What VLE are you all using?

[JJonas]

I need to look into VLE's so I thought I would ask Edugeek.

 

What are you using?

 

Do you recommend it?

 

Good point/Bad points?

[unixman_again]

Moodle here and SMT wield the big stick and make staff use it. OK, so the teachers don't use it well (basically it's a glorified shared drive) but with a big push to having all students on mobile devices, that will have to change.

 

Good points about Moodle - it's free, there are a huge number of sites, the Moodle forums are excellent for support, there are a zillion plugins to extend it, JISC offer free staff training, students are liable to use it if they do to university.

 

Bad points - upgrades are cumbersome, but we only do it once a year, so it's really all that bad, staff expect us to know all the ins and outs of it, and there is loads of stuff involving students that we haven't got a clue about. We point them as JISC.

[FragglePete]

Sharepoint Sites within Office365. Our Frog box turned into a glorified public accessible network area which was costing over £2.5k a year on an ageing server. Office365 = Free and tons of space.

 

Pete

[FN-GM]

We don't have one at any of our schools. Can't see any need for it. The closest thing that comes to it is Google Classroom.

[3s-gtech]

Moodle again. We use LDAP to integrate logins to AD. It's not used widely, but it's heavily used in some subjects - mainly as a host for SCORM content and schemes of work/material. It's been very useful. Agreed that upgrades aren't always easy (having dragged ours from the dark age of 1.9 to 3.1 recently) but there is a lot of support info about.

[dry]

Large primary here. We use eSchools. Support is good and they integrate register taking, our website & a few other things (parents evening booking etc).

 

One of the most frustrating things about them is they use underscores instead of hyphens when creating links, e.g. edugeek get it right:

http:// w ww.edugeek.net/forums/virtual-learning-platforms/174529-what-vle-you-all-using.html

 

whereas eSchools force the following:

ourschool.co.uk/really_important_link_that_parents_need_to_type

 

which, when printed by our admin staff on letters home look like:

 

ourschool.co.uk/really_important_link_that_parents_need_to_type

 

And our parents assume there are spaces instead of underscores in the URL, therefore failing to get to the intended page. I know there are ways around it, but it's something that eSchools are (rightly or wrongly) unwilling to change.

Edited September 15, 2016 by dry

[edmokeski]

We had Frog, but as others have said it was never properly used, expensive to maintain, and on aging kit. It is sadly still lurking somewhere, since we've not yet replaced the room booking functions, but it's on its way out. We've moved to Google Apps for Education w/ Classroom, at the same time as rolling out a 1:1 iPad deployment, which is gaining much better traction than the VLE ever did.

[localzuk]

Used to use Frog, but couldn't justify the huge yearly bill for it. So we moved to Moodle. Gets used reasonably well now to be honest.

[JJonas]

anybody using Firefly?

[siuko]

We are using Firefly (we have for a few years now)

 

What do you need to know?

[thimon]

Used Frog in my last school, now using Firefly in the school I'm at. Between the two Firefly is much faster and integrates better with Office 365 and AD.

[nickjelly]

I manage and co-ordinate Moodle in our school (Secondary). Take up here is great but it needs someone or some people to drive it to provide guidance, best practice and support imo.

[nigel_ford]

Yes - for 4 or 5 years now. Taken a while to get going, and could do much more with it.

 

very easy to create pages and assign permissions, downside is that page design options are limited.

[kevin_lane]

We use sharepoint 2010 and then 2007 back in the day, migration was a nightmare had to copy everything independently as no migration tool well none that was free been looking at 365 but again it's just a flat platform really as it's already been said just a glorious file server have moodle but found it not easy to play with

[sturgeo]

We've just started using Firefly, on a whole very good but some issues.

 

Anyone else using O365 for authentication and then having issues opening/editting files that have been added to pages?

[friendlytechnician]

Agree with FN-GM, we use Google Classroom as a VLE. If we need to expand on this we can use Blogger or Google Sites. I found Moodle time consuming considering we were only using it as a glorified file repository.

[mrbios]

"Its Learning" here.

 

It costs a lot of money, for very little benefit to the school. A useless money drain that's been put in place purely to tick a couple of boxes.

[eddyc]

We've just binned frog here and moved to google classroom.

 

Really like the look of firefly but too expensive when we were weighing up what to replace frog with.

 

Frog was great but frog is was unstable, clunky and expensive

[dblight]

We have also binned Frog this year and gone to Google. Office365 for mail and a few sharepoint form workflows. HAP also for students and staff.

[john_873]

We use Moodle here - integrated with SIMS

 

We tried to host it ourselves at first but didn't really work.

 

The integration with SIMS was a game changer and now uptake from teachers and students is extremely high.

[Reverend_Dan]

Also Binned Frog this year and went Office 365, using SharePoint mainly as a shared area. Some staff champions are starting to use Microsoft Classroom

[win]

Anyone else using O365 for authentication and then having issues opening/editting files that have been added to pages?

 

If you have read only access you can open files directly, but if you have edit access then you need to re-authenticate.

[theeggmaster]

We use RealSmart which gives us a Wordpress website with SSO to Google Apps, and SIMS - Google Apps sync of staff, student and class data. That provisions everything we need for collaboration and Google Classroom.

[Griff]

Just binned off Its Learning to save some $$$$$$$$

[Zoom7000]

"Its Learning" here.

 

It costs a lot of money, for very little benefit to the school. A useless money drain that's been put in place purely to tick a couple of boxes.

 

It's Learning/Fronter is what we are using too, until November at which point we'll be ditching it and moving to Office 365. It was a "forced" sign up for schools in our LA and they still "threaten" people from moving away by not making certain important documents readily available to users unless they log in via Fronter which costs anywhere from £3500/year. It's one of the clunkiest systems I have ever seen and has the worst support, which has only got worse since It's Learning took it over.

Edited October 7, 2016 by Zoom7000