DFM August Newsletter

I hope you've had a restful summer. For overseas readers, many of you will already be back and getting into the swing of things. Getting all your students set up on an online platform might seem like a daunting task, but we've tried to make it as easy as possible. Remember that the Manage Classes facility has a spreadsheet import facility. This allows you to reset the class groupings for existing accounts and create new accounts at the same time.

I'll be running a few sessions via Google Meet at 4pm on Wednesday 1st, Friday 3rd and Monday 6th (BST) specifically aimed at helping schools getting set up and where to start. I've allowed an hour, but the latter half is for questions from attendees. Click here to sign up.

An important change to notify you of is that we've just 'reset' the numberings for Key Skills and Exam Skills. We realise this is mildly irritating if you've built these numbers into your schemes of work, but given the huge number of Key Skills added over the past year, we wanted the numbers to better reflect learning order. You can find a complete list of skills here (also accessible from the 'More' menu) and a mapping from old numbers to new numbers here.

If you've used DFM with your school in previous years, don't forget the new course system. This is a replacement for the old 'scheme of work' system, allowing students to work through your syllabus with Key Skill practice, exam question practice, 'topic tests' and external links/DFM slides. You can start from scratch or use/adapt another scheme of work, e.g. an exam board or White Rose Maths. Teachers can track student progress on a course too.

The last thing to note is that there's the intention to get rid of ads on the site as soon as possible, potentially as soon as a few weeks time. Funding talks are ongoing and we have to finance our server costs (noting we're moving shortly to Google Cloud from Amazon Web Services). In the next newsletter I may be discussing a 'recommended annual contribution' from schools (a fraction of what you'd be paying for any paid subscription) to allow our charity to operate.

New Features/Resources

There's a new analytics facility for set work: you can now see a summary by question, with a breakdown of what answers students put (including variants of correct answers!). This replaces the 'Worst Questions' downloadable document, although you can order by question number or by performance (worst to best).
You can now more easily mix past paper exam questions and Key Skill questions when building a worksheet.
We've reorganised the exam skills, particularly for KS5. Differentiation is split into polynomials vs non-polynomials. For forces in mechanics, you can now filter by inclined vs non-inclined, connected vs non-connected, in equilibrium vs F = ma, and so on. For KS2-4 we've split the ratio and percentages skills to be clearer, among other splits.
One piece of feedback is that the Exam Skill videos are quite long, often covering lots of examples within a broader topics. In contrast the Key Skill videos typically just cover one worked example on that very specific question type the skill encapsulates, typically 2-4 minutes in length. Obviously the latter are preferable when students get stuck on a question and press the 'Watch a Worked Example' button, for more targeted support. Past paper exam questions, where there's a match, are now linked to a specific Key Skill, which will override the video associated with that question. Similarly, when using 'Require Videos' when setting a worksheet, it'll list the Key Skill video where there's such a link. I am grateful to our kind volunteers for linking exam questions up with Key Skills, particularly to Ms Harrison and Dr Hawkins.
Relatedly, you can now see the watch time required for each video when using the 'Require Videos' option.
Lots of new Key Skills question generators. It's now easier to see examples of each Key Skill, without a new tab being opened. Over 200 new Key Skill videos have been produced over the summer, now covering pretty much all of Key Stage 2-4. There are 704 Key Skills just for KS2-4!

All the best as you start the new school year,

The Dr Frost Learning team