Anyone Using Frog?

[Danjns]

Hey Guys,

 

Just wanted to know if anyone is using frog and how they're getting on with it?

 

We've been given fronter by our LEA for 2 years for free but aren't finding it particularly user friendly and the teachers we're working with can't seem to get their heads round it.

 

I saw a presentation on frog and it seemed pretty good - but then it was a promo!

 

I understand the cost difference but i'd rather spend the money and get it right than re-do it in 2 years time.

 

Cheers!

[jdoyle]

surprised teachers are having problems with Fronter. Is it really Fronter that's the problem or VLE's in general?

[teak]

Sorry for hijacking your thread (seems a waste to start another frog topic), but I am interested to know how those using Frog have found it too.

 

Any issues or considerations worth noting when going with Frog? Would be interested to know what software you are using alongside Frog, for attendance, assessment, behaviour, etc. If Frog integrates well with them, (ie SIMS, Lesson monitor, bromcom, etc)?

 

Parent reporting and assessment modules fully working?

 

thanks.

[gibbo_ap]

looked at frog and it looks great, doesnt have the write back to sims that we are after and are looking at sims learning gateway and talmos.

 

frog just cost too much

[Danjns]

The Teachers are the two members of staff that have been appointed to help with roll out. The head of ICT and the Head of RE - both competent IT users.

 

It's a lot to do with how counter intuitive everything seems - they're able to do it but we're all worried about the other members of staff that aren't so IT confident.

[teak]

Notice Frog promote TASC Software PARS, for SIMS read/write access.

[Danjns]

Notice Frog promote TASC Software PARS, for SIMS read/write access.

 

is that an added extra cost or something thats included?

[Danjns]

Is anyone using frog near the Croydon area? Would be good to come over and see how you've implimented frog and see any real time issues/drawbacks

[jdoyle]

The Teachers are the two members of staff that have been appointed to help with roll out. The head of ICT and the Head of RE - both competent IT users.

 

It's a lot to do with how counter intuitive everything seems - they're able to do it but we're all worried about the other members of staff that aren't so IT confident.

 

I've got non techy teachers in History, Science, Food Tech, Geography etc using Fronter reasonably OK.

 

What in particular do they find counter intuitive about Fronter? Does this relate to setting up pages in rooms, uploading and downloading resources, adding news items, creating messages, managing hand in folders, managing room membership, setting up tests/surveys, running SCORM courses, embedding video/flash?

[dsm]

We're a Frog school and we love it. It has bought so many benefits to the school in terms of admin, organisation as well as the more obvious teaching and learning improvements.

[Danjns]

I've got non techy teachers in History, Science, Food Tech, Geography etc using Fronter reasonably OK.

 

What in particular do they find counter intuitive about Fronter? Does this relate to setting up pages in rooms, uploading and downloading resources, adding news items, creating messages, managing hand in folders, managing room membership, setting up tests/surveys, running SCORM courses, embedding video/flash?

 

yep thats about it...

[teak]

is that an added extra cost or something thats included?

Looks to be an additional purchase, a web based frontend to SIMS data-entry I think. An alternative to using SIMS.net, Bromcom Win/Webfolder, etc. Would seem you still need additional software with Frog as well, but guess you add them as icons in the VLE so all in one place.

 

Easy of use and reduced workload are concerns of ours too for staff. Currently they are having to logon and learn several different products to do everything. The likes of SIMS.net, SLN2, etc all look a bit too office/admin in design with too much clutter. Not sure of PARS, but some staff like the look of the new Bromcom Webfolder; seems to do attendance, assessment and behaviour all within one website/logon. Bromcom also seem to do a parental portal and VLE, but cannot find much information on their VLE (not released yet?).

[Cue]

I found a couple of problems with Frog, notably the fact that it has an incredibly poor forum, with no form of editing, etc. It feels more like a guestbook that anything else, a guestbook with forums and threads, but still. I tried to push to have PHPBB3 installed and linked into AD but the net admin wasn't too fond of the idea.

