Dr Frost Learning

<h1>DrFrostMaths February Newsletter</h1>Dear all, I hope you are all well. For those in the UK, we are gearing up for a return to (non-virtual) school in a week. Thank you for all the support schools have given DrFrostMaths. The traffic has been heavy, with up to 3.6 million page views per day and a 600% growth in traffic since the start of the first lockdown. While there were a few server teething issues in January as usage particularly increased, particularly with the Whiteboard and Live game servers, the service of recent has been stable. The big news of the week is that we have registered with the Charity Commission, and hopefully this will be processed shortly. I am grateful to Steve Woodford (CTO of BGL Group and the technical mastermind behind CompareTheMarket), Ken Batty (our 'charity expert'), Archana Sarma (Tiffin School) and Alastair Ingall (Tiffin School) for being the founding trustees and their assistance in getting set up. There are a number of reasons I decided to convert to a charity, but the main being DrFrostMaths' core philosophy of bringing good maths resources free-of-charge to students and teachers regardless of income, and becoming a charity enshrines that in posterity. It also enables us to grow more rapidly at an international level. There's a number of exciting conversations happening in the background, including a potential large-scale expansion into the US, but I will keep you posted. Do follow <a href='https://www.twitter.com/DrFrostMaths'>@DrFrostMaths</a> for daily updates on new features and other developments. <h2>New Features</h2> <ol> <li>Further development and stability improvements to the DFM Whiteboard, including the ability to select a whole class as a teacher (so you can tell who in your class is not connected), the ability to temporarily hide student names and a handy 'Clear All for All' button. You can now also select any Key Skill questions within your worksheets. <li>Further development to the DFM Live! game, again including the ability to select a class as a participant option, resolving issues of a topic repeating or late joiners getting a random question, seeing the number of participants during the sign up phase, and perhaps most significantly being able to access results of past Live games from the Progress interface. <li>When students hover their mouse over any image in a question during a task, a 'whiteboard' icon will appear. Clicking on the image loads it in the side whiteboard, allowing them to annotate over it. These images will also appear to you if you set the 'Require Working' option to be on. <img src='https://www.drfrostmaths.com/uploads/users/1/images/img-1-1614242298-373.png' style='width:520px'> <li>A clearer numbering system for topics/skills. 'Exam question skills' now appear as 'E' numbers (e.g. E276) and Key Skills as 'K' numbers. These are used much more prominently around the site and can be typed into the search bar for quick access. <img src='https://www.drfrostmaths.com/uploads/users/1/images/img-1-1614242049-481.png'> <li>When viewing a task set to students, you can now visually see what questions have been seen by the student but not yet completed (and therefore also whether they've started a task). There's also a clearer visual indication when a student has included Whiteboard workings with their answer on a task. <img src='https://www.drfrostmaths.com/uploads/users/1/images/img-1-1614241835-506.png'> <li>A refresh button on the class data summary interface, just like the button for the individual task analysis view. <li>The ability for teachers to building Desmos-input questions on the <a href='https://www.drfrostmaths.com/add-question.php'>Question Builder</a>, including drawing of straight lines, quadratics, cubics, box plots, bar charts, frequency polygons and histograms. We've also been converting existing questions in the exam question database to make use of Desmos for answer input. <li>You can now opt out of your school appearing in any global leaderboards from the <a href='https://www.drfrostmaths.com/manage-schoolsettings.php'>Manage School Settings</a> page. <li>A large number of other bug fixes, including to do with reporting of task accuracies, overriding marks on Key Skill questions (and overriding marks via the Feedback interface), the stability of the top search bar, inclusion of Key Skill questions within the 'Weakest Questions' Word report, the generation of Desmos-produced images in Word exported worksheets, support for more mathematical notation in Word exported worksheets. </ol> <h2>New Resources</h2> <ol> <li>Many more Key Skill question generators. This one for generating random 'telling the time' questions has to be my favourite new one - the diagram is completely procedurally generated using Desmos!</li> <img src='https://www.drfrostmaths.com/uploads/users/1/images/img-1-1614242449-899.png' style='width:510px'> <li>24 SQA papers (the Scottish Qualification Authority) are currently being added to the question database. Many questions are already available but papers will appear in the 'Past Papers' directory soon so you can set these to your students on the platform. <li><a href="https://www.drfrostmaths.com/resource.php?rid=554">'All in One' Worksheet - Right-Angled Trigonometry - Part I</a> <li><a href="https://www.drfrostmaths.com/resource.php?rid=555">'All in One' Worksheet - Right-Angled Trigonometry - Part II</a> </ol> Take care! Jamie & the DFM Team