HodgeHi Posted February 26, 2009 Posted February 26, 2009 Hello, VLEs. Everyone's on about them now and I'm no different at the moment. The boss has asked me to investigate a few of the commercial VLE's. The current list is looking like this: Fronter (fronter.co.uk) Netmedia Educations (netmedia-ed.co.uk) RM VLE (rm.com) Pearson Education (pearsonpheonix.com) Uniservity (uniservity.com) Viglen (viglen.co.uk) Basically what i am after is any comments from people whether the VLE in their experience was good/bad and what they thought was good/bad about them. We could perhaps build a small discussion regarding the VLEs out there and keep all the details together, like some sort of crib sheet? Anyway i digress. The sort of thing we are after is a VLE that can be tweaked to a style of our liking, whilst still maintaining a simplicity for a primary school to use. I had a look at Moodle but it seems very rigid in respect to it's theming abilities. We need the framework of the VLE to be flexible in the way that the younger (Reception) kids could have a more simplified layout than the Year 6 kids. I am in the process of looking into DrupalEd as it does seem a bit more flexible in its theming. Thanks in advance for any feedback
alan-d Posted February 26, 2009 Posted February 26, 2009 This thread may help to get you started http://www.edugeek.net/forums/virtual-learning-platforms/27954-best-vle.html
jamesb Posted February 26, 2009 Posted February 26, 2009 Hodge, A couple years ago (wow, has it really been that long?) I had to do an evaluation on several VLEs for the school I was working for at the time. I've still got a copy of this floating around if you'd like me to send it to you. If you would, then PM me your e-mail address and I'll send it when I get home. 2
Sylv3r Posted February 26, 2009 Posted February 26, 2009 I would think (I haven't seen all the products in action you have mentioned) but an off she shelf VLE is going to be difficult to tweak it to how you want it to be. We went for TALMOS originally and it just didn't work for us as a school as staff had to change their way they taught to the TALMOS way to fit in with the information it required - I agree with you a VLE should reflect the style of any teacher as much as possible so anybody can run with it with as little training as possible.
jcollings Posted February 26, 2009 Posted February 26, 2009 Personally I would also add Frog to your list. It seemed like a really friendly and easy to use product when we evaluated it.
HodgeHi Posted February 26, 2009 Author Posted February 26, 2009 I saw frog demoed at Bett this year. I did like it. It's just the cost involved. It's just costs too much for us as we are a small primary school. We would look at using a feeder school for the access but i don't know of a secondary school in our region that has Frog installed and we do tend to feed quite a few schools rather than just one. Our LA also doesn't seem to be on the ball either when it comes to VLEs. There seems to be a lot of politics involved instead of what would be best for the Schools. There maybe more out there but i haven't heard of anything. There is one called Sandwell Schools that was mentioned to me today although i am not sure what this is. Anybody in the region seen or heard of this?
Hacksawbob Posted February 26, 2009 Posted February 26, 2009 Talmos here, never got off the ground, to much set up for not enough benefit. each resource needs to be tagged and assigned to a lesson. staff couldn't see any benefit in doing this when they already knew where the resources were. The killer was in order for it to be logged into from external to the school (ie parents) the LA said we would need to physically move it to their data centre to host it on the DMZ. If it ever needed to rebooted they probably wouldn't touch it. Looking at moodle now.
HodgeHi Posted February 26, 2009 Author Posted February 26, 2009 The killer was in order for it to be logged into from external to the school (ie parents) the LA said we would need to physically move it to their data centre to host it on the DMZ. I have exactly the same issue where i work. We cannot gain direct access to our School network. While i understand why, it is still annoying. Also as we are a Primary School i am also concerned about Pupil access. Due to the very nature of the users logging in the passwords aren't the most secure, bearing in mind some will be reception pupils. So already there would be a flaw that is begging to be exploited. How have others gotten around this?
NewOrder Posted February 26, 2009 Posted February 26, 2009 If your LA is Sandwell, they are presently in the last throws of BSF selection for secondary schools. The Sims team are rolling out Sims learniing gateway. A large number of primary schools use Shirelands via the Sandwell Together portal. There are 2 CLCs that provide innovative support. Compared to many other authorities your broadband is reasonably priced and reliable.
jcollings Posted February 26, 2009 Posted February 26, 2009 If your LA is Sandwell, they are presently in the last throws of BSF selection for secondary schools. The Sims team are rolling out Sims learniing gateway. A large number of primary schools use Shirelands via the Sandwell Together portal. There are 2 CLCs that provide innovative support. Compared to many other authorities your broadband is reasonably priced and reliable. We used to use Shirelands! We don't anymore and I can't say I'm sorry!
