Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

recent posts

about

  • Labour's promise: access to computers at home for every pupil

    Catherine’s done her homework on the Labour Party manifesto, and come up with this exciting promise that I don’t think has had much coverage until now:

    We will deliver our cross-government strategy for closing the digital divide and using ICT to further transform public services…

    By 2006 every school [will be] supported to offer all pupils access to computers at home.

    I’ve been saying for some time that we already have a pupil:computer ratio of 1:1 or better if you take into account childrens’ home computers, and that if we can tap into this resource effectively then accessibility problems simply go away. It seems somebody in Labour Party Headquarters was thinking along the same lines.

    One crucial effect of the strategy is this: it puts the computers where the teachers are not. This forces you to into a strategy of separating individual work that can be performed unsupervised from group work that requires teacher interaction.

    The greatest benefit that comes from computers in education, is the way they can free the teacher up from routine patrol and control, but this doesn’t work until you absent yourself when students are working on computers. Moving the computer to the students’ homes could be just the thing to break the old habit.

  • Deaf and Blind (written May 11)

    I’ve been without internet access since I got back from Kharkov. I’d fondly imagined that this would be like going back to a more leisured age; I’d have time to really think things through without distraction; I could focus on ‘real’ work.

    The reality is that all my communication and all my access to resources takes place online. I can’t effectively manage my team because I can’t observe what they are doing. I can’t think things through because I can’t read essential background information. I can’t even post this short piece until I get my connection back.

    The internet, in various manifestations, has become the essential extension to my five senses. Without it, I’m rendered helpless. It’s really very scary.

  • Learn Cyrillic!

    I’m off to Ukraine next weekend to see Alex and the crew. I’m a little nervous because not only can I not speak the language, I can’t even read the writing.

    To help me learn, I’ve knocked together a little quickfire quiz in Yacapaca. If you want to try it out, first read the ‘official’ National transliteration on Wikipedia, then try the quiz preview.

    Notice your own thought process as you see just the image of each Cyrillic letter and wait for the possible Roman alternatives to show.

    Took about 90 mins to create; about half of that time went into creating the Cyrillic characters as graphics.

  • Becta advises you switch to open-source: three alternatives to Microsoft

    It’s been widely leaked that BECTa’s latest report, iced until after the election, will finally spell out the blindingly obvious fact that free, open source, software is better value for schools than the equivalent bought from Microsoft. So the first step is to move to Open Office when your MS Office license comes up for renewal.

    But what if you decide to go the whole hog and dump Bill’s troublesome and expensive operating system along with the software suite he sells to run on it. Where could you go? Here are three alternatives that have caught my eye recently. All three support Open Office and a huge range of, frequently free, software.

    Umbuntu

    Umbuntu is a Linux distribution that’s catching a lot of buzz at the moment, mainly because it is said to be particularly easy to install. Here’s a very accessible writeup from Russell Beattie.

    Solaris

    Until recently Solaris was the sort of operating system you only got to see if you designed jumbo jets. Now Sun Corporation who own(ed) the copyright have seen the light of Open Source and released the whole thing free, gratis and for nothing as openSolaris. Believe me, more technical members of the PTA will be blown away if the school suddenly moves over to this granddaddy of heavyweight operating systems.

    Alex’s solution

    You’ll probably find this the least plausible, but in fact it would work beautifully. It comes out of a discussion about a particular school’s technical problem with Yacapaca that seemed to be due to an internal problem in the school. I wanted my colleague Alex (who’s based in Ukraine) to fix it remotely; he pointed out that the school had installed firewalls explicitly to prevent people interfering with their computers from the outside. Alex’s solution was nothing if not bold;

    We can provide U.K. schools with our own software based on Linux and FreeBSD which we control from here. This will definitely solve their
    sofware related problems. And of course, being able to control
    their server we will be able to diagnose every network/traffic problem
    manually or automatically via tools like Nagios.

    OK, it’s not going to happen. You’ll never get the governors to accept an operating system supplied and supported from the Ukraine. But just for the hell of it, pause for a moment and ask yourself, really, why not? After all, that’s exactly how this blog is served to you.

    Update: The report’s now out; download it from here. Very interesting reading.

  • Author your own assessments in Yacapaca: now in Alpha

    Finally, Yacapaca has an authoring environment for teachers. It’s not even in beta yet; we’ve labeled it an ‘alpha’ release, and we’re making it available only to a very small number of invited teachers. Nonetheless I’m excited, the more so because it took twice as long as expected to get to this point. We’ve been working on it solidly since I first annouced we’d do it in January.

    To recap what this means, Yacapaca authoring enables teachers to:

    1. get started by just signing up for an account; there’s nothing to download nor server to set up.
    2. *write a bank of multiple choice questions that optionally include formative feedback to each possible response.
    3. *create one or more quizzes from the question bank.
    4. set those quizzes for their students to do online. The quizzes are presented in Flash, which allows us to fully randomise and time-limit them.
    5. see all students’ responses on the web in realtime.
    6. analyse the results in several different ways, including graphical presentation of class results.

    * points 2 and 3 aren’t in the animated Yacapaca Demo yet.

    And it’s free. Our money comes from the commercial assessments we sell on the system, so we don’t plan ever to charge you for putting your own tests on there.

    To the best of my knowledge, this is a world first. There are plenty of systems that let a teacher create and set a quiz, but nearly all use HTML not Flash. None of the free ones collate feedback for the teacher. Even the commercial alternatives offer a much thinner range of assessment and analysis features, and of course they cost an arm and a leg.

    The only slight drawback is that, unless you’re in our alpha testing group, it’s not actually available yet. I’m writing this now partly as a blatant tease to build demand, and partly because it’s been a long slog since I first promised this in January and I’m just dying to tell someone about it.
    Click to enlarge