Real Smart Cloud

[sippo]

Has anyone heard of this and experienced it? Got some good reviews and we are looking to use it from Sept.

smartassess | a learning organisation

Love the website address aswell!

[Sylv3r]

We use Realsmart as an assessment for learning tool. Realsmart Cloud has intergrated Google Apps - you could in theory set this up yourself and link it with your own AD - but I guess purchasing via smartassess takes away all the hassle at a cost.

We have 4 or 5 departments using Realsmart and feedback is pretty good.

[sippo]

Anyone else use this?

They recommend that we use an independant browser such as firefox....

[Steveduk]

We used Google for Education and at the end of September 2011 started with RealSmart cloud and have only just being able to start using it (Feb 2012).

First impressions of the software were good although we have had and still have problems. Pre-sales we had loads of contact with the company however after sales support has been dire. There appears to be a couple of guys who are good at fixing stuff but struggle allocating time to issues (I guess they're too busy with new customers). Most of our student accounts messed up on import. We've just found a problem with the Flash app itself where it consumes 4MB of memory each time a button is clicked which doesn't appear to get released. There's a problem when you login as another user - the only way to get out is close all browsers and start again. Multiple PHP errors during use, especially when first signing in. Changes appear to randomly happen. Users report content not being saved.

Our latest issue is all of our administrative rights have disappeared from Google so we can't do much now! Realsmart support contacted but no response yet.

Also, RealSmart becomes the authentication provider so any apps you have or intended to create using Google as the auth provider will break. Some Google Apps also broke for this reason. This basically screwed up all the development work we had been doing for GApps.

Get in touch if you want more info or to find out where we are up to!

Cheers

Steve


PS. These are my opinions but I can put you in touch with some of my colleagues if you would like more!

[garethm]

We're on Realsmart - and it's caused us a nightmare in the IT department...
Their "technical" support is very limited - they are however pretty good for end-user support.

It's flash-based mainly, which is a major pain if you're using mobile devices, and requires a fairly beefy internet connection - and also completely unfiltering, un-proxying, and basically needs a direct connection to their servers.

Had a couple of teething problems with the Serco Facility import to start with, but once we'd got that sorted, it works pretty well.

They do recommend using Firefox, but once that's deployed it's fairly good.

Overall it's been pretty well received - it's liked by the kids, and most of the teaching staff. Become a bit of a pain sometimes for us in the network management team, as we've been resetting passwords - it doesn't connect to AD at all, mainly because it's hosted with Amazon EC2...

Hope this is of some help!

[edutech4schools]

Is this not a bunch of free software bundled together that you have to pay for?

[garethm]

Pretty much - the front end is based on Wordpress, it's got a fair bit of stuff in the actual VLE - the flash based bit.

[mthomas08]

Is this not a bunch of free software bundled together that you have to pay for?

I was wondering that, wouldnt it make sense in putting in a bit of time for Moodle. We are not a moodle based school but 5K on something which appears to be using free stuff in the first place isnt really the best option is it?

I watched the video and wasn't that good, sites looked very basic and very boring.. not really the "Best Learning Environment in the world".... certainly not for 5K.

Then again thats my opinion.