Christmas Frog

Rich Williams from Bradley Stoke Community School has been busy creating a christmas design for their VLE.  They’re also planning to do the same for New Year, Easter, and Halloween.

Cool, isn’t it?

Frog Shortlisted for the Bett Awards 2010

Frog have been shortlisted again for the ICT Company of the Year in the Bett Awards 2010 !!

Up against us this year are:

• Avermedia
• Capita Children’s Services
• Education City
• Espresso Education
• Inclusive Technology

Let’s hope this year is Frog’s year !!

A BIG thank you to everyone at Frog for everything you’ve done this year.  It’s because of how hard you folks work and how much you care that we get shortlisted for awards like this.

Thank you.

Sneak Peek at Frog’s Assessment Widgets

Kris has been putting a skin onto our new Assessment (SIMS) widgets.  Here are just a couple to look at, but this is nothing compared to what else we have.  I’ll get a screenshot of some of the other ones up in the next week or two.

 

These are still in development, but I thought that from here on in, I might provide a sneak peek of all sorts of things that we’re doing so you folks can get a taste of what we’re working on at any given time.  The deal is though folks, that you don’t ask me when or if anything is due for release – that info will have to come through formal channels – this is just me sending the odd bit of unofficial info out, we’ll call it our little secret ;0)

More Widgets – You’ve gotta see this!!!

The boys at Ninestiles have decided to up the game.  I’m not going to tell you what it is, so you’ll have to take a look.

Brace yourselves……

More Frog Widgets

Niall Brennan from Arrowvale School (a relative newcomer to the Frog family) has sent me some widgets they’ve done, didn’t take them long to start creating!!

 

And here’s what they look like in their dashboard:

Nice one Niall – our implementation team tell me that Arrowvale will be one to watch!!

Humping Frog

Lucy was visiting Judd School today.  Apparently they have a mascot for Team Frog (one of 12 competing groups on a recent competition day – they came second….)

While the school is by all accounts on the hunt for a blue frog, the green one appears to have taken more than a liking to the Frog server…..

Songs in Code

I found out today that the twitter trending topic of Songs in Code back in August was actually started by our lot.  Apparently the Frog development team dragged the IT industry to its knees for two days writing bits of code that were essentially cryptic clues for songs.  This got picked up world wide and IT savvy folks all over the world started inventing their own cryptic song references.

For some reason, the telegraph says it started in the States, but those in the know are aware that it was, in fact, the Frogs that were guilty.

Telegraph article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/6066324/Song-lyrics-in-computer-code-on-Twitter-can-you-name-the-tracks.html

There’s even a database started now: http://songsincodedb.com/

And if that’s not sad enough, some bloke has even put a song on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4j8XAQPoAs

Anyone, one here that I thought non-programmers might be able to get too:

SELECT person WHERE AGE > 12 AND AGE <20 AND SMELLS LIKE ‘%SPIRIT%’

Anyways, with an amnesty on questions like, “how did you find the time”, if anyone from Frog reads this, please post a comment to let us know which individual was guilty of starting it…..

EDIT: Steve, thanks for the tweet – background here: http://su.pr/1mP4Z5 and stats here: http://su.pr/1qmUss

Frog Development Environment coming soon!!

Ninestiles School in Birmingham have been beta testing our new Development Environment  (yes, you’ll soon be able to extend Frog in any way you want, by creating your own code and database systems within Frog itself, and even pushing your hard work up on to the Frog Exchange for others to share the benefit of)

Ben Hall and Mo Karim from Ninestiles have created a few widgets of their own.  I thought I’d share them with you ;0)

First off is a Parent Booking System for Consultation Evenings:

They’ve created their own LIVE connection to their cashless catering system:

They’ve also created a Live College Competition Graph:

and the Head of the College can add an Event at any time through a simple database interface:

On the assessment side, they’ve created their own flash based connection to a Frog database for a Progress Graph:

And finally, they’ve extended the new social networking system to include Mentoring data in the Student Profile:

 

Personally, I’m really excited about this.  Many of the items above are things that our customers are already asking us for, and the fact that Ninestiles have built these themselves, and at a later date would be able to share these, if they so chose, really starts to make the point of where Frog is going as a platform, and as a business.  When we release this capability out into the “wild”, we’ll also be providing source code for many widgets to give you folks a head start.

Ben, Mo – well done fellas, fantastic!!

Froggy Fireworks

Thanks to everyone that came around to make some explosions on Saturday night – below is a piccy of the fireworks we let off – there were some really big ones in there!!

I didn’t think to take a photo until most people left, so here are the folk that stayed around long enough to get snapped!! There were other loitering behind the camera for some reason.

Thankfully, there are no photographs of our escapades on Singstar until 3 in the morning – and apologies to everyone there for my rubbish singing!

It was a fantastic night, thanks again to everyone that came around and created a fun evening!!  And a special thank you to all those folks that sat in the house and kept the frightened kids busy!!

Congratulations to Karen and Rennie

Following our recent thread of newly born babies in Frog hoodies, I present to you triplets!

Mr Big, Lippy, and Cassy, otherwise known as Apollo, Helios, and Cassandra!

Sheeeesh!!