GenieNitro

The Robin Hood site is very good - lots of interaction with the kids and parents through the forums. Would love to find a clear simple moderatable way of setting up forums like that! Also taking the point about making sites colourful for kids. Have to think about how toget the right balance between fun and child friendly/professional and corporate! cheers for the ideas..

Hmm... smartpaper is a good idea. I use pdf format for newsletters etc. Some parts of our website are created using google sites. That way they can be (in theory) easily updated by staff. In practice, so far this means the admin staff uploading a copy of each letter home as they type it (thus avoiding me having to do it)! Having a staff list is quite a good idea too (didn't really think of that before!) S

Hi there, I'm sprucing up our primary school website and want it to be excellent! Would you care to share any links to really good Primary websites (that have perhaps been praised in Ofsted reports)? What features do you think should really be included to make them as useful as possible? cheers S

Hello there, I want to improve compatibility of our school website frontpage. I currently have photos scrolling down either side of the page using a html marquee type effect. It works brilliantly in all browsers gexcept for Internet explorer (of course!) So I'm looking for a free flash widget that will do a similar thing (ie have pictures of school life scrolling across or down the page). Anyone have any good suggestions? I'm not a coder and use iweb for our website development so looking for something I can copy, paste and tweak inside an iframe... cheers S

Yes that's an excellent idea! Will get on to our lovely, hardworking helpful LA contact forthwith! Steve

Well, I'm using Fronter for this as I want a news section that all staff can add to. Also, as everyone will be using Fronter anyway, I would like the news they see on their Fronter home page to be the same as on this general news/information page. Steve

Thanks for that... Sadly, Fronter (our MLE) strips out that code as 'unsafe' so it doesn't work. I have the 'reload every' plugin installed. Unfortunately it defaults to being disable off, so needs enabled every time the computer is started up. Was hoping to find a way of the refresh being automatic therefore immune from me forgetting to turn it on... Steve

Hello there, I have created a fronter information page that will be displayed publicly on a big screen I'd like the browser it is shown in to auto-refresh every 10 minutes or so, so as to include any new news that has been added. Is there a way of making Safari/Firefox default to doing this? Perhaps there is a line of html or some such which will force the page to reload? I have the Firefox 'reload every' plugin, but I would need to remember to right click the page on boot up in the morning to enable it... I'm bound to forget just when something really important comes up! Steve

Hello there, I'm giving my Year 3 class word documents to download from Fronter. Usually, the 'download' window appears on clicking the link. They can then access the file from that window. Sometimes it does not appear though and has to be brought forwards via the 'window' menu. Also, when children click a second link to download a file, it does not come to the front. This often leads to children repeatedly clicking the link and ending up with 9 copies of the same Word doc on their desktop. I sthere any way to set Safari up so that the download window always gains focus when a file is downloaded? cheers Steve

Yes would love to... as a lead teacher I can't do that directly - will have to go through the brough mle team... cheers Steve

Thanks Leco... As the vast majority of staff who will be using Fronter will access it via Mac OSX I think this is all going to be rather academic. When I choose edit file on a MAc, it gives me the option to paste the link into Word. However the open file dialog on OSX does not include a text box to type into, just a directory broeswer... so basically I think I am probably right to assume that it's not going to be workable of OSX for the time being! Steve

Hmm how odd! When I'm in the hand-in folder I dont even get the 'edit file' option on the menu next to the file. It's not there at all. When I have a go at editing a file via Win7 and Firefox, I'm given a link that it have to paste into the 'open' dialog of my word processor. When I do this, it opens up as read only so I can't edit it anyway!

Ah thanks very much! This doesn't work for me as I am running Fronter in Safari/Firefox under OSX. HAd a go in Windows 7...It wants to alow editing in the teachers' resources folder but not in the hand in folder (maybe because the children are the owners of the word files) Couldn't try it out though because for some reason the ActivX control wouldn't run... Ahh, so user friendly, this Fronter!

