Firefly

[colly72]

Hi all,

 

We are considering Firefly, as a solution to our parental engagement (publishing behaviour, attendance, reports from SIMS, messaging etc) but also to replace Moodle as a VLE. Does anyone here use it and if so, could you let me know how well it works, if parents use the app, etc. The last thing I want is to spend a considerable amount of money on a white elephant!

 

Any information gratefully received.

 

Thanks,

 

Michael

[thimon]

Hi Colly. We use Firefly here, in the previous school that I worked in they used Frog. I can definitely say that Firefly is the much easier product to use, much faster to load pages and content and supports SSO with O365 (not sure about other services). We use Hosted SIMS, which Firefly communicates with fine with regards to reports and such. Parents don't use the app, however it's mobile friendly and offers lost of customization.

[foofighterjim]

We are pretty much the same as @thimon, at the last count we had 3/4 of the parents that had logged into it and around 1/2 appear to use it regularly. We don't use the app at the moment, as you can push an email to the registered address if you want to send a message out. The behaviour module is a little annoying as each behaviour type in SIMS has a unique code and these have to be put into Firefly manually, we had over 40 behaviour types and it took over an hour to put on (and gave me a touch of RSI!).

 

The reports side of things I can't comment on at the moment as for some reason we aren't using standard SIMS reports here and Firefly doesn't like the way our reports are setup. First we couldn't get them to upload, Firefly got around this by getting the uploader to ignore macros but this messed with the conditional formatting of the reports, leaving them unreadable. A problem of our own making and I am sure if you are using standard SIMS reports it will run fine.

[bligh001g]

We have had Frog for about 6 years but have started pushing parental engagement over the past 2 years or so. Works really well for us, in terms of pulling SIMS data. Parental feedback has been great with behaviour, attendance and SIMS Linked Docs all displaying nicely for them to access. Lots of parents use it on their phone and the themes in Frog scale down nicely to allow this.

 

Everything seems to work well!

[David44]

The behaviour module is a little annoying as each behaviour type in SIMS has a unique code and these have to be put into Firefly manually, we had over 40 behaviour types and it took over an hour to put on (and gave me a touch of RSI!).

@foofighterjim

Just out of interest, when recording behaviour in SIMS, do you also record the students role? So, if the behaviour incident relates to bullying for example, do you add the target(s) of the bullying and/or witnesses of the bullying to the behaviour incident as well as the aggressor? If so, how do you stop Firefly from pulling this through and showing a behaviour incident against a student who may have just been a witness to something?

[foofighterjim]

Hi @David44 I'm afraid the honest answer is that I don't know, I don't have access to that information in SIMS as I don't need it to fulfil my role. The pastoral team and heads of year do, so I will try to ask one of them at some point tomorrow.

[ass17]

Also don’t forget that SIMS apps are progressing to the point that when SIMS goes completely online, you may find that you you will engage with parents via the parent app, teachers will set homework and will be seen in a pupil app. A lot of people are using google and Microsoft free services more to store docs, create forms, share work/collaborate etc...

 

my question to you is... will there be a need for systems like Firefly/frog in 2-3 years time? I would have to say at this point in time my answer is no.

[kennysarmy]

Also don’t forget that SIMS apps are progressing to the point that when SIMS goes completely online, you may find that you you will engage with parents via the parent app, teachers will set homework and will be seen in a pupil app. A lot of people are using google and Microsoft free services more to store docs, create forms, share work/collaborate etc...

 

my question to you is... will there be a need for systems like Firefly/frog in 2-3 years time? I would have to say at this point in time my answer is no.

 

 

How close is SIMS to being able to show homework for pupils?

 

We predominately use Moodle for that - but are investigating other VLE providers with Firefly coming in tomorrow !

[colly72]

We've now taken the plunge and are to implement Firefly for September. I take the point re SIMS going online etc but for us, waiting for another 2-3 years for it to get to that stage is too long for us to wait. 3 years is a hell of a long time in the IT industry. Firefly ticks most boxes for us and gives us that parental/pupil engagement now.........

[kennysarmy]

We've now taken the plunge and are to implement Firefly for September. I take the point re SIMS going online etc but for us, waiting for another 2-3 years for it to get to that stage is too long for us to wait. 3 years is a hell of a long time in the IT industry. Firefly ticks most boxes for us and gives us that parental/pupil engagement now.........

 

hosted online?

[colly72]

hosted online?

 

Yeah, in the Cloud. Saves me managing another vm.

[kennysarmy]

Yeah, in the Cloud. Saves me managing another vm.

 

Single Sign On in school?

[colly72]

Single Sign On in school?

 

That too (likely Office 365)

[kennysarmy]

That too (likely Office 365)

 

Oh - we don't have O365 or Google - seems a lot of cloud based stuff is relying on that to sort out SSO

[kennysarmy]

We've now taken the plunge and are to implement Firefly for September. I take the point re SIMS going online etc but for us, waiting for another 2-3 years for it to get to that stage is too long for us to wait. 3 years is a hell of a long time in the IT industry. Firefly ticks most boxes for us and gives us that parental/pupil engagement now.........

 

Hi, wondered how your Firefly implementation was going?

 

I've just heard we've now got the go ahead to purchase Firefly.

[colly72]

Hi, wondered how your Firefly implementation was going?

 

I've just heard we've now got the go ahead to purchase Firefly.

