Just launched – online assessment delivered through the web. Students’ marks come back to the teacher automatically! Built with our amazing Paperless School technology.
Yacapaca
Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching
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Compare if you will our Business Studies Encyclopedia
against our ICT Encyclopedia
At time of writing, the ICT Encyclopedia is both unfinished and unedited, but that’s not the distinction I’m drawing your attention to. Nor is the difference in colour scheme. The most important distinction is invisible to the user; it’s the speed with which we are able to create the newer ICT Encyclopedia.
The Business Studies site is a static website, assembled at our office from articles that are emailed in by their authors. We hand-code it to keep the HTML clean, but we could equally well use Dreamweaver or Frontpage. Because all the work comes through a single point, workflow is prone to getting bottlenecked. It’s also quite a job to organise all these little articles getting emailed from author to expert editor to proofer to layout artist. The glossary, navigation links and index are all built by hand too. It’s about the same work as publishing a book of the same size.
The ICT encyclopedia is an entirely different animal. It’s a Wiki. Wikis put all the tools for creating large hierarchical databases onto a server, with all the management tools. Here are some of the features of ours:
- multiple authors and editors can work on the website at one time
- contributors can be anywhere in the world
- editors have automatic pick-lists of entries to edit (though no full workflow just yet)
- automatic breadcrumb creation (those are the links at the top of the page, showing the hierarchy)
- permissions hierarchy
- dynamic skinning (compare Skin 1 to Skin 2 to Skin 3)
- auto-glossary creation
- built-in search
The end result is a better encyclopedia, built more quickly for less money. We now plan a suite of online educational encyclopedias, all tied to our online courses.
The name Wiki derives from the wonderfully onomatopoeic Polynesian word wiki-wiki, meaning ‘quick’. Its classic exponent is the Wikipedia, a huge collective effort to build an open-source encyclopedia. Wikipedia is even more radical: anyone, without restriction, can add, delete and edit pages. The system resists malicious editing by the simple expedient of making it easy to revert to a previous version of each page.
Our Wiki is an implementation of Zwiki, built in the sparse and elegant programming language Python. The bespoke features (like the glossary manager) were written for us by our colleagues Halogen-DG whom I highly recommend if you have a similar project.
Update: here’s a post from Chris Allen with a super overview of wiki alternatives. If you want to dig further, it makes a great starting point.
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A couple of people have written in about this question in the KS4 band:
Here is part of a spreadsheet from a school shop. If the price of a gel pen went up to 60p, which one of the cells listed below would have a new value?
At first glance it may seem that we’ve not programmed the correct answer, but if you read the question again you’ll see it has a twist that you may not have expected…
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The DfES has rejected a call by the Independent Advisory Group on Teenage Pregnancy (AKA Teenage Pregnancy Unit to make PSHE compulsory in secondary schools.
You might think that as the country’s leading PSHE publisher I’d be up in arms about this, but actually I think they are quite right to hold back. PSHE is one of the best things to happen in education in the last two decades, but I’ve always been against making any part of it compulsory.
I’ve just helped my wife finish a report for the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Medicine on the state of sex education across Europe. What fascinated me about the research was the personal anecdotes of good and bad sex education. The real cringe-makers seemed to be associated with adults (a mix of teachers and parents) who were forcing themselves through the process despite extreme embarrassment – and often under compulsion.
Good sex education, on the other hand, was delivered by people who were clear why they were doing it, and were congruent that they had chosen the right time and place.
So here’s why I continue to favour voluntary sex education (and by extension voluntary PSHE). To be taught well, it must be taught willingly. And the willing will volunteer anyway.
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From BBC Scotland:
Tory education spokesman James Douglas-Hamilton said: “With £1bn of education spending never reaching the chalkface, it should not be beyond the ability of the minister to sort this mess out.
Thanks very much James, I can’t say the odd billion wouldn’t come in handy.
Yacapaca 