mthomas08

Does not help that staff are expected to produce endless amount of reports for student A when they have another few hundred kids to worry about. Their life is like a Doctor, no longer improving a patients health but instead producing a lot of paper work for what exactly?

Get out of Education? Did you do a braveheart moment?

Done and agreed with @pete

I am glad some one brought this up, we too are considering this one day a part of a games club we used to run. Was useful as you said as a "Reward" and encouraged students to behave. We managed to get a copy from the students H drive and is pretty easy to create a basic server etc. Not sure what the legal issues surrounding it though but for us it will not connect through our service provider to the minecraft servers. BUT there are work arounds again not sure about the legal issues about that. Health and safety wise I have not had complaints from staff other than "Students playing during lessons".

For a time we used Survey Monkey, although free has its limitations when we get to heavily using Frog we plan on using that for quizzes/surveys etc.

Its a shame you dont use it to its potential, just curious are your SLT backing it and pushing it out? Lucky (and sadly unlucky) for us IT Usage of anything is never under used in fact some times staff will use any excuse to actually use it. Like projectors I remember when no one wanted to use them and we pushed them and now.... they simply can't live without them and its a daily pain for us. We actually use Sharepoint for our Help Centre - we do love it but hopefully Frog Forms develops so we can transfer over, Sharepoint currently is a bit too "Corporate" for us though good that MS is developing an education version though. @camel Afraid some places don't actually do the research/time involved. We would of gone down the Moodle route if we didn't go for Frog.

Yes totally right, if you are after the basics then it is simple/cheap or even free to get it done your self. We went for Frog because we wanted so much more with little setup server side (plus technical support/development). As mentioned 5K for some thing you could do your self is a lot of money, to me seems like they are just simply the "middle" man. Then again between us 3 people here in support we have the technical know how to get that done and already have the backbone in place (TMG/Virtualisation/Bandwidth) to get started.

I was wondering that, wouldnt it make sense in putting in a bit of time for Moodle. We are not a moodle based school but 5K on something which appears to be using free stuff in the first place isnt really the best option is it? I watched the video and wasn't that good, sites looked very basic and very boring.. not really the "Best Learning Environment in the world".... certainly not for 5K. Then again thats my opinion.

VLEs Required? Nope. The Gov pulled that plug. Do you need it? I would say yes. Cloud: Pretty much is what the VLE stands for, cloud is not just about externally hosting it is access to anything everywhere. And Cloud still has a long way to go to really get things where we as a school need them to be. We purchased Frog and with this we get access to a VLE, SIMs data (timetables etc), Parent Portal and SecureGateway Externally/internally. So technically that is classed as Cloud, when people (non IT Literate) use that term they actually dont know what Cloud means. We house our Frog Server and we pay Frog a Set Fee for Support, Server Maintenance and future Updates. This means we are not paying an external company just to host a server sitting in their cooling area instead of it sitting in our cooled area. Do we need a VLE: This is a big yes, we want external access to our resources and with Frog we have an impressive looking VLE that students can get involved in. As a result they also have input and so do staff - thats an important thing and we have the backing of SLT which again is an important step in my view. With Frog granting easy external access to our network drives again Frog are on call to support this function along with Securegateway/Parent Gateway/Sims Data transfer. We actually had a meeting last night discussion Digital Communication/Curriculum/Marketing and although as always half of it was a waste of time the other half had some reminders that Students are getting more technology at home. Mobiles, IPads and laptops etc - which in turn why not use this to your benefit as a School? for us down the line we want Students to access Frog through those devices. Will all of them do it? Nope but how many of them actually would? I actually have had some students ask if they can sync their phones with our email which they can. I have not even advertised this with Students yet but at least 20 staff do currently use this facility. More and more of our staff are wanting to use External access to our facilities which with Frog again they can do this and students will be able to as well. Is this a benefit? I would say a huge yes, we have given network drive/SIMs access externally which are currently being used well. And with Students being given this facility we do hope it will improve Learning and in turn improve Grades. We also have the occasional student who has been sent home/ill/injury etc again they can access this facility. We have had a VLE for a while (non Frog) and the biggest down fall with it was the look and feel which was why we switched to Frog. We wanted more staff/students involved with a VLE Platform, we wanted more ideas and new ideas being thrown our way. Strangely enough we have had more people involved in the short time of owning Frog then we have ever during the 5+ Years of our previous VLE. Although that has given us the ability to see what works well and what does not and it does require more then one person sitting there doing it. So in the end if you have the backing of SLT and a Team actually willing to push it forward and Departments actually willing to go along with it and come up with ideas as well you can really go some where with a VLE.

We have been having severe issues and its been certain PCs - theres were built with Windows 7 using FOG. Now we went round to all the PCs having this problem where they sit there loading the roaming profile for the kids for 15+ minutes and we rebuilt them. This solved our problem. Only issue to remain is when their roaming profile needs deleted (because I need to lock it down even more) they have to logon and logoff then log back on. Their first logon does not load the roaming profile.. luckily enough we are not having to delete roaming profiles often. Probably one student a week.

I have setup disk quota, anyone with mass amount of files I drop their their quota and delete the music - this seems to work well.

We have purchased a print solution, the amount of printers/paper/ink we go through is insane as a result our new solution which is going to be tested in a block will fix our problems (hopefully). No matter where you print you will need to input your code for it to actually print off. If you dont collect then there is no paper waste. We will also force duplex printing and any large printing or mass duplicates (photocopier being cheaper then printing) these will automatically be sent to reprographics. Fingers crossed it all does what it says on the tin. We have urged staff to pause their printers and only allow what they want through.

