We have moved!

At the start of the month we launched our brand new Fronter website and with it, a new blog. So this blog will no longer be in action. Head over to the new site to see some of the great things we’ve got going on!

• There’s a Community section where you can join or start discussions in our forums – get helpful hints and tips from other Fronter users or share your success stories
• Watch videos
• Read our case studies
• Download Ready-to-Go Rooms
• Learn more about our Champion Schools
• See our training courses and book yourself a spot on them!

Why not visit the new website and have a good look around for yourself.

Don’t forget, you can also read more about our Fronter UK Conference and register your interest on the new website too!

Fronter’s Summer Competition!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the second half of the summer term, Fronter is launching a competition to help teachers encourage pupils to become more involved in computing and the use of their Fronter installation.

First Prize winners will be invited to join us for lunch on Thursday 2nd July 2015. Here they can take in the magnificent view of London from the famous 10th floor balcony at Pearson’s headquarters in the Strand, where Winston Churchill used to stand and survey damage caused during the Second World War.

What you need to do to enter:

Pupils – create a ‘Summer’ Fronter Page
Teachers – create a ‘Summer’ Fronter Room

What the judges will be looking for:

• Creativity
• Original information, text and ideas
• Interesting use of photographs or images
• Exciting use of a range of Fronter tools
• Carefully selected links to related info
• Videos can be added i.e. YouTube or other

How to enter:

Submit entries via our pupil and teacher entry forms. (Teachers need to submit on behalf of pupils)

The closing date for entries is Monday 22nd June 2015, entries received after this date will not be entered into the prize draw. Winners will be notified on Thursday 25th June by email.
Download our competition flyer!

Terms & Conditions.

My school visit trip

By Tina Shari

This week I decided to get out of the office and tag along with one of our fab trainers, Mark, for a few hours while he went on a school visit. We went to see East Barnet School in North London who were one of our original pilot schools and have been using Fronter ever since.

Mark and I met with Janet and Stephen, who are both Fronter administrators at the school. They told us how the Design & Technology, Science, Music and Humanity departments are all using Fronter in different ways. The key Fronter tools in use at the moment throughout these departments are Tests, Hand-in tool, the Today page, News RSS feeds and video streaming. They plan to do a re-launch of Fronter in the autumn term to get even more departments, teachers and pupils using it both in class and for homework. Both Janet and Stephen are currently developing the use of Fronter and Microsoft Office 365 and are planning to implement Microsoft OneDrive to all staff in the next academic year.

The plans for the future use of Fronter within the school cover the implementation of a new Today page with lots of ideas already developed. Create channels for teachers and students (This is great for events, school trips and even communicating with parents). Encouraging more teachers to download the new Fronter Messaging app, attendance at one of our Fronter CSS training courses for members of staff and they also plan to attend the Fronter Conference in November. So lots of exciting things coming up!

Stephen from East Barnet School had this to say about our visit;

“It’s fantastic to finally hear that Fronter are pushing forward with new apps and other developments, as well as going back to their roots.

I think the school visits are very important for you guys and this is something that needs to be done. I can imagine it takes a lot of your time. However, it has raised the confidence level in pushing the Fronter platform forward within EBS.”

A Fronter afternoon

 

 

 

Woodbridge School are kindly hosting a Fronter afternoon on Friday 1st May. Would you like to find out more about the creative use of student forums and other Fronter tools? Or perhaps an opportunity to share good practice in the use of Fronter?

Sign up to come to Woodbridge School on Friday 1st May at 4pm for a session with other local Fronter schools.

For further information and to book a place please email pearson.fronter@pearson.com by 30th April 2015.

Spaces are limited so book now!

Woodbridge School
Suffolk
IP12 4JH

General Election & Citizenship Competition

In the run up to this year’s General Election, Fronter is launching a competition to help teachers encourage pupils to become more involved in Citizenship and what’s going on in the world.

First Prize winners will be invited to lunch, where they can take in the magnificent view of London from the famous 10th floor balcony at Pearson’s headquarters in the Strand, where Winston Churchill used to survey damage caused during the Second World War.

What you need to do to enter:
Pupils – create a General Election Fronter Page
Teachers – create a General Election Fronter Room

What the judges will be looking for:

• Creativity
• Original information, text and ideas
• Interesting use of photographs or images
• Exciting use of a range of Fronter tools
• Carefully selected links to related info
• Videos can be added i.e. YouTube or other

How to enter:
Submit entries via our pupil and teacher entry forms. (Teachers need to submit on behalf of pupils)

The closing date for entries is Thursday 7th May 2015, entries received after this date will not be entered into the prize draw. Winners will be notified on Monday 1st June by email.

