Comparing VLEs, give me your pros and cons...

[mrbios]

....of these 4 options:

Life (bare in mind we're leaving uniservitys old system)

Frog

Moodle (my personal opinion here is that we will never have the technical time to support this)

MyBigCampus (we're a lightspeed customer so this is free)

 

Regardless of whether you've used more than one of those i'd like the pros and cons of what you have used, even better if you can compare one to another though.

 

Thanks

[witch]

We have Moodle. I don't touch it as I knew if I did I would end up doing it all. The IT teacher uses it all the time - all his lesson plans are there etc. A couple of other teachers use it but most don't as it isn't particularly user friendly in my opinion.

[jmak]

We've been using our LA's proprietary system which is based on Digital Brain. The cut we get is easy to administrate and looks very pretty for infant schools. I've been playing with MyBigCampus for the last couple of months. It seems to be every bit as easy to use, has more features and would save us £5/pupil per year which I can think of loads of ways to spend - and even if didn't get it, equates to 50% of spend of curriculum resources for maths.

 

Sorry, did you spot the bitterness? The prettiness argument is winning at the minute.

 

If you're a secondary, the interface should work well - it looks remarkably similar to Facebook.

 

 

....of these 4 options:

Life (bare in mind we're leaving uniservitys old system)

 

I prefer to bear things in mind when I'm at work. I keep bare minds for home

[unixman_again]

We use moodle extensively and it just hums along. The only support that I have to do is assign access rights. During the summer break we're migrating from 1.9 to 2.3. I already have the new server running and I've performed a couple of test installs and data migration. The process is remarkably easy. There are a few problems with plugins but they are quite easy to solve. I've found moodle to be intuitive and there is always assistance available on the hosted forums.

[Eappariello]

We've been using our LA's proprietary system which is based on Digital Brain. The cut we get is easy to administrate and looks very pretty for infant schools. I've been playing with MyBigCampus for the last couple of months. It seems to be every bit as easy to use, has more features and would save us £5/pupil per year which I can think of loads of ways to spend - and even if didn't get it, equates to 50% of spend of curriculum resources for maths.

 

Sorry, did you spot the bitterness? The prettiness argument is winning at the minute.

 

If you're a secondary, the interface should work well - it looks remarkably similar to Facebook.

 

I prefer to bear things in mind when I'm at work. I keep bare minds for home

 

@jmak. Log back in after June 1st massive re design, look and feel, bigger icons generally prettier and will scale to any screen size. New iOS and Android App also.

 

Simon

[compsue]

We have used Uniservity Life Cloud for several years now. Always had trouble if a full class tried to log on as it went really slow. We decided just to use it for our website only but gave now built another one on another. I had contact from their sales team in November telling us that they had now moved to New Era and that they could offer either a website only or vle package. I told them we were no longer using it and didn't hear anything else until a couple of weeks ago when the office manager asked if it was OK to pay them £1900. I told her we no longer used it and to cut a long story short were told that because we hadn't told them within 60 days that we didn't want to carry on using it they have renewed our contract with the full package for 12 months! They are adamant we should pay....all we have is a homepage saying we have moved to another website. Anyone else had trouble with them?

[jslate1980]

We have used Uniservity Life Cloud for several years now. Always had trouble if a full class tried to log on as it went really slow. We decided just to use it for our website only but gave now built another one on another. I had contact from their sales team in November telling us that they had now moved to New Era and that they could offer either a website only or vle package. I told them we were no longer using it and didn't hear anything else until a couple of weeks ago when the office manager asked if it was OK to pay them £1900. I told her we no longer used it and to cut a long story short were told that because we hadn't told them within 60 days that we didn't want to carry on using it they have renewed our contract with the full package for 12 months! They are adamant we should pay....all we have is a homepage saying we have moved to another website. Anyone else had trouble with them?

 

They are not the only company that does this. Been stung a couple of times in the past. Best to send a letter of cancellation to any contract when you start it.

[mrbios]

We have used Uniservity Life Cloud for several years now. Always had trouble if a full class tried to log on as it went really slow. We decided just to use it for our website only but gave now built another one on another. I had contact from their sales team in November telling us that they had now moved to New Era and that they could offer either a website only or vle package. I told them we were no longer using it and didn't hear anything else until a couple of weeks ago when the office manager asked if it was OK to pay them £1900. I told her we no longer used it and to cut a long story short were told that because we hadn't told them within 60 days that we didn't want to carry on using it they have renewed our contract with the full package for 12 months! They are adamant we should pay....all we have is a homepage saying we have moved to another website. Anyone else had trouble with them?

 

We've been using its learning since i made this thread (really doesn't seem like 2013, wow!) they too need 60 days notice. We've just renewed for 6 months with a view to moving to Office 365 entirely by September.

[bligh001g]

We've had Frog at my school for about 6 years and it's very well adopted. We tend to set homework through it and use department sites the most. Really easy to maintain for staff and students like the new mobile app which has been launched.

 

Parents can see everything to do with their child too, I'd recommend it. Happy to give you a demo log in if you PM me.

[davemarble]

Always thought moodle or frog. Implementation plan and getting people onboard is the key. Pilot with small groups first.

[davemarble]

You pay for Frog but moodle has costs associated. Choose a member of slt to spearhead.

[jimmy_2k]

Moodle all the way. I am looking at getting ours hosted by our LA as I haven't got time to do all of the software updates and I want to keep it current. If you have someone who is dedicated to its administration then it will work well for you.