One thing I would suggest is really look around and do your home work, write down what you want/do with your current VLE. Next how much can you really spend and do you want something that when its done can be maintained by any one. We currently have frog secondary and I have seen Frog Primary (I was quite impressed) and would suggest giving them a call concerning that. We spent months browsing around at all sorts and it was either frog or moodle but frankly we didnt want to outsource/have one man dedicated to doing it all and we wanted full control/spend ages getting it setup, So frog was our best bet. Although this is just for us because it suited our needs and every school is different. We wanted the whole package and I must say the building platform on Frog is really impressive it is incredibly easy to build sites (we have a non IT Literate Art teacher building 4-5 sites). Although has its flaws Frog is rapidly growing and is constantly developing as well. As a primary though I would check the cost of it, I am guessing it would be a lot cheaper then what we got due to us being a Secondary (We got parent portal, securegateway and them to build a custom VLE/School Website).

Their own fault for having an automatic system inplace set by Sony? Surprised they have that to be frank, Apple like to do their own thing but not in this case. People would have been angered because they think they are purchasing through 100% iTunes system. Even I didnt know it tied in with Sony, apparently though Sony corrected the mistake instantly so Apples loss would of been what £100 which I am sure they can afford?

You are right, problem occured when editting pages. I have put my setting back in to place so wouldnt worry about it if I was you. Strange though your setting wasn't there to begin with but here it had already been enabled.

Shouldnt be a problem, will get back to you shortly

Strange that you should bring this up I did see this pop up on the IdeaPad, you can use your votes and raise the popularity of it. Although its a nice idea as an option I am not sure. Your managed service does cover them looking after the physical server on hardware issues and I do like not having to worry about that box. On the primary school basis this is probably much more better then having another box dedicated to something thats not going to be heavily used, as an Academy though for us I would prefer a dedicated physical box. Still if this did come down the line Frog would only have to worry about supporting the software side of things and the on site technical staff can worry about the physical server. As for snapshots not my preference to rely on that for backup/restoring especially when the current backup process could do with a few tweaks

You have covered the Admin side of Moodle (Installation), Graphics/Video/Audio, Templates and the overall Platform creation and maintaining. I really think you have everything possible on that list, not sure if there will be more skills that could be useful. I am currently doing ours and that list covers all that I have done or doing. Although this will probably be grouped under the development side, he/she will have to build a working close relationship with departments. Which I have been doing

Very strange, our integration had zero issues with AD and SIMs. I have just checked, our setting is enabled. Only thing I can really think of is when did they originally setup your AD Authentication? (Without the Store Enabled). Our Frog server was installed a year ago.

Same here, we use it with SharePoint till we get everything on Frog.

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.

Interesting question integrating VLEs, we currently have two VLEs one being Frog and the other being moodle. The guy responsible for the moodle one is supposed to be working on integrating them both with single authentication. Frog is AD Authenticated which is great, it does provide OAuth which allows Frog to be the login system for the moodle VLE. No idea if the guy has managed to get this working, currently we have a BAR (point) system on that VLE which is by far the best I have seen. It had been designed for about 3-4 years to what staff did and did not want, gives all sorts of choices and the info is pulled out of SIMs (manually). If he can get that done then that website (I believe) can use the same login that users have for Frog. As for Scorm packages we have had a few and seem very basic and slow when accessing (plus it just seems to be a file/folder structure)... so far Scorm packages seem the least of our worries

+1 on this. I am uncle to 5 kids and you have described both sisters kids (one good, one bad). You can tell who has been brought up properly and who is left to do what they want regardless.

Some good things on this list, good point on the "Find out what the school has to offer" - check their current website. It really does depend on what is currently available at the school. If it was this School then: Voice over IP Video Conference Increased reliability/redundancy (recently installed a home drive system, one server goes down other picks up) Complete site wide Wireless Coverage (currently @90%) Upgrade to Windows 7 from XP on all machines - again currently getting there Further Dev on VLE/External Access to everything - this should all be done within the next 12 months (we are not long a Frog School) All old PCs/Laptops replaced with good equipment - again we should be done after the next bunch of purchasing. I would like to at some stage train staff more. So I hope the above add to your ideas dont be afraid to use them all, it does depend on the School/budget/smt and what the School Ethos is on IT. If like us IT mad then the entire list would be loved.

We ditched ours for Frog our staff suffered the exact same thing that you are - Lack of interest. This was due to a number of factors for us: Staff didnt feel like they had any input They had to wait for the 1 person to get it done (Only he knew how to edit anything) Took forever for changes/updates to be implemented That 1 person was also hard to reach or contact The look and feel of it was appauling At the top of my head they were the ones, but there is probably more. We had the choice of Frog or Moodle (the moodle choices we found didnt suit what we wanted). We wanted complete control and no additional costs for more users, space used, sites and bandwidth. We also wanted something which could be made to look fancy in little time that we could also edit if we wanted with several staff and not 1 single person being responsible for it. So after doing our long list of *wants* Frog was the closest thing. We had talked to SMT and Staff about what they felt over our current VLE, SMT decided perhaps we need some thing else to take us forward. So we in IT and the Head of ICT researched for months in to VLE Choices and when it came to costs we also planned for a 5-7 year Ark at least and not the typical 3 years. Frog being incredibly expensive in the short term but long term it changes (when you are paying some one a lot of money dedicated to Web Development for 5+ Years). In total it has taken us about a year to get a new VLE, we really did put the hours in to it *edit We also did a lot of survey monkey's for staff and students because the VLE is important to the students as well and if the kids want to use it more then staff will too. Since getting Frog I have had more interest in the last 3 months than the 4 years of our other VLE.