Yacapaca
Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching
Category: Commentary
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September is here again, and teachers across England are returning to school. Refreshed from a much-needed summer break, they are ready to draw the very best out of the children in their classes. By half term, though, they’ll be knackered again, and by December they won’t know which way is up. Again. Why? It is…
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Controversial blogger Donald Clark has boldly announced that “Gamification does NOT work” in education. What he misses is that education has been gamified for the last 1400 years. Here is how that game works, and how we can…
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Following on from my rant about paper-based exams, Ty Goddard of EdTech UK asked me for some current examples of online assessment. Spoiled for choice! Although I could find no country that bases its end-of-school qualification entirely on an online process, there is a quite astonishing range of online solutions to different assessment problems. Here…
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In the early years of the Space Race, it was discovered that ordinary pens do not work in zero gravity. NASA spent 2 years and millions of dollars developing an incredible ‘space pen’ that incorporated a tiny pump. Meanwhile, Soviet cosmonauts took pencils. Maybe you have seen this infographic from the World Economic Forum (citing this…
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The ‘exam paper’ has been around for the last 14 centuries and it is still going strong. The way things are going, the exam-paper looks likely to outlast even the news-paper. But it shouldn’t. Paper-based exams are a hideously-unreliable method of assessing competence. Here are some of the major reliability problems of
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