End of year quiz, question programmers wanted, upcoming developments
Dear teachers,
Congratulations on getting to/towards the end of the school year! I really hope you all have a restful summer, and thank you for the support throughout the year. Per popular request, the maths department at my own school, Tiffin (where I will continue to work one day a week) has put together a general knowledge quiz, which you are welcome to use. You can find the quiz
here. It includes a video observation round (my own contribution!), and a music round.
A reminder about subscriptions, and what's to come
As per the previous letter, we will be continuing the same subscription model for the 2024/25 academic year. The base cost is £600 + VAT but your school can opt for any level of discount up to 100% based on your school's ability to afford; there will be a grace period in September for schools to organise. Subscription fees supports our increasing running/staff costs as we scale up our operation - we are a charity and do not make a profit. We offer a huge amount to schools, from task setting and monitoring, creating your own collections of questions using a huge bank of exam questions and 1500 question generators, and of course our huge collection of slides. But a huge number of developments and improvements are on the way!
- We are improving our PowerPoint offering, particularly for KS3 and KS4 Foundation Tier, thanks to a team of 5 contributors, led by our new Director of Learning. We will be releasing our first batch of new/updated resources for September.
- We are also massively increasing our number of Key Skills, our random question generators, with the view to emulating all common types of exam questions. New Key Skills are released on almost a daily basis.
- We are reorganising the site to combine the 'downloadables' section, course system and skill explorer all in one place. As a school you'll simply select the National Curriculums and exam boards/publishers that are of interest to you, with the site experience more tailored to your students' and teachers' needs. We hope to release this early in the coming academic year (and September if possible).
- We are working on Dr Frost 6, to be released mid/late next academic year. This will include a brand new user interface, a new Live! game, new task setting modes (including 'follow up tasks', which sets different questions for each student based on what they were weaker at), better tools for measuring progress, Google Classroom integration, the ability to schedule a scheme of work to a calendar and in general focusing on the experience for students as they progress through a curriculum or scheme of work in self-directed learning (including more use of AI).
Dr Frost 'Top Tips' Training Sessions
Maddie will be running training sessions throughout September and October for current users who want to check that they're using the platform to its fullest potential. We'll also of course be running more general onboarding sessions. Feel free to contact
[email protected] for more info.
Calling all teachers who are programmers!
Looking for some summer work? We're also looking for 2 new people to join our Key Skill development team, paid on the side of your teaching job. Key Skills are random question generators. We make extensive use of the Desmos API to generate diagrams, and we are very fastidious about clear, detailed explanations for answers. Our developers use an in-house engine to produce these question generators. We use PHP, but no prior PHP knowledge is required. If interested, please email
[email protected] with your CV and a brief cover letter.
New Key Skills
Have a great summer,
Jamie & the DFL team