Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

recent posts

about

  • 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 dreaming, Chatango have been doing. I’m wildly excited by the result, or rather by its potential, and I’ve just got to play with it.

    Where better to play than here? Below, I’ve embedded a Chatango client that links direct to me. If I’m online, why not say ‘hello’? (Thanks Joi Ito for the link).

  • 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 Evaluation with multiple-choice questions

    In a previous post I covered the KUE model and bemoaned the infrequent application of U and E in multiple-choice questions. Assessing evaluative thinking in multiple choice may seem the hardest of the lot, because it’s the most abstracted form of learning. In fact, it’s relatively easy provided you are very clear about exactly what you are testing for with each question.

    Continuing the cycling theme, I’d like you to imagine you are talking one-to-one with a student, and you want (more…)

  • 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 mark multiple choice tests is easy; most VLEs support it and there are plenty of (more…)

  • 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 the web user, turn to the correct pages and scan the text and images.

    So let me see if I’ve got this right. Via the internet, I’m supposed to instruct a million dollars-worth of machine that just happens to inhabit my local branch library to trundle around the floor, pick a book off a shelf, delicately turn the pages, scan them and send me images of them to read.

    Rather than me just downloading it as an ebook in the first place, that is.

    I see only one problem with this ingenious plan. How do we stop the robot spending all its time rolling on the floor convulsed with laughter?