Download our competition flyer!

Students have the knowledge, now they need the power!

Every Champion School we visit is different. No two are the same. Whether primary or secondary or infants, they all use Fronter in different ways and to achieve different goals. They all have Fronter embedded but some started using Fronter from the Staff Room out – a communication tool for teachers and support staff to use to pick up newsletters, diaries and policies. Other schools start with student pages – exciting content, forums, tests, home learning opportunities. Some start with home school links – parent pages, sharing photos of work, using individual folders to provide targets and helpful homework tips.

Each of our Champions Schools using Fronter have made it a success via whichever route suited them best and it is now embedded into the daily life of the school community.

So how do they keep it fresh? Well, many Champion Schools have now trained up an army of helpers in the form of students! From Key Stage 1 all the way to Key Stage 5, student-created content is creating a buzz in Fronter buildings across the land!

From something as simple as changing the votes to something new each week, all the way to students who manage their entire form room online, students having the power and ownership of Fronter has a huge impact. Students may start with non-learning related items – favourite songs and football teams for example, but quickly start to follow the example set by teachers. Students set up learning opportunities, link to educational sites they find and also give a voice to other pupils by asking them what they want to see on Fronter.

The knock on positive effect in terms of e-safety has also been huge with Campsbourne Junior School recently showing us how pupils have started to moderate each other on forums, letting other pupils know when their contributions are not appropriate to the discussion in hand.

Navigation of your Fronter building

Often we spend hours making loads of fantastic pages and rooms in Fronter. Wonderful ideas which engage and excite students while keeping them up to date with their current learning. However the whole system falls down if the students find it difficult to navigate to these wonderful places you have lovingly created. If content is king, then navigation is queen in your Fronter building!

Top Tips from recent visits to Champion Schools include:

• Have clear icons on each landing page so that people can choose their navigation route simply and find the links they need on each page with minimal scrolling
• For a secondary school there are a number of choices – do you want to go to Year groups, then subjects? Or subjects then split by year group? Or shared departmental resource areas with classrooms used just for Hand-ins? The possibilities are endless but make a whole school choice so that the students are clued up and find navigation straightforward
• Student teams who feed back to the Fronter administrator can ensure that pupil voice makes an impact – let them show you what they use the most so that you can make sure these areas are easy to navigate to
• Show teachers and students how to “Add Favourite Rooms” to their personal toolbar for quick and easy access to their most used areas of Fronter
• Use the Portfolio tool or Statistics of each room to keep track of the most and least used rooms so that you can explore the reasons why. What do the most used rooms have that the least used don’t? Share best practice across the school.

Improving Biology grades with Fronter!

The Ellen Wilkinson School for Girls is a successful, multicultural comprehensive school located in Ealing, West London. The school became a specialist college for Science and Maths in 2002, re-designated in 2006 and 2009 and, following recognition as a High performing Specialist School, was awarded Training School status in 2007. The school has gained a variety of awards recognising its strengths in areas from success in adding value (Specialist Schools Award) to Investor in People (since 1999). The school is particularly proud of the SSAT Gold Award for Cultural Diversity. A recent Ofsted report also recognised the girls’ outstanding personal development and well-being. The school is in the top 100 Value Added schools in the country and are also a Silver Level Pearson Champion School.

Being smart with Fronter
In the academic year of 2011-12 Sarah Sakimoto, a teacher at the school, decided to monitor and break down the amount of pupils who had used Fronter when revising for their final grades in biology against those pupils who had not. Of the top 20 pupils who used Fronter the most for Biology (number of documents opened ranged from 208 to 34) the grade breakdown was as follows:
A = 40%
B = 15%
C = 5%
D = 20%
E = 10%
U = 10%

 

Of the top 20 pupils who used Fronter the least for Biology (number of documents opened ranged from 7 to 0) the grade breakdown was as follows:

A = 5%
B = 20%
C = 20%
D = 10%
E = 15%
U = 30%

 

You can see from the two graphs that those pupils who regularly used Fronter had higher biology grades than those pupils who had not used Fronter. There are other factors involved so we cannot say for certain that grades were higher purely because of Fronter but it certainly shows what a great influence and impact Fronter can have on pupils’ results when used in a thoroughly engaging way.

“Our biology results have gone up consistently for the past five years and I think that having and using the Fronter learning platform has played a huge part in that!”
Sarah Sakimoto
Key Stage 3 Science Coordinator

Using Fronter at St Matthew Academy

St Matthew Academy is a school for all the family and takes girls and boys from the age of three to the age of 16. Through their specialism of Enterprise they give their students every opportunity to develop initiative, creative thinking and collaborative skills through the academy’s programmes and events and through links with local businesses.