 

Frog Bricks are... ehhh, they're okay, I like to mess with the source which it won't let you do directly (you can only edit between the body tags using a HTML brick, which can be problematic if you want to edit other things, though there is a nice array of options for editing the body...).

 

All in all, unless you're a fussy kinda guy like I am, you'll probably love Frog, it can be quite intuitive, I'm not entirely sure if we actually have everything up and running yet, there seems to be a lot of Facebook-esque Social Networking widgets that don't work for me. I guess the folk in charge of our VLE didn't actually enable them.

 

RE: SIMS, we have timetables, etc plugged into the student planner on Frog, so it does work.

[teak]

All in all, unless you're a fussy kinda guy like I am, you'll probably love Frog, it can be quite intuitive, I'm not entirely sure if we actually have everything up and running yet, there seems to be a lot of Facebook-esque Social Networking widgets that don't work for me. I guess the folk in charge of our VLE didn't actually enable them.

 

RE: SIMS, we have timetables, etc plugged into the student planner on Frog, so it does work.

Do you also use SIMS with Frog for everything else, attendance, assessment, behaviour? If so, are you just linking from Frog to a local install of SIMS.net, SIMS terminal server, SIMS web parts?

[Cue]

Do you also use SIMS with Frog for everything else, attendance, assessment, behaviour? If so, are you just linking from Frog to a local install of SIMS.net, SIMS terminal server, SIMS web parts?

 

I'm not entirely sure, I believe we just use it for the timetable, can't say I've seen any of the other stuff around.

[duncane]

In standard Frog a report is scheduled on the SIMS server to extract the information it needs, this is then picked up by the Frog server itself.

 

The parental gateway will have real-time (read-only) access to the SIMS database - we don't have the parental gateway yet, but we are planning to.

 

When it comes to general SIMS access, we use Frog's Secure Gateway to provide access to the staffroom computers, each of which has the SIMS client installed. Our staff seem to love this - they can use the same interface to SIMS they're used to, from home. It gets very popular around report writing time!

 

I'm still not happy about the length of time it takes to handle support requests - everyone else says they're very responsive, I can only assume that I'm not pushy enough - or maybe I'm just asking difficult questions... although a "that's difficult, I'll need to get back to you" would be better than silence.

 

I agree with Cue - Frog can be quite limiting if you're someone who likes to get under the bonnet and start fiddling. There's meant to be a PHP brick that's being beta tested, but we're not worthy to test it. (Unfortunately there's the good chance that by the time Frog gets round to releasing it, my school will be gone.) It would really come in useful - I'm forever having to tell staff, "erm no, I'm afraid it can't do that" - which is annoying when you can see that they're fired up enough to want to use it. (This usually revolves around the "write-only" database function - you can export the data to CVS, but that's it.)

 

The forums are fairly poor, but I do like the ability to embed a thread into a web page - so a teacher can have a web page about a topic, then provide space on the same page for students to discuss it.

[Cue]

I agree with Cue - Frog can be quite limiting if you're someone who likes to get under the bonnet and start fiddling. There's meant to be a PHP brick that's being beta tested, but we're not worthy to test it. (Unfortunately there's the good chance that by the time Frog gets round to releasing it, my school will be gone.) It would really come in useful - I'm forever having to tell staff, "erm no, I'm afraid it can't do that" - which is annoying when you can see that they're fired up enough to want to use it. (This usually revolves around the "write-only" database function - you can export the data to CVS, but that's it.)

 

The forums are fairly poor, but I do like the ability to embed a thread into a web page - so a teacher can have a web page about a topic, then provide space on the same page for students to discuss it.

 

Just a thought, actually...

 

Inconspicuous iframe, maybe? It's a tempting solution, albeit not the best way to go about things, but when push comes to shove...

 

PHP brick though? This intrigues me, do they accept beta testers if one can give enough "I can do this this and this with PHP, can I try it out?".

 

Now all we need is a way of accessing MySQL, I guess you could do it remotely though.

