Schools personal experiences of FROG

[Little-Miss]

An Academy up the road who hosts their own FROG has offered us use of it with our own little area etc.

 

My Head is keen to see what it looks like behind the scenes as a staff member. Is anyone out there kind enough to maybe let us look at their FROG setup or maybe speak to you/your Head about your experience of it and how well your school has taken it on.

 

Thanks

[Little-Miss]

Lol does this mean no one likes frog?

[edutech4schools]

In my Google apps post I had a few frog lovers.

[glennda]

Not used Frog but Moodle is a doodle to use/manage

[TheCrust]

We're in the process of deploying and adopting Frog and while I accept there are schools using it without issue, we've not had the smoothest of transitions and have actually felt quite frustrated by limitations in the product and the company's support team at times - as such I don't know how much use we might be but I don't mind helping if I can.

 

Drop me a PM if you want contact details?

Edited February 21, 2012 by TheCrust

[HC_Netman]

We use Frog and think it's great - it's not perfect by any means but all our staff and students use it regularly which is what we wanted. It does take a bit of setting up and I agree with @TheCrust that the support for Frog can be frustrating at times - in particular the fact that they currently refuse to support any browser other than IE.

 

More than happy to let you have a look at ours and talk to you about our experiences using it. Just PM if you want more info.

[TheCrust]

Ah. I'd forgotten about that particular "feature". That makes me chuckle - one idea behind a VLE was to enable and promote anytime/anywhere learning as long as there is a device with an internet connection.

 

To insist the browser used is a flavour of Internet Explorer (or more recently, certain versions of Firefox - as long as you don't want to access the toolkit anyway) just excludes so many potential users with other devices or browsers that I think it misses the whole point just a little bit.

Edited February 21, 2012 by TheCrust

[glennda]

TBH most Web devs try and make you not use IE as its awful!!

[ozydave]

Going through the process of appointing a new ICT contractor for a new build. We currently use moodle which I love.

I know that the bidding companies will try an sell Frog, never used it myself.

Is that really true that they only support IE browsers, can’t be?

Cheers

[HC_Netman]

Is that really true that they only support IE browsers, can’t be?

 

They have some support for Firefox but the Toolkit (the backend) can only be used in IE.

 

If there are any issues that you come across and you are using anything other than IE or at a push Firefox then they will not help you out - just tell you to use IE. There is currently a request on their idea pad to incorporate Chrome etc. but it is yet to get onto their development list.

 

This is by far the biggest issue we have with Frog becuase the majority of people just don't use IE anymore and some parents really don't like being forced to use it to access reports etc..

 

I still believe it is the best VLE provider out there at the moment (unless you have the time and expertise to set up Moodle yourself) but there are still some issues which really need addressing to make it more accessible.

[mthomas08]

If you want to give me a PM don't be afraid, I am spending every spare minute I have on development. Frogs biggest advantage is also their own weakness - their own platform to create sites. As a result there is compatible issues on some browsers but mainly with the toolkit.

 

We stick to IE here so we have had zero issues, we have MACs and have put Firefox on them (We did that anyway not due to Frog). We can't complain about those issues because we have had other sites like Sharepoint which have had just as much trouble over the years and problems with other sites. Frog have recently been employing more developers and technical support people though. It does work on Safari but some pages are not perfect as I noticed on my iPhone but some of these problems have been fixed in the last few updates we have had.

 

Creating websites I can not stress how easy it is we have an Art Teacher who is one of those "Clueless and non IT Literate people" yet she is able to work on 5 websites which she created. Frog with us have not been afraid to keep in contact and their support is on the end of the phone. We recently had one of their customer relations people get in contact and have setup a catch up meeting with our Frog Team.

 

I have one annoying thing with Frog and that is I am constantly coming up with ideas to add which is great for our websites. I have to stress that frog is never compared to VLEs but instead compared to Platforms that you can what you want with. There are limitations but these do tend to be the fussy things. A good example is the Forums, calendars could do with a few touches but they had not long released Walls (like facebook wall) and blogs.

 

If another School is allowing you to tie on to it, I would suggest go for it. We plan on doing this to our external centre although they will not get their "Home Drives" it is pretty much a free VLE they will get and they too can easily get involved in building sites.

 

We tried moodle but it was not what we wanted, we didnt want one person sitting there monday to friday doing it all so Frog for an IT Person to create websites its pretty simple in fact you will spend most of your time looking at creating fancy photos, flip books, flash files and trying to get things perfect then worrying about creating websites. And Frog for a non IT person is brilliant on that front, they also released FDP which means you can actually develop your own apps etc (HTML Code etc) in to Frog.

 

Although there are a few niggles you will have to worry about being a non hosting Frog site, SIMs data (which syncs for us nightly) will not exist for you and this imports as usernames as well, Home drives as i mentioned earlier and timetable/parent data will not exist. I do believe you could import it all though.

 

Our Staff and Students have been more involved since we got Frog, I am constantly having questions thrown at me and ideas and most departments have their own websites. Again no extra chargers for more users/websites and space used (one thing some VLEs actually do charge for). Which is a reason why the other site is offering you Frog

 

If you need any details by all means dont be afraid to let me know, I will never be afraid to say the bad and good when it comes to Frog but as I always say every VLE will have its ups and downs regardless who you go with.

[kerryturner]

We've had problems with frog and their support. But we seem to be moving forwards now... Edited March 1, 2012 by kerryturner
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