I have managed to produce a page in Fronter with a picture and links to other material stored there. This is much better than the list of folders I was originally faced with. How come I made such progress? Because the Fronter support team in the UK picked up on my comments here in Elgg and took the trouble to supply me with instructions on how to make better use of the interface. The page even contains a link to a discussion forum so I have managed to inject a bit of interactivity.
Now I feel a little guilty for moaning so publicly. I have been trying to work out why I got so stuck and I think the answer is that the teachers in the rest of my institution have not cottoned on to how to use Fronter effciciently. And as a beginner, my first instinct was to look at what other people had done. That turned out not be a brilliant idea when the examples visible to me were so unimaginative. I guess we could all do with an injection of inspiration as to how to make better use of Fronter.
Keywords: Fronter
Comments
Hi Anne,
My name is Roger Larsen. I am the founder and managing director of Fronter.
Have you got the support you needed? Don't hesitate to contact us if you need help or have questions.
I am glad to see that the learning path and page tool in Fronter helped you design the course how you wanted it to look.
Best regard, Roger
How strange that I should get two comments about Fronter on the same day but on two very different blog posts! Perhaps there is a connection that I am not aware of.
As I responded to the other comment, my use of Fronter is very infrequent which makes me a bad user. I was using it last Spring because I was covering a class for a few weeks which used Fronter as their class page. In response to my comments at the time I was sent an extract of one of the Fronter guidebooks which helped me inderstand the system rather better.
I will shortly be working with teachers from that same institution and so I need to once more get to grips with Fronter so that what I suggest integrates with their Fronter experience.
I think that my initial point still stands - and that is that I lack good inspirational examples of how to use Fronter. I also note that when I start searching for help and ideas there seems to be a strict limit on who (two max from each institution) and how much support is available and, as far as I can see, those helpful handbooks are generally only available if you have special administrator log-ins.
'We do not offer end user support' it says on the UK Fronter website but why can't there be a repository of open access documents and examples and maybe even user forums which could function without too much investment on the part of the company?
I can see that there is something called http://bugs.fronter.com which seems to me a rather negative concept to gather around! How about http://inspiration.fronter.com or http://bestpractice.fronter.com ?
Hi Anne,
I take on board your comments about the way that the data is displayed as a default but again this is designed to function and look similar to windows explorer (which is a thing most windows users will be familier with which makes for a smoother transition to the system).
The site you have come across is our bug/fault management site. This is now located at http://support.fronter.com and is not aimed to the end user but to fronter staff managing issues within the system.
Also what we mean by 'We do not offer end user support' means that it is not physically possible for us to support every individual teacher in every school we work with (i think you will agree). So what we do is build a support structure into the schools so that they have an appointed local administrator whom a teacher can contact. The person whom has received the fronter admin training (and will have all the skills to support their local school) will be trained on the correct procedures for creating problem reports to us and will be the only person allowed to contact the support team.
I do agree that it would be nice to have an "open" forum to allow sharing of good practice/ideas with all users of the system! Currently this is only available to administrators. I will suggest this to the management and see what we can do! :)
Thanks for your thoughts.
Tom Soron
UK Support Manager
Fronter - Becta Learning Platform Service Supplier