Gordon Brown’s pre-Budget announcement on school funding has been widely reported already, mainly as an example of New Labour’s long-established vice of reporting every piece of funding at least three times. My interest lies more with the timeframe of his proposals. Brown is promising money to refurbish school buildings over a 10-15 year period. It…

One of my greatest failed inventions was selling worksheets individually, like these (scroll to the bottom of the page). Teachers often complain that they buy a Chalkface pack then use only half the contents, so it seemed a good service to allow people to pick and choose the bits they wanted. It wasn’t. Everyone said…

When I decided last August to stop charging for Yacapaca, I knew I was taking a big risk. It was already making a good income and growing strongly, but I wanted the growth rate to speed up, and this seemed the best way to do it. I reasoned that as a school starts to use…

In a comment on my previous baby post I jokingly promised that we’d ramp up production. Little did I know…not only have we ramped it up; we’ve even outsourced some to Ukraine! I am therefore delighted to celebrate the arrival of Maria Skokova (top in photo). Igor, her father, built the Yacapaca ePortfolio pilot which…

Around the end of last term I came across Mike Highfield’s excellent SPB Helper for DiDA (here’s his demo). I was so impressed with the quality of Mike’s screencasts that I immediately approached him to produce a short series of screencasts explaining Yacapaca. The original plan was that these would simply be freebies would help…