Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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Author: Ian Grove-Stephensen

  • Teacher-created content just gets better and better

    If I had to pick one favourite from this month’s new courses, it would be Heidi Watkins’ very visual quiz on Maslow’s Hierarchy. But what characterises all of these new courses is their level of sophistication. Very graphic quizzes, high-quality formative feedback and thorough documentation are all in evidence. Here are my top 9 picks,…

  • Make Cloze questions more useful with Fuzzy Match

    Cloze questions (where the student must type an answer of typically one word) are a really useful part of the question mix that goes into every great quiz. The restriction with auto-marking them has been that it’s an all-or-nothing affair. A slight misspelling, or even a failure to capitalise correctly, loses the student the mark.…

  • Why did VLEs fail?

    Why did VLEs fail?

    Ofsted reports that VLEs, which started coming into schools in 2000, are “still in the early stages of development”. You can say that again. Most teachers won’t touch them. A couple more quotes: We found that the exploitation of VLEs at curriculum level resembled more of a cottage industry than a national technological revolution. …used…

  • When they came for the Jews…

    First they came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I…

  • Two modest but useful improvements

    We have managed to squeeze one last update in before Christmas. It’s quite modest in feature terms, but significant in that it is the first fruits of a 9-month (and running) programme to rewrite Yacapaca into the Python programming language. Here’s what’s new: Searchable student list. See all your students in a single alphabetical list.…