What am I doing at Frog?

The eagle eyed among you will have noticed I changed jobs earlier this year and I am now working as an Education Consultant at Frogtrade Ltd, based in Halifax, West Yorkshire.

What is Frog?

Frog is a Learning Platform (sometimes described as a VLE – although we like to think of it more as a school ‘ecosystem’) that offers exceptional creative control enabling teachers, admin staff and even pupils to fully embed technology into the school’s working practices and tailor it to the needs of their school.

If you are intrigued to know what I do at Frog, our recent ‘Frog Times’ newsletter had a feature on a ‘day in the life’ of me!

So far, I’m loving it and I love the fact that I’m getting to learn about all the amazing things going on in schools around the country and the ways the Frog platform is being used effectively to support teaching and learning and create independent learners.

I’m excited about a new product that I’m working on that we are going to be launching at our *free* conference on 14th June 2011 (Birmingham ICC). I can’t say much here (don’t want to spoil the surprise) but it will be a tool to help schools know how well they’re using Frog to support teaching and learning, management, pastoral care and links with the community and will also help schools find brilliant ideas from around the world.

If you work in a primary or secondary school or are involved in compulsory education or learning technology in some way, the conference promises to be an inspirational day, showcasing some of the amazing things schools are doing with technology around the country. You can register for the conference here.

There are some exciting things coming out in a new release of Frog for Secondary schools this Spring which you might be interested to learn about:

What’s new to Frog this spring?

This spring will see the launch of our first major release of 2011 with a whole host of exciting new features coming to your Frog Secondary platform.

Over the coming weeks you will be provided with more information, but for the time being we thought we would give you a sneaky peak of what’s to come. A final date for the spring release has yet to be agreed, but this will be announced as we conclude testing and get ready to go live.

New features

Widget channels

We are adding new channels to the ever-growing Widget Store, all of which you will be able to access for free. The spring release includes the following channels:

• Vivo – allows students to track and check their Vivomiles points
• icould – access to icould’s library of careers advice videos
• Bridgeman – access to a library of images from museums, galleries and private collections
• Global Grid for Learning – provides a single source of digital learning resources.

Menus

The first menu we have been working on – the Frog Dock – is an additional way of viewing your platform which works similar to many other current docking systems, such as the one found on Apple Macs. We’ve also done some work on our Accordion Menu, a collapsible menu system for navigating around your platform.

Customisation

To customise your Frog experience even more, the spring release will enable you to create your very own unique avatar character within Frog. We are also adding the ability for users to be able to change the background of their Frog desktop, permissions for which will be controlled by the Frog administrator.

Calendar

This is a major new function to Frog. This release will allow you to enable shared calendars, gives you multiple calendar views and the ability to invite people to appointments amongst other things.

Customer request for change (RFC)

We have a number of RFC’s that have been voted for on the ideapad and a selection of the most popular ones will be rolled out with this release.

Technical area

From a more technical perspective we are also starting to make changes that will allow for double-byte characters to be displayed in Frog Secondary using UTF8, resulting in better display of foreign characters.

In addition to UTF8 there are a number of upgrades overall to ensure the stability of the platform, along with enhanced access rights management and OAuth to allow easier connections to other systems.

To get the latest information regarding the spring release please visit the Technical Support area on the Frog Community site, or why not follow us on Twitter @frogtrade

New products following the spring release

Following on from demonstrations at BETT we are also getting ready to release our Google Apps and Microsoft Outlook plug-in products. Keep an eye out for more news on this once the spring release has been fully rolled out.