Hi there, this is probably not possible, but I'd like to be able to edit files (words, excel and other stuff) without downloading it from Fronter. For example, my children uploaded 30 word files today. I'd like to be able to add a comment without having to download, open, edit, save and re-upload them. Anyone know of a way of doing that? cheers Steve

Oh how I would love to! Sadly I have no admin rights, I am merely a lowly MLE lead! Borough is very keen on security and wants all that kind of stuff centralised. I find this frustrating and slow! Have asked and they tell me I am stuck with the passwords! cheers Steve

Well we are a primary school, so don't quite work like that, but the idea of a sticker is not a bad one and the kids are meant to have a reading record that goes home.... hmmm food for thought, thanks! Steve

Hi there, I'm afraid I'm not sure what AD is (just a lowly ICT coord/Fronter lead teacher!) The borough want us to do the USO thing, but the format of the usernames and passwords is just silly. The kids will have awful trouble remembering/typing them in properly (the fronter ones are bad enough!) User names will be something like this - John Higgins would be higgj34.315 coupled with the difficult letter/number password. I think they did mention a service (that we'd have to pay for) that makes the main network login the same as the USO (although not sure if this would work the same on an Apple system such as ours). Anyway, all of this is a little academic as I'm more thinking of the children trying to log in at home which is more problematic without a teacher around! cheers Steve

Hello all, you may know how to do this already, but I thought I'd share because I am feeling pleased with myself for figuring it out! Anyway, it is possible to have a background image or tiled wallpaper on any Fronter page you design. Just do this... 1) Upload an image somewhere and copy its address once it is in situ (or copy the address of a picture on the web). 2) Create a new container anywhere on your page and choose to 'insert text'. 3) When the text editor comes up, click the little 'source' button. 4) In the source box type: <body background="full address of the picture you will use"> 5) Save and , voila, a pretty background picture. The background will show through the containers too so one needs to fill these with a table (one cell set to size=100%) that has a coloured background. I've been happily making pages since I found this out and feel Fronter is a much less drab place now! Steve

Hello all, because I am fed up with the slow progress we are making with our Fronter implementation (SMT apathy/lack of training for other staff) I have decided to see if I can get the kids on boards and work from there. I have put lots of stuff on Fronter for them to do and plan to give each class a short introduction before I send them on their way. Thing is, my experience from working with my own class is that the little loves find it hard to memorise their usernames and passwords and lose the little cards that I give them. If I'm setting 300 odd kids off, I'm sure to have loads of them knocking at my door of a breaktime demanding new cards/complaining they can't log on. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I might get around this? I'd like an automated system such as is used on most forums nowadays (e.g. lost details are reported - user types in their Email address (which I would need to have logged I guess) or a memorable word and the username and password are automatically sent out. Does anyone have anything like this in place? cheers Steve

Oooh yes, you're right! Sorry to doubt!!! Hmm, that might well do the job! cheers Steve

Well, I could have a link to a multi-author document on the page but I would prefer to have the messages actually on the front page itself without having to go through the whole page-editing process. As far as I am aware, one cannot create one's own news items... they are generated by the system when something happens (like a child posting on a forum or someone handing work in). Does anyone know if there's a really simple way to create a little RSS list that I could embed. Maybe a website that lets me type into a text box and it gets added to my rss feed? cheers Steve

Thanks for that, sadly there is not a 'messages' element to include, just the ones you have mentioned, so it doesn't seem possible to do it that way. Steve

Hello there, I am building a Fronter 'Assembly hall' to give children basic access to some of the VLE stuff (ie those classes without individual classrooms yet). I am going to use this instead of the 'my today' page as their default home. I'd like to have the 'messages' section from 'News and notices' included somehow on the page I am building so that any important info is right there on the front page for the kids to see when they log in (and is easy to add to). Does anyone know how to do this or know an easy solution? Thanks very much! Steve

Hello there We have an OSX network (10.4 server) in our primary school and have recently bought a load of eeePCs running XP. So that the children can open/store files in a shared area, I have set up a user called eeePC on the network. I have set up a shortcut to the OSX network on each XP desktop which takes the user to the home folder of this 'eeePC' user. When clicking the shortcut for the first time after boot, a little username and password box appears, into which 'eeePC' must be typed for the user name and then the password entered. Everything is working fine to that extent but I was wondering if there was a way to automate this logging in, to speed up the kids getting to work! cheers Steve

Depending on the model, you could use it for very simple net browsing, word processing etc... We have a couple of old slot loading iMacs and I installed OSX 10.3.9 on them. Fine for looking at Fronter! Steve