Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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  • Marketing Consultants

    The other day a friend asked me what “ROFL” meant. It’s IM-speak for “Rolling On the Floor Laughing” and I’ve just found a great place to use it.

    One of the more dubious privileges of running a business is that you meet quite a lot of marketing consultants who patronise you about your website/mailshots/adverts/blog and tell you that they could do so much better for a very reasonable £1,200/day plus expenses. From now on I shall tell them I’m about to sign with Huh? Corporation and see how many think to research the competition…

    In point of fact, we are getting the website redesigned at the moment, but not by Huh. It’s being done by a very talented young man in Bodrum, Turkey, called Hakan Akyuz. We’re not quite ready to show off the new site yet, but here’s a peek at some of Hakan’s earlier work.

    (Huh? via the Edubloggers Links Feed)

  • Wiki Textbook

    Exactly one month ago today, I enjoyed a lengthy chinwag with Steve Margetts about wikis in education. Having set the world to rights, and (perhaps rashly) promised Steve free hosting, I blogged the conversation and forgot all about it.

    Steve didn’t. He got busy, and exactly four weeks later I find WikiTextbook has sprouted, beanstalk-like, onto the web.

    The scaffolding’s still up, certainly, but just look at what he’s already achieved:

    • Super, functional architecture
    • Great site design
    • No less than 167 articles already
    • Covers GCSE and A-Level Business studies, with ambitions to cover all subjects
    • Sponsored by adverts, so Steve is actually generating income from the site.

    What absolutely knocks my socks off is how Steve is generating content at such a phenomenal rate. According to the about page, his stroke of genius is

    Teachers and students alike are encouraged to add their own material to the site so that everyone can fully enjoy the benefits of a free WikiTextbook!

    Steve believes that schoolkids are capable of writing their own textbooks, given a suitable structure, and he’s prepared to put that belief into action.

    That’s revolutionary.
    Click to enlarge

  • Jef Raskin RIP

    Jef Raskin, the original developer of the Macintosh, died on Saturday. Goodbye old friend (whom I never met, and knew only through your designs), and thank you for 20 years of pleasurable computing.

  • Anniversary

    It was exactly 403 years to the day that Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary:

    …to the Opera, and there saw “Romeo and Juliet,” the first time it was ever acted; but it is a play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life…

    (full entry)

    Well, I beg to differ, Mr Pepys. So much so, in fact, that I’ve just published a set of online end-of-unit assessments to Romeo and Juliet, and I’m inordinately proud of them.

  • Black & Pakistani kids' underachievement is a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution

    The BBC blithely reports Government spin that

    Asian and black pupils made the greatest rate of improvement in GCSEs in England last year.

    Underneath the headline, here are the proportions of students getting 5 or more Cs at GCSE, by race:

    • Black Caribbean 35.7%
    • Black African 43%
    • Pakistani 45.0%
    • White 52.3%
    • Indian 66.6%
    • Chinese 74.2%

    Improvement is certainly to be celebrated, but with the highest-performing group doing almost twice as well as the lowest, what a long way we have to go!

    We’re not the only ones thinking about this. Across the pond, Bill Gates has been pumping some of his substantial fortune into solving the problem through his Gates Millennium Schollarship programme.

    He’s now starting to see the problem as systemic, according to a speech last week

    …only a fraction of our kids are getting the best education. Once we realize that we are keeping low-income and minority kids out of rigorous courses, there can be only two arguments for keeping it that way – either we think they can’t learn, or we think they’re not worth teaching.

    The first argument is factually wrong; the second is morally wrong.

    What strikes me is his willingness to own the problem: “we are keeping low-income and minority kids out of rigorous courses” (an attitude that might help explain his extraordinary wealth, by the way). That’s something I don’t see in Derek Twigg’s remarks.

    Read the whole speech for Bill’s solutions; like most of what he does, they are clearly thought through and highly strategic. Refreshingly, they don’t seem to involve buying his company’s products.