HodgeHi Posted February 27, 2009 Author Posted February 27, 2009 I have just been looking into Dokeos. It seems relatively fine. It could actually do what we need it to do. The course are theme-able and It is simple in its use. It even allows you to convert Open Office documents into SCORM compliant files, although i haven't done this yet. It does have one MAJOR issue for us though. It seems to allow any user to create courses and course categories. Does anyone know how to remove this ability? I would just remove it completely as it doesn't really seem to have any purpose. Why would you want Students creating their own courses?? Surely that's the Teachers job.
HodgeHi Posted February 27, 2009 Author Posted February 27, 2009 We used to use Shirelands! We don't anymore and I can't say I'm sorry! Was it no good then?
Dom_ Posted February 27, 2009 Posted February 27, 2009 How much was Frog, out of interest? We had it at my last place and it was amazing, the SMT got a bit sheepish when i asked how much it was though!
jcollings Posted February 27, 2009 Posted February 27, 2009 Was it no good then? There were several "issues" - happy to have a PM chat about it.
jcollings Posted February 27, 2009 Posted February 27, 2009 How much was Frog, out of interest? We had it at my last place and it was amazing, the SMT got a bit sheepish when i asked how much it was though! I don't recall exactly - it wasn't cheap though.
garyjbragg Posted February 27, 2009 Posted February 27, 2009 Hi, Here at Meadowhead School (1800 pupils) in Sheffield, we are using Frog. Currently for Staff, Parents and limited use for students. Has taken a lot of sorting out, but seems to work quite well, and it was bought before I got here and thought we might as well get the use out the money spent. Anyone else using Frog?
jamesb Posted February 27, 2009 Posted February 27, 2009 How much was Frog, out of interest? From what I remember, a lot. The advantage for a secondary school though is that the license (if I remember correctly, it may be an additional license) allows them to host VLEs for their feeder schools for a reasonable fee.
Jamo Posted February 27, 2009 Posted February 27, 2009 We are using fronter here, its clunky and ugly imho. Has a lot of features apparently, but i just cant get over the fact that it looks horrible!
apoth0r Posted February 27, 2009 Posted February 27, 2009 I have to say that Moodle has been fantastic. Very easy to use for all parties and it's free. What's the point in paying through the roof for something that is as good if not better then any of the others. I think theres around 150,000 moodle sites in the world that will agree with me.
Jamo Posted February 27, 2009 Posted February 27, 2009 Yeah totally agree about moodle, I did a test set up for my school on my homepage and it was so much easier to create a good looking site which is easy to navigate. I find myself thinking about where to go with fronter because the interface doesn't seem quite right and you are stuck with how fronter is.
HodgeHi Posted February 27, 2009 Author Posted February 27, 2009 The cost of Frog, if the cost mentioned in another thread is correct, is around 20-25,000. The issue i had with Moodle is that it wasn't Primary School Friendly enough. Year 5 and upwards would have coped fine i think but we have to think of the little ones as well If the content section was theme-able then i may have ventured down that route and tried to cobble something together. It looks like i will have to wait for Moodle 2.0 and see how it develops. There was a link somewhere that someone gave me of a thread on Moodle's forum that went through a discussion on development Vs Design. It was a good read i thought. I will see if i can find the link.
mattmoo Posted February 28, 2009 Posted February 28, 2009 we are going down the sharepoint route and hopefully sharepointLMS (google it) just waiting for version 2 which will be in beta in the next month i hope. Looked at all others including moodle but decided to keep everything in sharepoint.
EduTech Posted February 28, 2009 Posted February 28, 2009 We are using Shireland's, but i can thankfully say we will be moving away from them in March i believe and using sharepoint in which i am developing alsong side Talmos I secondary can say i am happy for the change, as i dont rate there learning platform currently so many problems. Also it has to go through so many people before you can get anything done. James.
mattmoo Posted March 1, 2009 Posted March 1, 2009 We are using Shireland's, but i can thankfully say we will be moving away from them in March i believe and using sharepoint in which i am developing alsong side Talmos I secondary can say i am happy for the change, as i dont rate there learning platform currently so many problems. Also it has to go through so many people before you can get anything done. James. Good to here it James, i am a big fan of collaboration and like the idea of lots of schools using the same platform but in the end i think having a VLE which suits your school 100% is better then a 60% job with features you will never use. Can you pm me your opinions of shirelands? as its something that they are trying to sell us despite all my work within sharepoint. Matt
EduTech Posted March 1, 2009 Posted March 1, 2009 Good to here it James, i am a big fan of collaboration and like the idea of lots of schools using the same platform but in the end i think having a VLE which suits your school 100% is better then a 60% job with features you will never use. Can you pm me your opinions of shirelands? as its something that they are trying to sell us despite all my work within sharepoint. Matt Exactly the reason why we are doing it ourselves, plus the support would be much faster for staff as we can support it where as at the moment we have to log a call etc, and it has to go to shireland > then to synetrix. But yh sure i'll PM you.. James. P.S. i'm not trying to put people of shireland, but i just think it is better suited for primary schools.. rather then secondary.
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