For us FROG stood head and shoulders above the other providers that were shortlisted. With FROG you are buying into a concept of development - based around ever growing Web2.0 technologies, you are not being sold a generic off the shelf product but buying into a platform that is supported by a toolkit that the school can use to develop the platform further. What do you end up with - a system that will grow with ever changing needs, that has the flexibility to grow with a school to ensure that needs as well as innovation can always be met. This being backed up by excellent support from FROG themselves. Unlike the other products FROG encourages innovation - for schools to think out of the box and not be tied to a generic solution that may not do what school require, in the way that they require.
Monday 16 June 2008
Jumping with FROG
Not quite sure how much detail I can go into here about our own procurement process in terms of the 3 suppliers that were shortlisted but what I can say is that I am delighted that the college is partnering with FROG to develop our E-Learning solution. The decision went to our governing body and was ratified - pending satsifactory checks through companies house (all of which was successful).
We will be hosting the frogserver in house, which is an attractive option for us. An exciting part of the project is the secure gateway functionality. This can effectively give our students access to specialist software from home that they would not otherwise have access to, e.g. 2D-Design, Pro Desktop, Macromedia Suite. Students log will be able log onto FROG from home, select a client machine and then remote desktop in to that machine. The technology department have already said that this will offer a tremendous amount of support to students in KS4 with the completion of their coursework which currently stalls when they cannot get on with key tasks at home as they do not have the software.
FROG also shows a huge amount of potential to start developing different portals to address specific needs - a governor portal, transition, community - you name it we'll be able to create something that will add value to the school, enhancing the quality of teaching and learning. Am excited about the implementation meeting with FROG to start putting ideas together.
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Your comment "huge amount of potential to start developing different portals to address specific needs" makes me think about the BSF conundrum - the whole aim of BSF is educational transformation of schools, with ICT seen as the key catalysts and enabler, but the managed services approach with 5yr SLAs drives out a lot of the developmental capacity needed.
It will be interesting to see how rapidly you manage to develop your learning platform using Frog, and how many of the developments that you do would be beyond the scope of the kinds of refresh and development possible in a BSF ICT managed service.
We going to be on the crest of some big developments with FROG, I know that now - exciting times ahead :) What is becoming increasingly apparent is that many of the key IT catalysts do not necessarily sit with one provider.
For example, we are involved with a pilot for www.eventelephant.com (Gareth knows this and is looking at it) that can be used to set up school events via an event management system that can do bulk emailing, online ticket allocations/payment processing etc - these type of functionality is innovative and could play a huge part to play in facilitating family/adult learning opportunities - supporting the community cohesion agenda. OpenAPI technologies are going to provide us with an interesting way of bringing lots of third party providers together under one umbrella - this together with developments such as OpenID are going to make things very interesting. The functionality of eventelephant would be something that would be great to have in FROG, but if not available sometime in the future the opportunity to create a mash up mix of third party solutions via OpenID under the FROG umbrella is going to be very important to schools.
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