 Well, what I want to do today is show you the steps that we've gone through to create parent accounts which are linked to their students, allowing parents to go in and see their students' courses and view student marks that have been put up in the mark book and so on. So I want to start by just saying a big thank you to the people who really did all the hard work, Mary Cooch who blogged the solution that I found online, Maxime Palettia who created the Moodle plug-in we use and Penny Leach who created the original plug-in. So the work's not mine, I've just put up a set of detailed instructions on how to do it. We had a problem, we had trialled having parents accessing their student work in Moodle and it worked really really well. Parents reported back that it was fantastic, they could log in, see the coursework, see how their students were going and they could use that at home to just keep in touch with their students and what was required. But Moodle requires you do that one parent at a time. You can bulk upload the parents but you then have to manually assign each parent to their child and the tasks, if you've done it before it just takes an incredible amount of time and so I thought there had to be some way of doing it and there isn't much out there. I found one blog with someone who had talked about these particular plugins which does allow you once you've bulk uploaded parents to automatically create and link each parent to each child. So what I'm going to do today is just quickly go through the steps. At the end of the PowerPoint there's a URL which will allow you to download the PowerPoint if you want it and on the Moodle Mood course I've got a full set of instructions with screen grabs and so on if you want to follow that. So the solution, you need to begin by creating a parent role and there are full instructions on Moodle for how to do that and when you do that the one thing we changed from the set way of seeing our parents was we took away their ability to edit their students profile. We just felt for privacy. It was bad enough parents viewing what their kids were doing or not doing. We thought we'd give that limitation that parents couldn't go in and change our student passwords and things like that. It's also we found worthwhile creating a cohort called Parents. So if you want to you can grab all your parents in one go and delete them or at the end of the year and so on. So we just found it easy to create that cohort right at the beginning. You'll need to create a CSV file of parent data and it needs to have a username for each parent, password, first name, last name, email and then you need to add the role which will be the parent role and the cohort you want to add them to which is the parent cohort. Now we grabbed our data from cases 21 which is the Department of Education's database of parent information and student information. We deleted any parents who didn't have an email address logged in there. We also carefully went through and manually removed any parents who had access restrictions to children which took some time. And for us we took the family ID as the username and added an F for a female and M for a male parent to create the family ID and a randomly generated password. If you're not sure how to create a random password I've put the instructions on that on the Moodle course. You then need to create a CSV file of parents, the child and the role you want which in this case is parent and you do need to make sure that each parent who has multiple children has to have an entry for each individual children, each individual child so that if there are two children there needs to be two entries, one for each child. And again we just grabbed that out of cases 21 and just manipulated it in Excel. You then can use the administration user option to bulk upload accounts to create the parent accounts and that's a nice and easy step. And then comes perhaps the hard part. So if you're not used to dealing sort of behind the scenes this is where you may need to get some assistance from someone who does. You need to actually make a change to the Moodle database. So this can seem to be rather frightening but if you make a backup first you shouldn't have any problems. I've done this many times and never had an issue but I always make a backup before I start. In fact I backup my entire Moodle course just to be on the safe side. You need to create a new table which you would call something like Moodle parent which has three fields, the parent, the child role and the role which matches that CSV file you've just created. I use PHP MyAdmin to access the database which is a really nice free download that allows you to access MySQL databases and then you need to import the data you've created in that CSV file into the new table in Moodle. And again if you've done it before it's really easy. If you haven't done it it's not a difficult process and it doesn't take very long at all. There's a plugin you then need to grab which is the Enroll DB user rel plugin and I've used it on Moodle 2.8 without any problems and I suspect it should work quite happily with 2.9 and you need to install that. If you haven't installed a plugin before it's fairly straightforward and there's full details of that on the Moodle course site. You then need to map the new fields you've created in that new table into the existing fields in the Moodle database. So you start by just going into the plugin and you add in your server username, password and so on for the database you've created and then you take the local subject fields which are the fields that Moodle has natively and then you add into those the three new fields that you've created which you can see at the bottom there parent child and role which are in the remote field and remote is the new table you've created. And if your plugin was like mine when I did this the last time I had trouble getting it to be enabled you go into manage and roll plugins and just click on the little line and make sure it's open and not closed. Then comes the part that perhaps is the trickiest of the lot you do need to have access to the command prompt. So if your Moodle site is hosted on an external host you may need to contact them about how you do that and they may need to do it for you. We host all ours internally so that's rather easy to do. You just navigate to the PHP directory that contains PHP.exe and you execute that rather long file there lined there PHP.exe minus F and then the path to your to the plugin you've just installed and if it works well which it has for us every time you'll see all the links being made between parent and child. And then we decided to send out an email to every parent that we created an account for so we used our original CSV file, used that with word mail merge, created a letter that said welcome to our Moodle site. This is what you can do. Here are details of your account with your username password. Here are my details if you're stuck and then we just did the bulk email out to every parent. Just be warned if you do that and the emails are incorrect which a lot of them are. You then get several days of those emails bouncing back to you filling up your email box. So we've been very careful to make sure we try and get those as accurate as we can when we start. And that's that's how we've done it and we've had great success. We have parents contacting us to say this is fantastic. They can see what their students are doing. It's worked very well. We still have some parents who didn't have emails registered with us who now want accounts created and we have to create those manually but it's only one or two every couple of weeks so that hasn't been a real problem. So if you want more details please check out the Moodle course. As I said I've put full details there so that you can follow those through. And that's it. So I'm happy to answer any questions if you've got them. What can a parent sleep when they get into? When they log in they can see their students their children and the courses they're enrolled for and then they can enroll themselves in the course and they enroll as a parent which means that they can see all the material that's posted in that course plus any of the forum posts that their students have done plus say if you're using the mark book they can see the results in the mark book as well. Did they appear in the grade book? No the parents don't appear in the grade book no. And they can only see their own child's results. Yep. Can we see the discussion forum or see other children's? They can only see their own children's posts in the forums. So there's no comparison? No. All context? Yep. Yeah all context that's right but there's a privacy issue there which is why I believe that's there. In the second year how much does that go through again? Look the second year when you run that that command line it actually deletes all the parent links and recreates them. So we've we've basically just started each year fresh so we delete all the parent accounts and by having them in a cohort you can just delete the cohort it takes the parents out removes them from any enrolls the subjects are in and then we just start fresh and send out a new email to all the parents and we've had no complaints and it's worked really well. Yep. Really interesting use of the Cureport Functionality in the parents' function. Have you tried out the new Cureport Functionality? Uh no. Yeah there's a function where we can so you sort of skip importing from the DB so you can upload a CSB and it'll just take care of it. All right I'll have a look. Yep. The issue is with students being over 18 and having other people access to their data? No look we haven't. I'm just trying to think if we have any students that well I suppose we do it year 12. No it hasn't been an issue for us. Perhaps I need to look at that so yeah I'll go back and have a look at that one but no we certainly haven't had any complaints from anyone. I think the only complaint we ever received was a parent who had moved away and was rather angry that we'd set up an account for a child that was no longer with us and that was simply because we hadn't checked our database perhaps closely enough. If the student actually had a problem with the fact that restriction on it so you would have deleted when the barren restrictions. Thank you Stephen.