Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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Author: Ian Grove-Stephensen

  • Free wi-fi broadband from Google

    Google have been saying for some time that they wanted to offer free broadband for everybody, but I really thought that meant “everybody in the USA”. Well, I was wrong! Google TiSP was announced today (Sun, 1st Apr 2007) with no apparent geographical limitations. So how did they do it? Well, Google have ingeniously realised…

  • Simple but brilliant Maths resources

    Margaret Williams from Lakers School has produced some really great lesson starters from the question bank in her Learn your Tables authoring group (requires login). They are so fast that I got really flustered the first time I tried one, and muffed it completely. They are a great aid to getting the times tables wired…

  • BBC Jam

    So it’s bye-bye BBC Jam, or at least au-revoir. If you have not been following this story, BBC Jam was the renamed BBC Digital Curriculum, which aimed to produce high quality online learning materials for up to half the English curriculum. It has now been suspended following some legal argy-bargy. Plenty of pundits have weighed…

  • Authoring case-study

    Michael Record runs a popular Technical Authoring evening class at Broward Community College in For Lauderdale, Florida. He’s using a very effective mix of online and classroom teaching to do it, which he’s very kindly given me permission to profile here. The core of the course is the course blog. There is one entry per…

  • Greeting new authors

    Flickr is my role-model of how to build a successful collaborative community. This is from an interview with Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders (via Citizen Agency): CNN: What’s the key to making online communities work? Butterfield: I’m not sure I have a universal answer to that. Take the people working on Flickr, including myself,…