DFM April Newsletter

I hope you are all way and staying safe. There is so much news since my last newsletter it's hard to know where to start! But I'm delighted that DFM is supporting schools around the world during the lockdown, with a huge rise in usage in mainland Europe, Asia and Australasia. Here's what's new, much of which is specific to supporting schools doing remote teaching:

As the first DFM Phase 3 improvement, I have completely replaced the question-answering system for students from scratch. This includes a new cleaner interface and a 'mini-whiteboard' for them to write workings (and yes, there will be the option in future for you to 'require workings' and be able to see these). The points system has also been significantly simplified. But most significantly, it runs over 90% faster. This has completely resolved all server issues (despite daily page views now consistently in 7 figures), and saving up to $20,000 in server costs a year.
The home dashboard for both students and teachers has also been completely redesigned from scratch. All the 'clutter' is gone and replaced with a series of 'tiles', allowing you to more easily access core functionality like the latest homeworks you've set, etc. There's an introductory video on that page, but you can access it directly here: https://youtu.be/yX5tKnJkEEo.
A new Resource Explorer which combines the resource homepage, 'resources by topic' and the Topic Explorer all together. This makes it much easier to find the different types of things available for each topic.
Students have a new Clean Up Task facility, accessible from their dashboard, which allows them to redo 4 questions they recently got wrong. This will show up in your Activity Log when they complete these.
When you view questions in either the Worksheets facility or Browse facility, there's now an Annotate button which loads the question in the DFM Whiteboard for you to scribble over. Remember that if you give this whiteboard URL to your students, they'll be able to annotate over the question too and you'll be able to see what they write.
There's now a refresh button when viewing a particular student task. This allows you to see your students' answers live as they come in!
The By Class and By Task tabs in the progress interface have now been merged into one interface. Given it also loads much faster now, it's now possible to set tasks to entire year groups.
Fixed a huge number of bugs, including those related to report exporting to Excel, giving/receiving written feedback, class demo accounts, students 'redoing' assessments, and viewing Topic Test data.
The DFM Whiteboard interface has been improved, and now with the option to draw circles and arcs.
Edexcel's GCSE Mock Set 4 is now in the question database.

So what's planned?

We're in the process of registering as a charity. I'll go into detail on this in another newsletter.
One criticism of DFM, which I totally accept, is that it's hard for a student to practice a very specific type of question, rather than a broader mix of questions within a topic. It means things go fine if you choose the questions for your students, but it can be a bit 'pot luck' if you set an Automated Homework, where it picks the questions for you based on the chosen topics/difficulty range. The new Key Skills platform under development aims to address this. This will have random question generators for very finegrained skills, each with a short accompanying worked example video. I'm hoping to release this in July in some form.
You will have the option to require working on questions, which they draw on a mini-whiteboard.
Use of Desmos software, which will allow new question types like drawing box plots and curved graphs.

That's all for now.