Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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Author: Ian Grove-Stephensen

  • The ‘loser’ problem

    Every winner begets a loser. In a class of 30 who are kept ranked, 15 students are consistently being told they are below average, and probably no more than three trade the epithet ‘bottom of the class’. Tell someone (especially a teenager) something about themselves often enough, support it with peer feedback, and it rapidly…

  • Ten years on, I admit I was wrong about Building Schools of the Future

    Remember Building Schools of the Future? It was a flagship programme by the then Labour government to put old wine into new flasks whilst carefully avoiding doing anything that might actually improve the quality of teaching and learning in English schools. I thought it was a gross misappropriation of resources, and said so exactly 10 years…

  • How I created 4 new e-safety quizzes in less than an hour

    I was collecting a few more quizzes for my E-Safety course last night, when I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Although quite a few of the quiz authors have produced quizzes that include specific issues such as Facebook, cyberbullying, chatrooms and

  • Power authors: make your Author Group questions work in Quiz Builder

    I have been in conversation over the past week or so with Zach Ishani from Royal Wootton Bassett Academy, Yacapaca’s #17-ranked author. Zach is in the middle of a big authoring project at the moment, and he needs to get up to speed as fast as possible with Quiz Builder. Zach’s problem is that

  • Progress bars now update (almost) instantly

    The Assignments List shows the progress of each assignment. This is a very useful feature, but also