de Ferrers Specialist Technology College – Frog Blog

What’s NEW this week on our Frog VLE?

- You can now access the E-safety page on the main student menu – you will find some useful tips and advice about socal networking and online activity and links to a number of important sites.

- Tuesdays seems to be out most popular day for using the VLE…any idea why?

- Many thanks to everyone that took part in the climate change suggestions for Mrs Hewitt.

- Jobs for students…read more below:

FROG JOBS

Student vacancies at de Ferrers – “helping to build your learning platform”

We are looking for several students interested in the following Frog VLE opportunities:

 SPORTS REPORTERS

We need a few students on each campus – girls & boys – to manage the new sports pages on the VLE. You might be reporting on big matches & college successes, interviewing upcoming de Ferrers sports stars or deciding who was ‘man (or woman) of the match’.

 NEWS CREW

Want to be a journalist? This could be your chance…we need a crew of reporters to produce our own VLE news area – local, national & world issues. We will start with an online website/magazine and some radio reports and hopefully move into video reports when we get our permanent green-screen room. You might even become the editor and write your own blog…

 RADIO STATION TEAM

de Ferrers is getting our own web-based radio station and we need more of you guys to help! Recording jingles and music, our own audio soap, beauty tips, fashion help & homework advice – we need volunteers to help us do these things.

 FROG AGENTS

As we expand our learning platform and bring in more student voice, we will need help with building widgets & webpages, managing users and moderating the forums. Frog Agents will do this – we need people who are responsible and resilient with good ICT skills, that want to learn more about managing VLEs.

 GAMES DESIGNERS

In the near future, we would like to assemble a small group of Y10-Y13 students with strong ICT skills to develop curriculum learning games, initially using some Flash templates. These games can then help students across the college with revision and making progress in a range of subjects.

 If you are interested, please submit your detailsvia the VLE ‘jobs’ page and we will get back to you, or e-mail: frog@deferrers.com.

If there is a lot of interest then we may ask you for some further details, including what you think could bring to the job.

We have recently set up an International Climate Challenge area on the VLE. This is your chance to have your say about the future of the world – tell the government what you want to see in your area to reduce climate change.

You can find the International Climate Challenge form in your “Subjects” area of the main menu. Look for the orange hand and this will take you to the resources area and drop box. Simply download and complete the form and upload it.

The Frog team are busy working on Sign Language Club page, Maths & Enterprise websites, Sports Reports, Interactive e-safety zone, new ILPs and much more…some of it should be ready by Friday…

Look out soon for adverts for reporters and radio presenters…

It’s week 2 of our Frog VLE and web traffic is up 20% on last week…keep it up, all you Frog users!

The Science website is now live and packed with stuff, including GCSE revision resources (past papers & mark schemes, podcasts and the podquiz, BrainBlast notes and quizzes), weblinks & Science news, class notes and the Nutty Professors Science Club. Special thanks to Mr Griffiths for getting the website out in time for resit exams.

From Friday, you will be able to see the school daily notices and lunch menu on your Frog homepage. What else do you want to see?

Finally, our 1st Frog competition: RADIO DE FERRERS JINGLE…..

We want you to use your ICT skills to design some short jingles or music for our forthcoming radio station. A panel of staff & student judges will select the best one for a music-related prize.

The deadline will be 1st January 2010. Anyone in Y7 – Y13 can enter.

E-mail your entries to frogadmin@deferrers.com. Good luck and get jingling…

The new users keep coming to our Frog VLE…we had 1349 individual users on Frog on Thursday 5/11/09 – that’s nearly 65% of the college after just 4 days, so well done!

Last week, we used Frog with some of out primary partner visitors during a DT transition workshop on bread-making – a very successful pilot, so well done to all involved.

We’re glad students enjoy the social networking aspect of Frog – it will now be available out of college hours – from 3:30pm – 8:30am every day and all weekends and holidays.

This week we wil be adding some of the new e-learning games to Frog pages, building the sign language club webpages, dropping in some links to Clipbank moves and much more.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SEE?

Post your comments here, or e-mail suggestions to: frogadmin@deferrers.com