[Moodle] Web based emails, myspace,youtube and more

[victor rajewski]

> This is probably off topic and I do beg your indulgence, but does your
> school allow students access  to the above. Do your students have unlimited
> email storage? If not, what limits do you set for them? Thanking you for
> your patience. If there is another area where I can post these types of
> questions, please let me know .

myspace, youtube, blogger are all blocked by the victorian education
department firewalls, so even should the possibility arise that they
could present a learning opportunity, we can't use them :( The
department has supposedly created their own blogging system for school
use but from all reports I've heard it has even more problems than the
online recruitment disaster. Occasionally a student will find a
non-blocked anonymous proxy, but they're kinda rare (at our school at
least). I haven't come across anyone using TOR yet, but if any kids
work out how to use that then the battle is over and you might as well
concede defeat.

As for web based email, there are so many about that it's really hard
to block it outright; I prefer being able to keep tabs on what they're
sending, so encourage use of in-school email by offering generous
limits (after all, disk space is ridiculously cheap these days). There
is also Google Apps for your own domain, which is offering it's
services for free to educational institutions. No ads for the
students. Just your soul required ;)

These topics are probably best posted to the 'offtopic' mailing list,
or year7-10IT or something like that, and there's also the
department's 'tech room' forums where the techies hang out.

vik