 

Hi,

 

We launched it at the beginning of September and I've got to say that it's been an immediate success. We have some tech-shy teachers here but even they have found it straightforward to use. Our Firefly trainer was really good and he did some really useful workshops and sessions for our teaching staff, which helped a lot. We used a day our INSET for this. Our students have pretty much universally loved it and they already rely on it for their homework/tasks. I think they find it so useful to be able to see all their homework on their phone or tablet. There's an initial setup/activation for student process, which we did through lessons but this is quite straightforward and we didn't have any problems although we used Office 365 for SSO sign-in, which made it easy for the students as they didn't have another password to remember.

 

We've not yet launched it for parents, although our Head is chomping at the bit to do so. We currently aim to do this in January but to be honest we could do it earlier if it wasn't for us wanting to manage the process to the smallest detail.

 

We've had some white elephants in the past, in terms of teaching & learning tech initiatives but I'm pretty confident that this one wont be. Early stages but I already feel it's part of our culture.

[kennysarmy]

Hi,

 

We launched it at the beginning of September and I've got to say that it's been an immediate success. We have some tech-shy teachers here but even they have found it straightforward to use. Our Firefly trainer was really good and he did some really useful workshops and sessions for our teaching staff, which helped a lot. We used a day our INSET for this. Our students have pretty much universally loved it and they already rely on it for their homework/tasks. I think they find it so useful to be able to see all their homework on their phone or tablet. There's an initial setup/activation for student process, which we did through lessons but this is quite straightforward and we didn't have any problems although we used Office 365 for SSO sign-in, which made it easy for the students as they didn't have another password to remember.

 

We've not yet launched it for parents, although our Head is chomping at the bit to do so. We currently aim to do this in January but to be honest we could do it earlier if it wasn't for us wanting to manage the process to the smallest detail.

 

We've had some white elephants in the past, in terms of teaching & learning tech initiatives but I'm pretty confident that this one wont be. Early stages but I already feel it's part of our culture.

 

Sounds really good.

 

We don't have O365 or Google, so not sure how we'd get SSO working, awaiting to hear from them.

 

I'm also unsure how we'd migrate 10 years of Moodle data to their platform or if we'd just leave that behind...

[colly72]

Sounds really good.

 

We don't have O365 or Google, so not sure how we'd get SSO working, awaiting to hear from them.

 

I'm also unsure how we'd migrate 10 years of Moodle data to their platform or if we'd just leave that behind...

 

I think with locally hosted Firefly, you can do AD SSO but with Cloud, as we've gone for, I don't think it's an option. We don't used Office 365 for anything else other than this, so we just used Azure AD Connect to sync our AD users but we currently don't use any other aspect of Office 365.

 

We also had Moodle, which was used sporadically across different departments. We've kept it running until Christmas and told staff that they need to manually migrate any resources they wish to keep, or they will disappear in the new year. To be fair, I think many were happy to start with a clean slate, so I don't think much will get moved over into Firefly.

[kennysarmy]

I think with locally hosted Firefly, you can do AD SSO but with Cloud, as we've gone for, I don't think it's an option. We don't used Office 365 for anything else other than this, so we just used Azure AD Connect to sync our AD users but we currently don't use any other aspect of Office 365.

 

We also had Moodle, which was used sporadically across different departments. We've kept it running until Christmas and told staff that they need to manually migrate any resources they wish to keep, or they will disappear in the new year. To be fair, I think many were happy to start with a clean slate, so I don't think much will get moved over into Firefly.

 

Thanks, so is setting up Azure AD Connect easy?

Did you do this yourself our outsource the setup?

 

I've got no knowledge at all of Office 365 and for us there may be big advantages to migrating our Email solution (Mdaemon) to Microsoft at the same time.

[colly72]

Azure Ad Connect is really simple, we did it ourselves. We still have an on-premise Exchange server, so we're not using O365 for email yet. All we do is sync our AD accounts with Azure, to provide SSO.

[kennysarmy]

Azure Ad Connect is really simple, we did it ourselves. We still have an on-premise Exchange server, so we're not using O365 for email yet. All we do is sync our AD accounts with Azure, to provide SSO.

 

Thanks.

 

So the student logs on to the school PC, then do they just click on the Firefly link off your desktop or do they have to open an Office 365 portal first?

[colly72]

Thanks.

 

So the student logs on to the school PC, then do they just click on the Firefly link off your desktop or do they have to open an Office 365 portal first?

 

Yeah , so they click on the Firefly shortuct, then they choose staff/student login (in our case), which then directs them to login via O365. They do have to enter their username sometimes (which is their full upn name, normally the same as their email address) but no password is required from a domain-joined PC. If they've previously logged on using the same machine, it does remember the username, which they just have to click on.

[lnormi]

We use Firefly, SIMS have a parent portal and use Office 365 to sign into all of it Very interested to see how others are getting on with this set up.

[kennysarmy]

So the guidance from Firefly regarding staff who are parents is:

 

If you have teachers that are also parents, they need to be taken out as a parent on the student's profile. You should then add them back in, but when going through this select New and make sure that you use a personal email when going through the contact creation on the next screen.

 

Our Data Manager states this is bad practice:

 

Well duplicating contacts in a database is not good practice. When I run housekeeping routines SIMS will attempt to merge these contacts because there shouldn't be duplicated contacts.

 

Also whenever you run the diagnostics routine, it will now come up as an error for every single person who is duplicated.

 

I have always been advised by SIMS support not to duplicate contacts. However, if that is what you want me to do then I will. But please do not include these errors from duplicated contacts on your SIMS diagnostics reports which you ask me to look at and fix.

 

What have others done regarding this?

[Danp]

Our MIS (WCBS) has parents and teachers listed twice so it's not been an issue in Firefly. They login with their @schoolemail for teaching stuff and their @homeemail for parent stuff.