Online solutions for small business, education and you.
We are now offering a range of specialist services and products to support the Joomla! Content Management System.
As well as Joomla! hosting and theme design our expert coders are now able to deliver bespoke Joomla! development of plugins and modules to give your website precisely the functionality you require.
For more information on our new Joomla! products, services and support, visit our Joomla! pages.
In addition to our free Wordpress hosting service we also offer a paid premium service that provide additional features and support including domain name registration, additional disk space, greatly discounted theme design and dedicated personal support.
For more information visit our Wordpress hosting and themes pages.
We are now offering free hosting for Wordpress blogs!
Simply by contacting us and letting us know what url you would like (www.yourblog.loquela.co.uk) we will install a new Wordpress for you and send you your login details. You simply then visit www.yourblog.loquela.co.uk and start blogging.
As well as the standard themes that ship with Wordpress we have included a wide variety of additional hand-picked themes that you can apply, swap and change at the click of a button.
To find out more visit our Wordpress hosting and themes pages.
It has pretty much always been thought that if Moodle were to succeed in UK education it was crucial that it won the backing of BECTA. It turns out, BECTA has in fact turned its back on Moodle and has not included it in its list of approved Learning Platforms or VLE.
This should come as a surprise given that Open University no less has embraced Moodle as the VLE of choice as part of its £5m online learning program and contributes substantially to Moodle development alongside IT giants Google. Is BECTA missing a trick somewhere?
It seems that BECTA is suffering from that old delusion that Open Source software, because it is free, must be flawed in some way. But this just demonstrates that BECTA is simply out of touch with the evolution of ICT.
Open Source software is by it’s very nature less likely to be flawed in many ways than commercial proprietary software. A popular software package like Moodle can have an extremely diverse community of thousands of experts contributing to its growth, not motivated by money but by a passion for and a belief in the product. Such a product is popular not because of expensive hard-sell marketing campaigns, complicated distribution contracts but because the product works so well for so many. BECTA fears that support for Open Source solutions can not be as robust as it is not backed-up by obligatory expensive long-term service contracts. But just how wrong could this be? How much more risky must it be to be tied down to a commercial proprietary VLE that is serviced by a single company than have the freedom of using the most widely used system in the world with an almost limitless choice of expert support service providers? Moodle support is available for free from the official Moodle Community website. Admittedly, although this does operate 24/7, a response may not be a quick as you would like. Loquela and Educational Web Design offer professional support services with a guaranteed response time. If for whatever reason you are not happy with the service we provide, you are then free to choose from the hundreds of professional Moodle service providers world wide. What is more, you can swap and change service providers as many times as you wish without once having to change and learn another VLE. Surely this can only be a good thing. An alternative might be to hire your own internal Moodle expert - there are plenty of them about. None of this is possible if you take the risk of signing up to any of the available commercial solutions.
BECTA cannot deny that Moodle is an excellent Learning platform unless they wish to argue the point with the Open University, the worlds foremost authority on distance and online learning. BECTA needs to catch up with the realities of ICT. BECTA needs to switch on to the advantages of Open Source opportunities and instead of simply promoting a restrictive range of commercial learning platform suppliers should perhaps also offer an approved list of Open Source support service providers giving schools a wider choice and greater opportunity for more practical investment of limited funds.
Manufacturers of Interactive whiteboards ought to be afraid. Very afraid.
A PHD student from Pittsburgh, USA has come up with a simple, extremely low cost solution that means now all schools can genuinely afford to have an interactive whiteboard in every classroom!
Johnny Chung Lee studies Human-Computer Interaction at Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA and is delighting teachers the world over with his revolutionary idea. Visit Johnny Lee Chung’s website to download his software for free and get full instructions on how to create your own interactive whiteboard with just a laptop, a simple LED light-pen and a Wii controller.
Our latest project comes from St Andrew’s CofE Primary School in Levenshulme, Manchester. St Andrew’s have ordered our very latest fully-comprehensive website package. We are very excited about starting work on this project as it promises to be a very impressive website with all the whizzes and bangs you would expect from a truly high-spec Primary School website - and more!
There is widespread fear that images of pupils on school websites can pose certain risks. But we believe that any risk can be minimised as long as no individual child is identified my name or by any other marker beyond the image itself. One thing that must be remembered however is that if anybody, of mal intent or good, can if they so wish download any images at all that appear on your website and there is nothing that can be done to stop this. Little tricks like disabling the right-click function on a web page serves only as a weak deterrent to any user that is not aware of the ’Prt Sc’ (Print Screen) function or by those who know how to identify the location of an image by inspecting the source code of a web page.
If your school is genuinely concerned that pupils will come to harm if you display their image on your school website, then our advice is do not, as one school recently exposed in the national media did, place images of your pupils with their faces blurred-out or masked with smiley faces! We believe this practice serves absolutely no purpose and only looks at best very silly and at worst, as in the case of the blurred-out faces, positively sinister. Instead simply refrain from including images of pupils on your website at all.
BECTA has shocked the Open Source for Education community by refusing to include Moodle as an approved Learning platform despite Open University’s unconditional support for the software. See this short film: Secondary ICT Management - Choosing a VLE from www.teachers.tv that provides some good objective advice on choosing a suitable VLE for your school.
We have recently launched our new system status reporting service at http://educationaldesign.co.uk/system-status.php and http://loquela.co.uk/system-status.php. These pages keep maintain a 24-hour running commentary of any planned maintenance and known issues with our web hosting data centre. In the unlikely event that you should experience problems with your web website, please refer to these pages before contacting customer services.
Loquela Communication design is an Internet and Web solutions company with a simple goal: to provide cost-effective, quality websites and web applications that are accessible and conform to the latest W3C standards. Our key audiences are small to medium businesses, Education and charitable organisations. We provide a range of services from basic web design to advanced online database applications and content management systems, to website hosting. Please visit loquela.co.uk for more information.
Educational Web Design is the arm of the company completely dedicated solely to providing online solutions and support for UK Primary and Secondary schools.