Goodbye Frog VLE, Hello Google Classroom

Recently the Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia (Ministry of Education Malaysia) announced the cessation of Frog VLE to be replaced by Google Classroom with effect from 1st July, 2019. 

The press release by the Ministry of Education below gives you more details about this changeover from FROG VLE to Google Classroom

What is Frog VLE?

Frog VLE was introduced in 2011. It is 2019 now yet many parents still ask this question "What is Frog VLE? To this day many parents are still unfamiliar with it. Not only parents but schools, teachers and students too. Many parents do not even know or have forgotten the one-time password provided by the school to "hop in". Its okay now because parents no longer have to "hop in" as Frog VLE is "hopping out" from Malaysian schools.

It is not the system which was flawed but the lack of education on how to use. At the end of the day, it became a white elephant.

From personal experience, I found the page to be filled with too many irrelevant advertisements. Our kids were told to surf into the page every now and then, I suspect to fulfil some KPIs. That was during primary school. Their secondary school utilized it better as they do get assignments where they have to go to the system to retrieve and complete.  Schools deferred in their usage of the services offered.

In fact there are e-textbooks available for free at a time when e-textbooks could not be found anywhere else but many parents did not know how to use them.

The learning curve for teachers on how to use the system to give out homework and quizzes and for students to learn how to use it was not overcome for some schools. A few schools managed to cross the hurdle and make the most of it and it is those schools which benefited from it but sadly it was not utilized by all schools in this manner.

That's in the past now and parents no longer have to worry about What is Frog VLE. Instead, lets look forward to Google Classroom.

What is Google Classroom?

Google Classroom is a free web service, developed by Google for schools, that aims to simplify creating, distributing, and grading assignments in a paperless way. The primary purpose of Google Classroom is to streamline the process of sharing files between teachers and students. Read more in Wikipedia. It is free to use for anyone with a Google account to use. If you have a google account, you can go to Google Classroom and sign in to see the interface for yourself.

The interface is simple and clean. Teachers can assign homework, comment on and grade student's work online. It utilizes several of Google's other service including Google Drive for assignment creation and distribution, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides for writing, Gmail for communication, and Google Calendar for scheduling. Teachers can also add YouTube videos in their content for students.

You can read more about the Google Classroom FAQ here and do watch the video below on Google Classroom 101 for a quick understanding of What is Google Classroom.

If you wish to know even more about the progress and status of teacher training on Google Classroom, you can join the telegram group set up by the Ministry for teachers. Anyone with a telegram messenger account can join the group and view the discussion here: https://t.me/googleclassroomtraining  Currently there are 14436 members and 3,531 members online as we write this post. There will be more to come so be prepared to have lots of notification from it if you are interested in following what the teachers are saying about the system.

Are you looking forward to the change?