Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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Author: Ian Grove-Stephensen

  • Spanish resources

    We are starting to see competition hotting up to become the main Spanish authoring group. There are now seven groups. All are set as ‘public’, meaning any teacher can join them. Two have no questions or tasks, so they don’t appear in the author group list yet. As you can see, it’s very early days…

  • Coursework is dead, long live…

    I can’t say I’m convinced ‘Controlled Assessment’ is really a step forward. Is it really the job of teachers to prevent children from learning when and where they want to? But, ours not to question why. At least with a Yacapaca ePortfolio you can switch student access on and off using the ‘hide’ feature in…

  • Authoring language materials

    Until recently, language materials have been noticeable on Yacapaca only by their absense. I have had correspondence recently with a few teachers who are starting to write materials – particularly quizzes and short-text tests. I thought it would interesting to look at just how the subject is developing. Here are the authoring groups currently named…

  • The return of "I am Clever"

        Update 2013: the I Am Clever materials have now been permanently retired. Thanks for your interest.  Back in 1999 we thought it would be a pretty cool experiment to add an online component to Chalkface packs. Students could do homeworks or extension activities online, and have them emailed back to the teacher. So…

  • Subjective Assessment

    Last week’s list of question types went down so well that I got motivated to do you another list, this time of ‘task’ types. ‘Task’ is Yacapaca-speak for what is also known as Subjective Asessment, or free-text. I have covered the principles of these already; this is a handy list of the actual settings for…