff training and admin development, such as the theme design. It is best to read the slides displayed above for a detailed account of Cronulla's implementation of Moodle as their eLearning platform.

As well as Cathie Cashmere's excellent presentation there was a short demonstration by Jamie, Head of HSIE at Cronulla High School. Jamie explained that as a non-computing focussed faculty they saw Moodle as "an avenue for students to get access to learning materials outside of the traditional classroom" and explained that he had embraced new features such as the third party add-on called the Lightbox Gallery module. Jamie demonstrated the use of the gallery to add images and get students to think critically about content.

During the presentations several important suggestions and software recommendations were made and it is useful to list them here for those that did not attend:

• Bing.com is fast becoming a good alternative to Google. Made by Microsoft, it has some nice features such as video previews as thumbnails and playing YouTube content even at DET schools
• Keepvid.com is a video download service that allows YouTube videos to be downloaded (once permission from the copyright owner has been received)
• All My Own Work, the mandatory NSW Education curriculum on copyright, plagiarism and original work has provided a great starting point for schools in Moodle
• Format Factory is free software for Windows and Video Monkey is available for Mac. Both these packages help convert video from one format to another. A good format for Moodle videos is .flv using h.264 codec. Moodle supports video playback using the multimedia filter which is turned off by default in new Moodle installations (turn on via Admin > Modules > Filters > Manage Filters

Jason Hando with Moodle News

The Moodle User Group (MUG) website was showcased by Jason, with recently added features such as Moodle Extension Reviews and the new Blog area. SMUG members were encouraged to join by clicking the Register button on the home page. Notifications of all upcoming events will be sent to those registered on the site.

Gradebook in Moodle 1.9.5 (released last week) has some fantastic new features such as locking student names as a column and allowing horizontal scrolling of grades. In addition, teachers get a nice tabbed interface that makes navigation far easier and more intuitive. Once upgraded to 1.9.5 admins should turn on these features in the Grades area of the site. Admins can also turn off unwanted aggregate methods and keep the ones used by their school/institution.

There are other reasons to upgrade to 1.9.5 including 5 security fixes that will help ensure your Moodle site is not compromised.

Next Sydney Moodle User Group will be on the second Thursday of July (9th) at John Purchase Public School at Cherrybrook.