March Newsletter - new roles and a survey!

Apologies to those who have received this email a second time - we had many reports that this email ended up in junk or not received at all.
Firstly, a very exciting announcement - the dream role for the right person!

Director of Learning (Maths) - £65-70k

We are seeking a highly talented and experienced teacher or product design specialist with a deep understanding of end-to-end curriculum content design: from initial strategy and concept, through to production and QA, impact and evaluation and subsequent iteration. This person would ensure we have coverage across the National Curriculum in our different content streams, with some expectation to produce content, but also a budget to form a panel of experts (both primary and secondary), contract out resource production and make future permanent hires. Click here for full information.

Usage survey

For any users of the Teacher Tapp app, you may have noticed some familiar maths sites appearing within the last week, including us; that may have been our doing! But we'd love to also do an internal survey to see the extent you use different Dr Frost Maths features, their impact, and what features you might want to see. This, along with the Teacher Tapp data, will feed into a comprehensive growth plan with a large associated funding grant, so we'd be grateful for your responses. Click here to complete the (short) survey.

We're looking for a Scottish 'Regional Champion'

Are you a Scottish teacher and a keen user of Dr Frost Maths? Then would you be interested in spreading the word by looking after a region of schools in Scotland? This would involve organising virtual or face-to-face sessions with schools, and you will be paid per session. Please contact Maddie (maddie@drfrostmaths.com) if you might be interested.

Relatedly, I'm doing a 'tour' of Scottish schools in the summer term (along with Hong Kong!), so watch this space.

Using DFM for Exam Practice video and upcoming 'advanced DFM users' training

We had a request to have a training video on using Dr Frost Maths for exam practice. Maddie has put together this video, which we will put on our training page soon.

In addition, Maddie would like to run an 'advanced DFM users' webinar in the summer term and would love to hear from the DFM community about creative ways they use DFM in their lessons, for example sharing a screencast, and/or having a slot in a collaborative session. Contact maddie@drfrostmaths.com for more info.

'Dr Frost 6' Roadmap

We're constantly trying to innovate and improve our offering, so here is some early indication of some of the things we are likely to be focusing on:
  1. Teachers love our PowerPoints, with over 20 million downloads, but we feel that our coverage is slightly patchy in areas. We will be concentrating on more resources for a broad range of abilities at Key Stage 3, complete coverage of GCSE Foundation Tier, and starting to create PowerPoints and worksheets for Key Stage 2 (primary) level. More generally, we will be refining our existing content, and will harness the expertise of teachers and content creators.
  2. As part of this, we are hoping to craft 'off-the-shelf' schemes of work that departments can use, along with planning notes.
  3. The promised new virtual whiteboard will eventually be coming, with a brand new interface, the ability to drag around and resize existing items, and improved interaction with students connected to your whiteboard. We'll be marketing this as more of a standalone product.
  4. Similarly they'll be a new version of the Live! game. We'll be keeping what features make the existing game great, but with a more theatrical and polished offering, including more options such as team play.
  5. We'll be replacing our times table game (which is now 8 years old!). We're hoping to involve a game designer, but from a pedagogical perspective, we want to offer analytics to teachers on times table performance and intelligently give questions to students that combines recall with tables they're weaker on.
  6. There is some duplication of functionality between our 'courses' system and the 'skill explorer' interface where you set tasks by topic, so we'll be streamlining things by absorbing the distinctive bits of the course system into the skill explorer to combine them. We'll no longer have the separate 'UK Curriculum' topic tree and the 'By Course' option - instead 'UK Curriculum' will just be another course and schools will be able to select their default organisation of topics.
  7. Related to this, we'll be allowing departments to align their scheme of work/course to a calendar, giving you the option to automatically schedule tasks (and recall tasks) on the relevant topics for the term, as well as feeding in to improved algorithms for suggesting to students what they should be working on.
  8. We'll overall be carefully reflecting on the student 'learning journey', including a revised home dashboard.
  9. We'll be adding accessibility options for students with visual impairments.
  10. Longer term, we will be looking into making our services available in other languages, and expanding into Physics and Chemistry.

New Key Skills

Lots of new Key Skills courtesy of our talented team of Key Skill developers! If you have any requests, contact gaetan@drfrostmaths.com.

Have a lovely weekend!

Jamie & The Dr Frost Team
(c) Dr Frost Learning is a registered charity in England and Wales (no 1194954)