You may have noticed that the blog & news about Frog in general has been pretty quiet of late. For that we humbly apologise but moving into the new College has proved significantly harder than we assumed (And we assumed a lot!) and poor old Froggy has been moved to the back burner for a bit. However the Frog Box in ensconced in it’s fantastic new home in our first ever purpose built server room and we are reasonably ready to start a roll out to few choice departments once things settle down but not just quite yet. It’s frustrating, especially after all the initial excitement but the devil drives when needs must and there are a lot of needs at the moment. Paul & I will endeavor to keep you up to date as best we can but we have our hands full juggling a fine array of odd shaped objects shall we say.

Well where do I start. Our New College continues to loom closer with all the nice bits of electronic equipment being installed. Frog has not stood still Stu has produced some amazing templates for departmental use and we have now had the platform signed off. We are now awaiting our training days for our Frog champions. Work has been done on our PEP ready to start demos to staff when we get into our new abode in Sept. The leadership group have seen our platform and seem impressed with the progress being made. I now want to get the MLS page created to bring in the library system and work with our admin department on the assessment part of the Bidefrog platform. Lots of  things to do, not enough hours in the day at the moment.

One of the key functions within Frog is the ability for Staff to create as many bespoke resources as their heart may desire. To make this process even easier we are creating departmental page templates from which a teacher can create mini web sites, single pages, forums, quizzes, tests, etc etc in fact any kind of online resource they want.
As with our current website each department will have it’s own colour coded visual identity. Here’s a sneaky peak of current work in progress.

Because the pages are template based we can update the look and feel relatively easily as things change & develop. A key design philosophy is to make sure that as soon as a viewer glimpses a departmental resource they will know exactly which curriculum area it belongs too.

Senor Toad & I, being blokes, are pretty darn good @ getting nurdy stuff together (Well, it is our job after all) and we do try to be the hosts with the most(s) when folk make the schlep all the way down to North Devon. But I would strongly advise that you never book us to organise the catering at your wedding reception. We’ve been promising the legendary Anne Duffy a ‘Proper’ Devon cream tea for months when she nexts visits. However work always seemed to get in the way, we did even make it to Bideford’s only authentic French Cafe one lunchtime but a couple of croissants is no substitute for a proper clotted cream fuelled gut bash as we’d alway promised.
So it was with some shame & embarrassment on our part (as well as some big smiles) that when Anne turned up last Friday she’s obviously given up on us treating her to the aforementioned treat and scoured Bideford for a DIY Cream Tea kit to treat us & I have to say mighty fine it was too.
So not only are Frog purveyors of the very best learning platform on the face of the planet they can also rustle up a crackin afternoon tea too!

This year, for the 1st time, we are running a completely ‘Digital’ online election.
It would have been brill to do so within Frog but we haven’t had the chance to roll it out yet so it will have to wait.
I’m really curious as to what other Frog-Schools are doing & how they are going about it as the solution we have had to adopt is the sum of  a series of separate parts not a single package. Although they have been pulled together in one place I’d love to know about complete frog solutions. Anyhoo this is what we are doing:
To publicise the event we have used our student blog as the central portal with additional info hosted on out main website. For our straw polls we are using the excellent  ‘Polldaddy‘ & for the actual election ‘form’ we are using our install of ‘Our Web Survey‘.
On polling day we’ll have a virtual road to the polling station & a virtual poling booth to attempt to make the process as real as possible.
If you get a chance please let us know what you have been doing with Frog.

After a couple of weeks away from our Frog install during the Easter break (yes the snowboarding was excellent, thank you) , it’s good to see things really taking shape with our template.
Here’s a view of  the current student homepage. (Click to enlarge)
As you can see students will have the ability to change their profile picture & update their status once a day if they so desire.
The Movie Title section should be able to pull in any e-stream elements we have uploaded & the music menu will be able to pull in any sound files we (Admins & Staff) upload. Great for pod-casts, music performances etc
It will be interesting to see how many students use the RSS feeds feature for favorite teams, bands, games news etc too.

The build continues apace, here are some more sneaky peeks.
The landing page above.

  Department/Resources menu page.

The Staff Homepage.

Blinkin’ Flip’ this is exciting stuff!

 
As we get closer & closer to launching the good ship Frog on the College pond I’ve just built us a custom ‘Administrators’ mission control browser homepage.
I’m a big fan of custom HP’s I find they speed up work-flow, albeit only by a couple of clicks, and just get me where I want to go that little bit quicker. After all those little bits add up over time. Does anyone else out there use custom HP’s? I’m kind of interested.

I feel a bit like a kid sneaking downstairs at Christmas and tearing off the corner of the wrapping paper to see what’s inside!
Andrews now done the login template and it’s got me thinking about the possibility of having a little ‘Post It’ type widget with a daily snippet of news pre-login. A ‘Hook’ as they like to say Ooop North.

The guys in Frog Towers in Halifax have started to put together the college template. Having had a sneaky look it is every bit impressive as we thought. The designers have taken onboard all the requests from Stu Knowler and the student and staff champions to ensure we have an awesome start to our Frog experience. We are itching to see how all of the platform looks with our template but rest assured it won’t be long now.