Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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Author: Ian Grove-Stephensen

  • Can students spell? Here are the data for homophones

    Our Grammar Soundalikes course has been getting more popular recently, with over 17,000 uses in the last year alone. The diagnostic assessment has had over 10,000 runs just by itself, so I thought it would be interesting to look at what students know – and what they don’t know. Best and worst spelling results: The…

  • Seven short but important updates

    Some of these updates, particularly those relating to due dates, are tripping up both teachers and students at the moment. So, please, take note! Due dates are real! Many students are not used to the idea that work really does have to be handed in when you say it does. Assignments are locked after the…

  • Faster, easier controlled assessments

    We have added some more tools to make controlled assessments easier to manage. In your Assignments List, you can now hide an

  • Use due dates!

    People (including your students) fall into broadly two groups those who like to get stuff out of the way as soon as possible those who leave things until the last minute. There is a third group of people who do things in an orderly, scheduled manner, but it’s very small. What proportion of your students…

  • Will Michael Gove take education back to the 1950s?

    How utterly depressing. Michael Gove wants to take a curriculum already groaning under the weight of too much content and add more ‘facts’. 70 years ago, Albert Einstein famously asked “why should I clutter my brain with information that is readily available from reference sources?”. Yet, in the age of Google, Gove still doesn’t get…