Frog or RM's offering. Any advice?

[russdev]

@Andie

 

Out of interest how was the portal rolled out to your school. What help did you get from LA to roll it out? Did the school have a plan as to how it will roll out?

 

Reason ask is one thing noticed is that people often have bad experiences with a LA wide portal but then someone on their own using same portal has no major issues.

 

I do wonder sometimes is if large problem with some la wide portals is a non-technical problem as RM give very good roll out consultancy in my view but I think in LA wide installs this often does not filter down to schools.

 

But maybe I am wrong.

 

As for speed was quite an issue early on but has improved no end. Usernames going to have that with any hosted portal that is connected to other sites as said for us not major issue we just started to use the portal username as logins since last september (before that were using rbc email logins).

 

Trust me compared so some portals KLP is very intuitive.

 

Also what find is staff will always not want to use it key is get students using it find key staff who will use it and make sure that they use it with students. Staff do come around.

 

As said all along this is me talking about us using it and how we have found it.

 

Russ

 

p.s

 

Just to say I wasn't trying to say Andie that your problems where down to it being LA wide etc just comment got me thinking of more generic issues people are having.

[Andie]

@Andie

 

Out of interest how was the portal rolled out to your school. What help did you get from LA to roll it out? Did the school have a plan as to how it will roll out?

 

Reason ask is one thing noticed is that people often have bad experiences with a LA wide portal but then someone on their own using same portal has no major issues.

 

I do wonder sometimes is if large problem with some la wide portals is a non-technical problem as RM give very good roll out consultancy in my view but I think in LA wide installs this often does not filter down to schools.

 

But maybe I am wrong.

 

As for speed was quite an issue early on but has improved no end. Usernames going to have that with any hosted portal that is connected to other sites as said for us not major issue we just started to use the portal username as logins since last september (before that were using rbc email logins).

 

Trust me compared so some portals KLP is very intuitive.

 

Also what find is staff will always not want to use it key is get students using it find key staff who will use it and make sure that they use it with students. Staff do come around.

 

As said all along this is me talking about us using it and how we have found it.

 

Russ

 

p.s

 

Just to say I wasn't trying to say Andie that your problems where down to it being LA wide etc just comment got me thinking of more generic issues people are having.

 

The LEA (who for the record are not Cambridgeshire) were responsible for training two key administrators over two days who were then responsible for rolling it out to their schools, with additional training a month later for subject leaders. Part of the training was given over to planning roll out in your own school. The following is just my opinion, and not an official opinion of the school: the LEA training was not good; I felt that the LEA trainers hadn't been well trained in Kaleidos themselves nor had they had enough time to look at it properly for themselves. I have no idea how these individuals were trained. That was version 1. Unfortunately, we then went over to version 2 which rendered a lot of our initial training obsolete. The training for that involved a couple of hours for two people from each school going to a room with no hands on facilities whilst a chap from RM went through what we needed to know. Subject leader training did not seem to go well either from the feedback that was recieved here. This was again LEA led. There have been other factors affecting the LEA rollout that couldn't be gone into here.

 

Our school did develop a plan to roll out the platform. Unfortunately, at each stage we have hit technical problems which have meant logging a support call with RM. For example, the teacher who was trying to roll out to his class was unable to load resources - the machine just froze. My other bugbear is that we did hit a few issues with the way usernames are generated, which were traced back to issues with Integris that had been solved by LEA workarounds. So I tried to get RM to look realistically at these. Now call me niave, but as RM own both Integris and Kaleidos I thought this would be simple. But no. Apparently RM hadn't trained their Integris staff on Kaleidos or their Kaleidos staff on Integris. Now, as the two work closely together, in that the data from Integris is extracted into Kaleidos, and it matters how you enter that data and what fields are extracted, I would have thought it would be quite important by version 2 stage to have thought about this!

 

In part the LEA roll out has been a factor in our lack of enthusiasm for Kaleidos. But as an individual who has tried to use it and has been pushing away to get things sorted for over 18 months now, it is not the only factor.

 

I prefer not to go into greater detail in public. We haven't given up entirely. There are possible other ways to do this. We start paying in a year and it will be awful, in my opinion, to be spending money on something that we don't use.

[hartshay]

We have used Frog for nearly 3 years and it has proved to be very popular with staff, flexible and reliable. It really is an excellent system ... if you get the chance to procure it do it ...you will not regret it

[danIT]

Perhaps a little bit off topic, I dont really understand how resources or activties as such get added to Frog?

 

I've seen Frog in the flesh but im still confused.

 

What i see are various areas where i can pick up 'web pages' or other objects, I can create webpages and elborate interfaces using the web page builder or use templates which have been created by other staff.

 

Could someone explain, demonstrate via a login, how a student might go about collecting and collaborating with Frog?

[andykemp]

Dan, can you elaborate on what you mean by "collection and collaborating"? Frog doesn't at present offer anything like a wiki (as far as I am aware), but does have forums, forms (for quizes, questionnaires, and data collection etc). Frog 3.0 due in the next couple of weeks will bring a new wave of social networking features much like facebook...

 

Are there particular things you are wanting to achieve or have in mind?

[danIT]

I just wonder how a teacher might use Frog to create resources and 'publish' them in Frog?

[andykemp]

I think for most people the majority of frog resources are made as 'webpages' which then contain various bricks be them sections containing media, or files, or questions or forums etc which the teacher can just drag on to the page... When they have finished arranging the sections as they want them they can then just publish the page to the departmental section.

 

If they want to set the page as homework it can be included either in a lesson plan which can be allocated to a class or using the Quick Set Work tool to indicate what needs to be done and when...

 

Is that what you mean?