Hello all,
We launched September 2015 and it has been very useful. We didn’t have a VLE before; we had Moodle so anything would have been a win to be fair.
In general, our approach has been to make sure staff know how to use it so it helps them day to day, it supports children’s learning and improves transparency and inclusion for parents.
We have stayed transparent by providing training tools on Frog, getting SMT on board and keeping the energy up whilst going to as many MSL and events as we can.
Frog does a lot of things for us and we have a lot planned, just with Frog learn (not including frog parent, progress and play which we are looking at currently).
Frog tends to do most things better. Given, sometimes files can be clunky such as getting things out of a folder but apart from that everything else is quite useful.
We are using it day to day for staff as a working system. Everything we use daily can be put on Frog and this makes things easier and more streamlined to use. Students can easily access learning support and keep up to date with what’s happening throughout the school and parents can get more involved in their children’s learning (in addition to supporting them to support their children, as the resources used in school are readily available).
Sites can be about anything and everything and can be as private or public as you want them to be. The limits are only with what you can think of! Staff, students and parents use their dashboard as their access hub for information, learning resources, access to areas and to communicate with the school.
I wouldn’t say that we have ‘lost staff’ but there will always be those who are more comfortable with new technology and those who are not so comfortable with it. It is up to the school to target those who need help as well as at the same time pushing your top achievers with Frog to make sure there are good successful examples to show them! The key here is to provide good training, allow staff to have time to play and experiment with the platform, get SMT on board first and foremost and make sure that it is maintained, staying relevant and up to date.
There are some great examples on the community site of success stories, including my presentation in the eat share and learn at BETT 2016. My slides on how we launched at Rushy Meadow Primary should also be on the community site. The community site has been great for us as a reference guide. We have also kept in good contact with Frog, the service desk and our SRM who make sure that Frog is working and that there is a good relationship between Frog and the school.
One example of this is that I know Greenshaw High School have gone paperless. They have made it so that Frog is their main system in school, all homework goes through Frog and they are reaping the benefits of the system and how easy it is to use and manage.
A good thing to use might be the SAMR model which you can find online. We started by making sure that Frog was running successfully alongside other current systems and, given time, Frog is gradually taking over as all the time more and more people are asking about it and saying how effective it is being.
Nothing happens over night!
Harrison O’Neill
Rushy Meadow Primary