 

We wanted to try and get phpbb3 up and running, sadly the netadmin wouldn't allow it running due to, unlike Frog and such, the lack of 24/7 professional support from a dedicated, paid team. Of course, running on its own server, and phpbb3 due to the fact that it has some rather nice AD integration.

[teak]

In standard Frog a report is scheduled on the SIMS server to extract the information it needs, this is then picked up by the Frog server itself.

 

The parental gateway will have real-time (read-only) access to the SIMS database - we don't have the parental gateway yet, but we are planning to.

 

When it comes to general SIMS access, we use Frog's Secure Gateway to provide access to the staffroom computers, each of which has the SIMS client installed. Our staff seem to love this - they can use the same interface to SIMS they're used to, from home. It gets very popular around report writing time!

 

I'm still not happy about the length of time it takes to handle support requests - everyone else says they're very responsive, I can only assume that I'm not pushy enough - or maybe I'm just asking difficult questions... although a "that's difficult, I'll need to get back to you" would be better than silence.

Thanks duncane, really helpful information. Interesting you mention staff are very postive on using SIMS alongside Frog. Probably helped if that is what they are used to using. Our teaching staff haven't had much exposure to SIMS in the classroom.

[robins]

We've just bought Frog, had SIMS and AD linked and done the initial training. I've not noticed anything I don't like yet. It doesn't seem to get mentioned much on here probably because the frog community forums are pretty effective - ask your sales rep to give you access to the community via a demo login. By the way TASC wrote the database link to SIMS on behalf of Frog. Much of the platform seems to be within our powers to develop or gets extended FOC by changes which users vote for or commission. Interestingly there is code sharing and content swapshop but also a facility to flog user created things to one another within the community.

[duncane]

Much of the platform seems to be within our powers to develop.

You have a lot of flexibility with looks, and creating static content, but that's pretty much it.

 

Without the PHP brick, you can set up forms, look at the results as a whole, but that seems to be it (other than export them) - you can't take data from that form and manipulate it within Frog.

 

We can't easy restore data for users in Frog if they lose it: The toolbox recycle bin* doesn't tell us which user is associated with which file, and Frog backup is just a dump of Frog's internal directories (so we'd have to get Frog to restore the data from that file dump).

 

Really, there's plenty of things that you realise you can't do - unfortunately it's not until you need them that you realise they're missing. I don't want people to think its terrible - it's far from that - but I baulk at the idea of its power for developers are opposed to users.

 

* I'd need to double check if users have access to their own recycle bin via the toolbox - as an administrator I see everyone's and it's confusing.

Edited April 18, 2010 by duncane

[clareq]

My major issue with frog is that it doesn't seem to be able to cope with user areas spread over more than one server, or user names that don't obey their rules. The majority of our sixth form join in year 12, but frog insists on using year of entry, not year of entry to Y7, meaning that frog usernames don't match ours, and we have to manually rename the majority of our 6th formers. Coupled with that the fact that all students user area path can only point to one server, which means we have to manually remap all userarea paths for 2/3 of our users. Yes, we can run a csv to put in users and user area paths, but it looks like the nightly SIMS import routine overwrites our csv. However, we're stuck with it - the LEA provide it for us.

[Cue]

That makes me rather tempted to var_dump($_GLOBALS); and see what it gives me, now...

[p858snake]

My major issue with frog is that it doesn't seem to be able to cope with user areas spread over more than one server, ...snip...

Use a DFS share so it thinks they are in the one area?

Edited April 19, 2010 by p858snake
sniped the rest, don't need bold

[Sunderwood]

Hi,

 

Yes we are using frog... Came on to have a quick look to see who else is using it. I think it looks great and really easy to use!!

[enjay]

The majority of our sixth form join in year 12, but frog insists on using year of entry, not year of entry to Y7, meaning that frog usernames don't match ours, and we have to manually rename the majority of our 6th formers.

 

Do you have to use year of entry in usernames? We don't at present. If you do, and it has the limitation you describe, that would cause us an absolute nightmare as our students join at all sorts of stages, right from Nursery to Year 12.