VLE

[Brpilot99]

Hi everybody ...

We are now looking to impliment a VLE and have seen that there are a number of options available ... This is kind of a poll to find out what others are doing and comments regarding ease of use for staff etc.
Ive heard about the google VLE .. anybody found out of its any good?

Any help welcome and thanks in advance

Brian
Network Manager
Courthill School
Poole

[K.C.Leblanc]

We've got uniservity, as a user experience it's somewhere between a caravan holiday and being stabbed in the eye with a compass.

[MaceZ4]

In my experience I've found that lots of people like to use the Moodle VLE, it's pretty simple to use for both staff and students...
There's also lots of free resources out there for it...

[edutech4schools]

Google is fantastic for a primary school website as its so easy to use and update. Not used as a vle but it does come with docs that can be sent to the website. I would sign up for a free single user site. Just sign up for a google email account and you get the lot for free and have a play with the sites, they have a school site template. Then if you like that sign up for Google apps for ed which is free for schools, this gives you an admin control page to add users and control all sorts of things.

[jstuttard]

We're going with Edmodo - free and simple and it looks like facebook

[witch]

Come and have a look at our Moodle set up

[glennda]

Another vote for moodle - its pretty good and easily customizable.

[cpjitservices]

+1 for Moodle, dead easy to implement, popular and easy to use.!!

[stevehill06]

another +1 for Moodle. Have used it loads. Had it running since version 1.6.

[Roberto]

We use Blackboard. As @Norphy will agree, its fair enough when set up and can do a lot of stuff, but setting it up is about as much fun as cleaning your teeth with a chainsaw while being forced to watch someone surfing 'goatse' style websites.

[sjatkn]

We have Frog. The teachers generally like it and it does seem reasonably easy to do most of the things we want.

Advantages:
Hosted on a Frog server in your own building, so no reliance on broadband to access it, great if you have a slow or dodgy connection.
Flexible, can do lots of things.
Allows access to existing network drives.
Tech support via phones for simple issues is excellent.
MIS integration. User accounts are created automatically overnight.

Disadvantages:
Very expensive.
Seems to suffer from a number of bugs (then I guess all the rest do to).
Tech support via email very slow. Has been known to take 2-3 weeks, I usually email and then phone them.
Tech support for complex issues is very slow. We have a problem with the MIS importer not pulling parents email addresses across and it has been with the developers since January with no sign of a fix yet. Despite at least 2 new versions of the importer since I reported it.

[CyberNerd]

google doesnt have a VLE, but google apps does integrate very well with moodle.

[Norphy]

We use Blackboard. As @Norphy will agree, its fair enough when set up and can do a lot of stuff, but setting it up is about as much fun as cleaning your teeth with a chainsaw while being forced to watch someone surfing 'goatse' style websites.

That much fun? Gosh.

You also have to pay uber money for the benefit of all of that, Blackboard ain't a cheap product!

It has reasonable ability to sync with MIS systems and you can authenticate against AD using integrated authenication on IIS. To be honest though, I think it's more geared towards universities and huge colleges than schools. I think that even a college the size of this one could be considered a bit small for it.

[bart21]

Another +1 for moodle

It's so easy to use and highly customisable

Take a look around this one . Http://www.thepeele.co.uk

Nick

[glennda]

Oh Yeah - if you want to look at another example you can look here The Weald School's Virtual Learning Environment