VLEs - Moodle Doodling

Phew! It's taken a while to get back to the blog. Sorry about that.

I can definitely say I'm settled in to the job at the college now.
Today I finally banished the 'order card' that has been at the centre of stock ordering processes in the library since who knows when.  I have created a list library in Sharepoint on our intranet and it now serves as the place where books are requested, where the orders are logged, Dewey applied, receipt acknowledged and, most splendidly, statistics extracted.  There's only one item entered so far, but I have a good feeling about it. My team were positive about it so hopefully this will take off.

VLEs though. Very much enjoying learning about Moodle and have started mocking up some potential  sites (sorry, 'courses') for the Learning Resource Centre.  So far, I've created web pages, embedded youtube videos and added all sorts of whizzy things but will they end up in the finished product? who knows. The E-Learning Manager provided some great training and I am full of ideas, but I just have to make sure not to over-do it!

There is so much potential to promote the resources, and service by linking to areas of our course from the tutor course, I'm making sure that all the academic liaison meetings that the team have with tutors mention what we are doing and how linking to us will enhance their own course pages by providing additional resources.   We'll see how it goes.

We did some staff development today. This probably sounds quite basic, but it turned out that the team had used hardly any of the features of Outlook except to send and receive emails. So I was able to give them some handy tips for task lists, keeping track of follow-ups, sharing calendars, etc. The next aim is to banish the paper diary that haunts the issue desk!

We are preparing for Safer Internet Day when we will be helping to promote e-safety by having the SID videos and our college e-safety presentation on a loop on the big screen (biggish - you probably have a bigger TV in your living room...)

And finally, I was meant to be having some intensive training on the IS Oxford Heritage system in a couple of weeks, but the internal paper trail means it will necessarily be delayed. I'll probably blog about that once it's happened.