St Matthew Academy has used Fronter to apply their BTEC work collaboration across the school in order to communicate to other Primary and Secondary schools across their borough. Several projects have been created in the VLE, including an applied science room, which incorporates PSP’s, voting, hand in folders and forums.

“Hand in folders, forums, all the basic tools are very effective for the staff and the students engage with it easily.”

Students are encouraged to work at home and hand in homework via Fronter. This means that even if a student is away from school through illness, they can keep up with deadlines and discuss topics relating to the subject. This has resulted in more students being able to stay on track with their learning outcomes, and a huge increase in overall attainment level in the BTEC science course with an improvement in student grades. Ben Smith (Head of Science) adds;

“Fronter was a key part in using the BTEC, it was there to solve the problem to keep the students communicating.”

The next project the school worked on was a 6 year medical project course starting in February 2012 titled “Home grown doctors in Lewisham.” Using Fronter they hope to create a “transition room” and a “Lewisham St Matthew’s room” to help bring the surrounding schools’ activities together using it essentially as an online journal with an interest to use Collaborate as a recruitment tool.

“It’s beneficial to go with other schools in the area that are using Fronter. You can collaborate with tasks and work across the borough.”

Fronter – 21st century tool for a 21st century education

Enfield Grammar School created a Citizenship Fronter room for students to log in. The homepage is what students first encounter when they visit the room, where they can find links provided to complete student voice surveys, access current affairs and see what is new on Fronter. There’s also a homework reminder section, links to relevant Citizenship research and information websites, a feedback section about the room and educational related videos.

Do students use the Citizenship Fronter Room?
Fronter enables the teacher to keep track of the usage of the room over time. From the start of September 2012 – end of January 2013 there were:

• 3000 Individual hits
• 8000 Documents viewed/downloaded by students
• 530 discussion forum comment left across 20 discussion topics
• 400 Different students have logged on to the Citizenship Fronter room

Gifted & Talented Section

Students can access further reading on the topics studied within citizenship. Students can look at detailed PowerPoints embedded into the Fronter London MLE to stretch their knowledge base. The G&T cohort would also be able to attempt challenging project work in the near future.

Student Voice

The Citizenship discussion area on Fronter allows students a safe and controlled space where they can debate and discuss the latest current affairs or give virtual feedback about the school and each others work.

 Years 7, 8 & 9 landing pages

When students enter through the home page to the landing pages they have a host of information, resources and guidance about PSHE & Citizenship education. The rooms provide support for all students including those that are on the SEN register or the G&T register.

“Assessment criteria, support and help is provided in a virtual way to any student, learning support assistant or parent to help support their child progress in citizenship.”

Why is this useful? 

• Students who are absent can view the PowerPoint and catch up on missed work
• All teaching assistants are able to see what topics are likely to be taught in upcoming units
• Any student in seclusion or excluded can still access the course content and keep up with the class
• If students wanted to show their parents what they will be studying it is there to be accessed

Year 10 GCSE Citizenship landing page

Assessment criteria, support and help is provided in a virtual way to any students when completing their coursework and controlled assessment pieces. Checklists of what to do and downloadable fact file resource pages are also available.

GCSE Students are able to download and view each lessons PowerPoint. Students have access to download a homework sheet incase they lose theirs.

Extension A*-C homework tasks can be set to stretch the most able students and ensure they aspire to exceed their target grades.

For those students who prefer to learn from multimedia, recommended ‘videos to watch’ links are provided and podcasts are available about the different topics.

Year 11 GCSE Citizenship landing page
Help and support for the Y11 controlled assessment is provided in the form of Prezi-Presentations and YouTube clips.

Y11 GCSE Students can also print out the lesson notes and create their own citizenship revision material.

They also have access to view and download all the Y10 GCSE work and revision notes and homeworks so they can re-cap the units taught last year for their upcoming exams.

Setting emergency cover work
The Citizenship Fronter room has a section where cover work can be uploaded and saved for a later date. Both print outs for students to fill in or PowerPoints for the cover teacher to work through can be provided.

Encouraging students to read
The Citizenship Fronter room has a section where links are posted about recent events in the news or newspaper articles which may be relevant to topics being taught or the GCSE examination content.

Citizenshipgames room
The Citizenship Fronter room has a section students are actively encouraged to play educational games related to content taught within the citizenship national curriculum.