Frog Teacher

[dagza]

Hello

Does anyone have any experience with or comments about Frog Teacher?

Their site seems to want me to have a telephone demo before they will let me get my hands on it so I was looking for advice before I put choose whether or not to put myself through that!

Thanks

Darren

[linkazoid]

Stay Away from them!!!

Terrible system, no instructions manuals or anything... seem to be very helpful until they have your money and then you cant get hold of them..

[dhicks]

Does anyone have any experience with or comments about Frog Teacher?

Once looked at the site and phoned sales to talk about it. Was very impressed by the fact that I got to talk to someone who knew exactly what they were on about. Sounded like a good system, if somewhat on the propriatory side. From my talk with them, I'd say the telephone demo (?) is probably worth a go.

Edit: Reads next comment posted. Oh. Ah. Hmm. Well, they sounded nice...

--
David Hicks

[GrumbleDook]

Stay Away from them!!!

Terrible system, no instructions manuals or anything... seem to be very helpful until they have your money and then you cant get hold of them..

I was chatting with a Frog school last week about your post (they are not EduGeek members ... reminder to self ... get them converted) and they seemed surprised by someone being so anti-frog and with such a poor experience. Have you spoken with other schools to see what they get in comparison? If you are still struggling to get in touch with someone I am sure I can get you some contact details further up the chain.

[boomam]

I allways find Frogs support to be quite good?

[iatkinson]

Stay Away from them!!!

Support is generally good though it needs to be because the initial system is a pig, we've had nothing but trouble and probably won't be utilising it much longer.

[sycho666]

We have just implemented Frog in our school, we have had some good experience with the system. Yes it is a bit of a non-standard system, but it does implement well with AD and sims.net, it is also quite intuative, takes a bit of getting used to, but after a short time it all kind of clicks into place.

Getting the staff to move towards using it will probably be your biggest challenge in implementing it. We held a training Inset day. The idea of the day was to get staff introduced to it, by showing the features it offers. The staff were very impressed especially when I showed how the intergrated Room controls work, to allow or deny access to internet.

The key to the day was to get staff to think about how they could use the VLE to allow their resources to be used well, and how they can create their own image on the VLE by creating Faculty Websites. We had them all working on paper to design a template that they could use for their faculty page, using a basic list of design specifications. we found this worked quite well as it got all the staff involved, even the non IT literate staff, later in the day we walked them through how to start creating the pages in the VLE toolkit itself.

We now no longer have a morning briefing or cover sheets printed, all information is provided on the front screen to the VLE or emailed, which you access by having to login, hence having to use the VLE to do their daily tasks, while they are in they then have the freedom to investigate it more at their own pace.

Currently all staff have accounts and use it on a daily basis, it was only implemented to staff in february, but all are now using it to a basic level, and some are using to create pages to use in lessons. We are rolling it out to all students from september.

The key to making this kind of system a success is to show the benefit of using it, branding it to make it your own, and giving the staff just the gentlist of pushes into using it. For example when they come and ask you to put some files on a shared area, suggest possibly using the VLE to create a page linking to the files, possibly customizing it to make it fuc for the kids.

As for the company that provides it, Frogtrade, we have had a good relationship with them, I personally have found them extreamly helpful, the technical team are extreamly knowledgable, not only with their product but with other standard technical details, regarding integrating it with your network and existing MIS such as SIMS.net in our case. The development team are very helpful also, if you ask them for suggestions on how to implement a feature or customize it for your purpose they are always forthcoming with the information. From the start of the implementation of the VLE they have been very keen on helping us through it, and are always keen to listen to your own ideas for future development of the VLE, not just for yourselves but system wide changes such as new features for the email system or room controls for example.

So far it has been quite a success, we are yet to see how we fair with the kids, but if introduced correctly I think it will be successful.

For the implementation of this kind of system, it needs to start with some good planning of how you want to use it, what you want to use it for, and how you will get the people to adopt such a system, it cannot be forced on them, they have to be seen as part of the process. FrogTrade insist that the VLE is your product not theirs, they provide the basic system, you can customize it as much or as little as you want, if you need help from them they will provide it, if not your are free to experiment and share your experiences.

Have to say big thank you to Lee Hardy and Jonathon North from the technical team, these guys are brilliant and really know their stuff.

[LeeH]

Found this on the world wide interweb

http://ahsintranet.co.uk/category/vle-strategy/

Seems to have a working log on for the trial site.