Chalkface Blog
The best teaching materials in the most practical format.
Author: Ian Grove-Stephensen
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Pingdom is a service that tests your homepage by accessing it from a remote server, and timing how long it takes each individual component to load. I tested Yacapaca from their Amsterdam server at peak time (11:33) this morning, and got the encouraging result that we are “faster than 93% of all tested websites”. If you…
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We have just recovered from our worst-ever outage, at 25 hours and 9 minutes. Here is what happened. Our principal database server went down at 09:16 Monday 22/09/14. We moved quickly to reboot it, but this failed. Concluding it was a hardware issue (it turned out to be a failed motherboard), we switched over to the backup and…
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Pair match questions can be used to test for understanding of sequence and relationship in quite subtle ways, but they serve you poorly if you do not know how to analyse the results. Below is an analysis of a pair match (AKA Drag and Drop) question from the Computing Baseline (High level). This is the author’s…
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I had this lovely note today from Owen Hawkridge at the Chauncy School in Ware. You might be interested to know that we’ve* abandoned our old spreadsheet system for tracking pupil progress at KS3 and instead are using the Yacapaca gradebook. We’ll be starting with
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Thanks to the 1500 students who trialled the KS3 Computing Baseline Beta last year, and the teachers who very thoughtfully filled out the survey about it, I have been able to produce a new version that is both thorough and practical. Here’s what is in it: Three levels of
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