Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching
Miranda says
Just been chatting with Barry Blake fom Mangotsfield School who rang because he’d used up all his [Yacapaca] tests and not realised. He needed more, urgently. The idea came up of having a facility which would enable teachers in a similar position to access an additional 100 emergency uses from their interface without having to ring us first. The info. then would feed through to us for invoicing.
It shall be done.
Today we celebrate an anniversary. It is precisely one month since telecoms company Easynet (via their UK Online brand) cut off my broadband connection. In the name of ‘upgrade’, I’d foolishly let myself be seduced by the promise of an 8meg connection for the same price as the half-meg connection I’d had from BT.
Every day I phone them to politely ask about progress, and one of their trying-their-best but hopelessly undertrained customer service people adds another note to my file. About one day in three, I’m promised that an engineer will look into it real soon now but no, they don’t know just when.
Yesterday – great excitement! One of their customer service people actually phoned us, to tell us it was all alright now! I’m not quite sure what’s all alright, because my broadband certainly doesn’t work.
Nor is this an instance of a few poor employees. The people I’ve spoken to generally keen to help, but all they are permitted to do is take notes. I’ve hit point-blank refusals to let me speak to someone at even supervisory level. Customer Services people don’t know anything about Tech Support, Tech Support don’t have access to Engineers’ diaries.
I run a small but successful company. I know how to set up business systems that work. And what I see at Easynet is systems that are broken at every point. Bad internal communication, employee disempowerment, poor supplier relations, the works. It’s a case-study in management incompetence.
What’s really scary about this is that Easynet are chasing the schools market. They boast on their website about a deal with Reading schools.
I acknowledge that Reading may be having a different experience; I certainly hope so. But from where I’m sitting, this is what the ten-foot bargepole was invented for.
I’ll not repeat my previous rant about how appallingly disadvantaged young people who cannot touch-type really are. But I will point you to goodtyping.com and their Free online Typing course. Via Jane.
Back in January we got a mauling from a couple of local authority ICT advisers who felt that our KS3 ICT Assessment didn’t cover the full range of processes at the higher levels. “Never mind” said I, “it’s all online so we can change it in a trice”. Ahem.
The ‘trice’ turned out to be six months, almost to the day. Between creeping elegance (we more than doubled the number of quesions, and added formative feedback to every one), the schedule of a very busy author, various emergencies at our end and the need to test and retest everything before it was launched, we managed to eat up half a year before we had something I was definitely convinced was step beyond the old assessments.
Finally, it’s ready, and I’ve spent a (frankly, tedious) weekend going through the mechanics of launching it. New content to load onto the site (done), old content to be suitably flagged so it can’t be used anymore (done), everything checked one last time (done), everything checked for a last, last, final time because what can go wrong, will (done), several thousand teachers informed by email (done), beautiful sunshine missed out on (bah), but never mind…it’s launched.
And, at the cost of working through the weekend instead of waiting until Monday and delegating all the work, I’ve got it ready before the end of the half-term break.
Now the good bit. I get to watch the site stats as existing users come on to check out the new tests, and non-users check the free demos to see what all the fuss is about and, hopefully, become convinced it’s time to buy a subscription. If it’s up your street, why not check out the KS3 ICT Assessment demos on the Chalkface website yourself.
P.S. Notwithstanding my bellyaching above, the bulk of the work was actually done by author Mark Leighton and manager Miranda Broadhurst. And I didn’t miss the whole weekend at all, because I spent Saturday afternoon at Strawberry Fair.
Yacapaca 