Cramlington Learning Village

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Pre-Frog
Read about our vle journey pre-Frog.
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Choosing the right VLE
Read about how we made the decision to choose the right VLE for our school.
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Setting up Frog & how Frog has supported us
Read about how we tailored Frog to our needs and how Frog has supported our development.
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Our VLE
Read about our excting VLE in more detail.
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Our VLE

Pre-Frog
As a school we spent a number of years dabbling with VLEs. We were aware that all schools were soon to be required to have a VLE and wanted to make sure we had the correct VLE in place ready for this.

We did manage to find a VLE which conformed to Ofsted’s criteria for having a school VLE. Unfortunately we were unsuccessful in finding one which conformed to our own. Having already built up a very successful Intranet full of schemes of work, lesson plans and resources this was a much easier, more structured way of planning lessons and enabling staff and students to find resources than any VLE could give us.

The VLEs we tried were clunky, dull and unintuitive. It took far too long to get anything worthwhile out of them other than a central repository of documents which was partially searchable. In short, a VLE did not benefit learning in the school at all and if anything, it hindered it.

This does not mean that we could not see the potential in a VLE. The idea of something which was available 24x7 which recognises users and their groups was clearly going to open up possibilities. I guess we needed to wait for the right platform to emerge.