Fronter Setup

[tony82]

We want to import rooms into Fronter in a curriculum structure. I.e. All ICT rooms in the ICT corridor, all English Rooms in the English corridor. We can therefore control memory use on a departmental basis. Fronter will not write a script to do this and claim we are the only school that has requested this, to my mind, obvious structure.

We would also like to change group properties en masse, again no other school has requested this.

Has anyone else found Fronter difficult and has anyone else requested these changes?

[bpbes]

We have only just begun setting up fronter rooms. To start with we are concentrating in two areas, Science and the Library.

A science corridor was created then two rooms on that corridor. Science wanted separate rooms for KS3 & KS4, these are to be rooms where resources can be stored for KS's plus course modules and general information.

Science teachers then have their classes (imported from Sims) they can then pull in resources and create other stuff such as hand in folders test forums directed at the members for that class.

The Librarian (also a fronter administrator) has created a Library corridor with various rooms off that corridor. As she isn't a teacher she doesn't have any imported classes but she can errol memmbers from reg groups to target pupils. It is early days yet and teachers will be starting slowly to make sure they understand the way it works.

[Face-Man]

If you are only doing it to keep on top of space I personally would not bother. Though the space is alocated (if you are part of the LGFL contract) at around 200mb a student this is shared accros the whole local authority. The current stats for our LA indicate that there is 25GB used (4 GB of which is just about to be removed from the trash can) and 974GB free and some of our schools have been using fronter for well over a year.

If however (as you suggest) it is for organisational resaons I would suggets a differnt approach which is what we are currently recomending. Create manualy created rooms for each deptartment (possible for each year or key stage) and "encourage" teachers to put all the resources in these rooms. This should be the bulk of your data leaving the othere classrooms just there to contain "handins" and other student generated work. This also means that it is a lot easier for staff to work together with needing permissions for rooms to be changed.

I hope this helps