Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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  • Chatango

    Chatango is an embedable instant messaging (IM) client, written in Flash. As I’ve written before, I’m convinced that IM is of enormous, but as yet unexplored, significance to schools. Until now it’s required either standalone application or a dodgy Java applet. I’ve been dreaming for months of creating one in Flash, but whilst I’ve been…

  • Nobody Here

    In these hazy, lazy, but all too frequently rainy days of Summer, may I commend your attention to Nobody Here; my favourite ever website.

  • Assessing Understanding with multiple-choice questions

    The original 1988 National Curriculum couched learning achievement in terms of knowledge, understanding and evaluation (KUE), a cut-down version of Bloom’s Taxonomy. This remains, in my view, by far the most practical version for the working educator. The easiest way to set up an assessment is via multiple-choice questions. Building the technology to serve and…

  • For mash get Smash

    Are you old enough to remember those TV adverts with the robots that fell about laughing at humans who still mashed their own potatoes? That image came into my head when I read this BBC article about robots reading books [quote] A robot in the US library could fetch the book and, as directed by…

  • For successful e-learning, redesign the whole course

    An excellent phone conversation yesterday with Steve Margetts. He’s been assessing a “Managed Learning Environment” that in his opinion isn’t. I won’t name it here, but its key feature seems to be that teachers can put their notes on the web using it. Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t wildly impressed. Then today, an excellent research review by…