How are you using Fronter?

[Jobos]

The HT at one of my schools keeps saying that Fronter in not used enough and despite me telling her repeatedly that Fronter is cr*p the HT wants me to produce a report for and against Fronter.

Our LEA (Leicester City) introduced Fronter to us around 18 months ago and in that time I have not seen anything to convince me that Fronter is worth the time and trouble in using it. Even the LEA pages on Fronter look like they have been made by a pupil in year 3 using Frontpage 2000.

Anyone got examples of good Fronter use at their school?

[Pottsey]

We are having the same problem. The only semi useful part of Frontier so far for us is a Staff room with the shared calendar. Been thinking about a booking page for the mini bus and we have an upload folder to hand in staff reports. But so far everyone just use’s email.

The problem with Frontier is mostly it’s just a different way to do things we already do. We have yet to find a way to make Frontier improve children’s learning or make staffs lives easier. I see Frontier as really good in theory but a waste of time in practise at least for us.

If you’re doing a for and against Fronter, one big against is it’s not inclusive. There is pretty much zero SEN support and you could argue Frontier is discriminating against special needs users who cannot acess it.

EDIT:
Its little things like you cannot change the font, font size or font colour in tests/surveys. There is no switch access. No way to switch a colour profile on for one user who is colour blind or needs high contrast and well you could spend hours writeing up reasons why Fronter is not SEN friendly.

[Face-Man]

You can see some demo stuff at

cms.lgfl.net - Learning Platforms

there is also a demo site at

Login: primary (or secondary)
Password: London

https://fronter.com/ukusers/

If you are looking at creating resources best have a look at

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/

[Pottsey]

Those demo sites seem to have done things I didn’t think are possible. Go to
Login: secondary
Password: London
https://fronter.com/ukusers/

Now go to the GCSE ICT room. The boxes are not aligned up and the whole page has been tweaked far beyond other pages. How can we do that?

[Face-Man]

Now go to the GCSE ICT room. The boxes are not aligned up and the whole page has been tweaked far beyond other pages. How can we do that?

That's because it's not been created in Fronter. If you notice the icon at the top of the room tool packages it's a link. This link goes to the resources folder were there is a folder called ICT website with all the code in (ready to be adapted). Interesting approach !! I may have to give it a try myself sometime soon.

You can see the website here http://www.parliamenthill.camden.sch...ite/index.html

[GenieNitro]

I've started doing similar things to that for our Fronter site.
So far, i've embedded some pages from our school website into Fronter as they look better and are easier to set up...

I'd actually like to embed some Fronter pages in the school website too (thus having password protected areas for staff to use). Can't quite get that to work as I am given a Shibboleth idp error saying my session has timed out...

Will keep trying though!

Steve

[Pottsey]

Starting to change my mind on Fronter thanks to Face-man pointing out you can use files created outside of Fronter. Now I am re-designing every page/room outside of Fronter with a web flash page and it already look x10 better.

[GenieNitro]

I've started doing similar things to that for our Fronter site.
So far, i've embedded some pages from our school website into Fronter as they look better and are easier to set up...

I'd actually like to embed some Fronter pages in the school website too (thus having password protected areas for staff to use). Can't quite get that to work as I am given a Shibboleth idp error saying my session has timed out...

Will keep trying though!

Steve

Ironically, when I got to school today, I found that all the embedding on my Fronter pages was suddenly broken! Still is now...
No flash,
no video
no iFrames.

Fronter must be reading this and have decided to punish me!

Steve

[Jobos]

How do I embed webpages in Fronter

[GenieNitro]

How do I embed webpages in Fronter

Well, I just made a new fronter page and put this in as text

<iframe height="2000" width="100%" frameBorder="0" src="http://www.gorringepark.merton.sch.uk/Site/Links.html">your browser does not support IFRAMEs</iframe>

Worked just fine until this morning!!!

Steve

[leco]

Well, I just made a new fronter page and put this in as text

<iframe height="2000" width="100%" frameBorder="0" src="http://www.gorringepark.merton.sch.uk/Site/Links.html">your browser does not support IFRAMEs</iframe>

Worked just fine until this morning!!!

Steve

Are you putting that into a text container? I've tried and all I see is - the text

[CAM]

The input box for text should have an option to show HTML. Have you tried it in there?

[Wallgo]

What's the logic in putting a website's pages within Fronter though?

[GenieNitro]

Are you putting that into a text container? I've tried and all I see is - the text

Well, as I said before, it seems to be broken as of yesterday.
I'm only seeing the text too and not the embedded pages (all of which were working beautifully until yesterday morning).

Steve

[GenieNitro]

What's the logic in putting a website's pages within Fronter though?

The logic is that the pages one can make with Fronter are simple, ugly and clunky.
It's easy enough (when it's working) to just set up a Fronter page with an iFrame and use a better authoring programme to fill in the content.

Steve