Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

recent posts

about

Author: Ian Grove-Stephensen

  • Chatango

    Chatango is an embedable instant messaging (IM) client, written in Flash. As I’ve written before, I’m convinced that IM is of enormous, but as yet unexplored, significance to schools. Until now it’s required either standalone application or a dodgy Java applet. I’ve been dreaming for months of creating one in Flash, but whilst I’ve been…

  • Nobody Here

    In these hazy, lazy, but all too frequently rainy days of Summer, may I commend your attention to Nobody Here; my favourite ever website.

  • Assessing Evaluation with multiple-choice questions

    In a previous post I covered the KUE model and bemoaned the infrequent application of U and E in multiple-choice questions. Assessing evaluative thinking in multiple choice may seem the hardest of the lot, because it’s the most abstracted form of learning. In fact, it’s relatively easy provided you are very clear about exactly what…

  • Assessing Understanding with multiple-choice questions

    The original 1988 National Curriculum couched learning achievement in terms of knowledge, understanding and evaluation (KUE), a cut-down version of Bloom’s Taxonomy. This remains, in my view, by far the most practical version for the working educator. The easiest way to set up an assessment is via multiple-choice questions. Building the technology to serve and…

  • For mash get Smash

    Are you old enough to remember those TV adverts with the robots that fell about laughing at humans who still mashed their own potatoes? That image came into my head when I read this BBC article about robots reading books [quote] A robot in the US library could fetch the book and, as directed by…