There’s no excuse for the appalling lack of posts on the Frog Blog in the past year or so BUT we do have a very legitimate ‘Get out of jail’ card.
We’ve been cranking Frog virtually every day since October last and it’s been pretty successful.
You can get a better idea of what we have been up lately to via the Web Dev blog.

Essentially we launched our install to Years 7, 8 & 9 back in October & the lower school enthusiasm for Frog has been excellent.
Our suggestions box has been over flowing with ideas & we’ve even awarded our 1st ‘Frog Star’ badge to a Gracie Walker, a year 8 student, who has been using her Frog to great effect.

Staff seem to like the quick issue work setup and our challenge is now to engage them as much as we have students.

We were also invited up to this years BETT show and showcased our install to educators from across the globe!

We’ll both try much harder from now on to post more frequently, especially as we have a our 1st heavy duty staff usage survey about to be published.

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.

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!

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.

Due to prior commitments the technology department missed out on the presentation to staff earlier in the year. Last night Senor Toad brought the department up to speed on the Frog product, demonstrating some of the generic capabilities of the system. The session was well received, many thanks to Mr Gilbert and the technology team for their time, can’t wait to get our teeth into resource creation when the templates are ready.

One of the new features currently being beta tested for Frog which will be available to us when we launch our Frog in September will be the ability to ‘Skin’ our Frog. (How many Frogs can I cram into one sentence!)
Although we will all start off with our single template design we will also be able to create our own ‘themes’ which, over time, users will be able to select from their homepage. This will also give us the ability to create custom themes for SEN or visually impaired students. As Frog grows we will be able to ask students to design/submit additional themes. Hopefully this interactive feature will grow organically alongside the platform. It also means it will never get dull! Result.