Castleton Primary School in Rochdale has around 250 pupils across eight year groups. Almost a third of pupils are from minority ethnic groups, and about half of this group speak English as an additional language.
Castleton were looking for a learning platform to help the wide variety of children at the school. They wanted to make life simpler for their teachers, pupils and parents by giving them all a single point of access to things like timetables, lesson plans, assessment tools and curriculum. Frog was identified as the clear frontrunner, and was introduced in 2013.
Kath Day is a Year 4 Support and ICT Teacher and has been a Frog convert since day one as she could clearly see the effect it has had on her children’s preparation from the start. “Children are much better prepared than they used to be. Most log in over the weekend and so they come in on a Monday morning knowing what they’re going to be doing over the next week. Before we introduced Frog children were forgetting to take their spellings or homework home with them. Now they can access them from home quickly and easily.”
Another area where Frog has been especially helpful has been in the opinion polling topic in the ICT curriculum. Children have to create their own opinion poll, seek responses, and then analyse the results. Kath has been using Frog with the children to create the various forms they needed for online surveys and polls.
But for Kath, it is the children who are the real advocates of Frog. Her older children are using the platform to create and maintain websites. Kath is able to get her younger children to access games and other resources from right across the web, all from within Frog. “Before Frog, I could never have expected my children to go and visit a particular website from home. Only a handful would have done it. But I can link to it from within Frog, and I know that everyone will go and do it.”
Her children all seem to love using Frog because it is “bright, fun and easy to use”. “When you log in on a weekday morning and see messages that children have left on the noticeboard that just say ‘I Love Frog!’, you know that you have got something special!”
Kath has no hesitation whatsoever in recommending Frog to other colleagues and schools. As someone relatively new to the platform, she has been particularly impressed with Frog’s support team.“When I have a question or issue, I can phone them, speak to them in lay terms and they immediately understand and solve the problem.”