Shastings

@zag, Were about 14 months into using Kite and we're very pleased with the product so far! You're welcome to come and have a look. PM me for details

I use Kite regularly with iOS and frequently with Mobile Safari: Other than some of the usual issues with scroll bars on iPad/iPhone the only real problem is staff and kids uploading files to Kite portfolios, etc, as the file system on iOS is generally inaccessible. I understand that Kite are working on an app to overcome these issues, which will be most welcome. However, neither of these are actually problems of their making, more peculiarities of iOS. Google Apps integration will help as many other apps already share to Google Drive quite easily and presumably it will be a short hop from Google Drive onto Kite. We have found that Chrome is the most glitch free browser to use with Kite. I've tested Kite briefly with Android while assessing mobile devices for general use within the school and whilst these tests were far from thorough or scientific I don't remember any significant issues.

Kite is the offering from e4education. We adopted this system at the beginning of the academic year to replace our much hated RM Portal: I can't believe the difference and neither can my colleagues. We spent most of last year researching, getting demos of and running trials of various VLE products and this one came out on top for our purposes: very easy to use, does what it says on the tin, more than flexible enough for our purposes; which, in terms of ease of use at least, is more than I can say for many of it's competitors. Costs are also very favourable.

Had a good look at several VLE products during last year including Open Hive, Frog, Real Smart and Kite. Went for Kite in the end as we found it to offer the best balance of facility vs ease of use. We've now had the system in for 6 months and so far we're very pleased indeed, with generally very good feedback from both staff and students using the system. We don't have any kind of dedicated team to work with our VLE so ease of use for all staff was vital. Of the products we tried Kite and Real Smart were the two that really stood out in terms of ease of use. During our research we saw some very impressive end product from a number of providers, but when we started looking under the hood we often found some pretty unintuitive and even downright awkward obstacles to regular teaching staff constructing effective learning materials, which ranged from bizarre file handling to very limited page editing for those not versed in html. I guess ultimately it's a horses for courses issue, but for our purposes certainly Kite has been a resoundingly positive choice.