vle_lover

Just like to know if anybody has recent experience of its Learning. The price seems resonable, but as the budget is a little thin this year........ I'd love to have a go at the demo site but I don't really want the incessant whining from a sales rep if I sign up for one. Thanks

I've just received an email from http://www.schoolquotes.co.uk offering to get quotes for a VLE, just enter your requirements and relevant quotes will come your way. Has anybody used them and are they any good, or just a way of generating unwanted calls from unwanted suppliers?

oops pressed the wrong button , but to quote "is it for primary or secondary?" It's for use in a secondary school

When you say sharepoint 2010, do you mean that you have built your own VLE from scratch or does sharepoint have some tools for this built in.

I know this has been asked in the past, but I would like a feel for what VLEs are being used now and how well they are working. I guess the questions to ask are Which VLE? Inhouse or Hosted? What percentage of Teachers are using the VLE, 10%, 50%, 90%?? How easy is it to administer? Does it integrate with the MIS properly? Is it expensive ?, I know how long is a piece of string but.... What do you use if for, - notices, lessons, homework, quizes, coursework, revision, reporting to parents? Are any good sites on comparing VLEs around, I've looked but it's all a bit loose. Thanks

I'm just looking around at what's been successful in the world of VLEs. Our VLE is up for renewal as I suspect are many others who started three years ago. Although some work has been put into the current VLE, due to the interface and speed issues, less that 10% of the teaching staff logged on to it last month. I was interested if anybody has had much luck in changing VLEs and launching a new one and if so what did you move from to.

So the summary is Kaleidos not very good looking, clunky and slow, but not much worse than any other VLE when you take into account that the SMT don't really know what they want, apart from being able to say they have one. Somebody must be using Kaleidos, though if you look at the number of posts to RM's own Kaleidos community site / forum, either everybody is happy or nobody is using it much as compared to the number of posts to Moodle forums.

I agree with the top down approach, and am very interested in seeing a reference site, with more than a third of the teachers and learners using Kaleidos Learning Spaces, but ... I think the best gains to be had from the technology are the Learning and Studying bit, i.e. the Learning Spaces. The portal is ok for displaying information but not much else. I might be a techie but I have been looking at the teacher and student interfaces, and I don't find it very inviting to use, from either a teaching / authoring or from a student / learning point of view. It is just so painfully slow to use and just very clunky in nearly every way, just count the number of clicks and dialog boxes to do almost anything. If we want to inspire our students into extending study time out of the class room by using the VLE, rather than just having it used in a ICT classroom it's got to be better and compete at least in speed with facebook, myspace, youtube etc, if not in looks and utility. I agree entirely about the cover, it is a really good idea, but if you are moving from into a class room at the beginning of a lessson and it takes 5 minutes to logon to your LAN plus a minute to logon to Kaleidos and then say another minute to navigate to the lesson (if you are quick at it and not distracted by students), you have lost quite a chunk of your lesson and the students attention, plus perhaps there are materials / text books to collect prior to the lesson. I think you have to look at what you want as a whole, from authoring the content to the delivery, and start using the technology in small areas to at least know what you want out of it, and be able to demonstrate best practice with your VLE of choice. I think you need to have a target for success other than just installing it and training everybody on what it is, say as above 1/3 of teacher and 1/3 of students using it(for a predetermined amout of time per week) within 2 school terms. I don't even care what the numbers are I just want to see some. I understand the attraction of Kaleidos and the other managed VLEs, in some ways it's really very good from the IT support point of view. It's very limited in what can be changed, everything in it is manual (kaleidos), so no automated processes to go wrong, except the SIMS extract and upload. Not much to configure except which of the Six colour schemes (not really themes) you have to choose. Somebody else to call(blame) when it's on the blink. The safe feeling that having a big name supplier gives the senior management. Most of the time it's really easy to do what you can do, as it is so feature poor there is not much choice anyway. I particularly like asking how do I do "this" to be told you can't do that. I agree the Change Management process needs looking at but, when you are trying to persuade a large number of users that "Public Transport" is the only option when nothing goes where you want it to or at the time you want it to or reliably turns up, and it still is very expensive you are really up against it.

I'm not sure there is a lot in the Learning Spaces part of Kaleidos, what you can do seems quite restricted and hard work to make happen. The trouble with getting non teachers, or those that don't teach regularly, to look at it, is they don't sit down and consider a whole course and how you would present it using the VLE. Kaleidos "as is" is not very inspiring to either teacher or student, and really hard, slow work. I was hoping someone would say, "We use the Kaleidos Learning Spaces and it's great, we use Product A to produce scorm compliant activities and they work fine, recording the details of the activities for a student" I was hoping I'd just got the "wrong end of the stick" with kaleidos and just not understood what it can do.

Hi I'm Mike been in IT a long long time, but now having a bit of a rest as an IT tech in a secondary school, with some responsibility for VLE. Education is a strange environment to work in, mostly nice but "Teacher Knows Best" is really ......

It appears that many schools have Kaleidos, I don't seem to be able to find many positive comments about Kaleidos. I really believe that VLEs work - the bit that is about student - teacher interaction or to be precise the "Learning Bit" Having spent time with the Learning spaces uploading resources and linking them to courses, I find myself a bit underwhelmed at what I've got for the amount of effort put in. Has anybody seen or even have a good Kaleidos implementation that say half the teachers use and half the students regularly use (at least twice a week). I have heard of lots of people who have been told that it's ok in a school down the road, but have yet to talk to anyone directly, who smiles and is as enthusiastic as a Moodle user, apart from people who have been to a show and seen a demo, or paid 20k for the pleasure and now feel obliged to say it's great. As I'm stuck with it, and it looks like a lot of people will be stuck with it if it wins the BSF contract, I just wanted a little reassurance that somebody has got it to work to some extent. Thanks Come on 70 views and nobody has anything nice to say about kaleidos?