Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

recent posts

about

  • Managing revision

    Yacapaca has a very sophisticated built-in revision management system for all our most popular subjects, and it is very easy to set up. Here’s how.

    1. Enable revision topics

    Students tab > Student sets > Actions > Topics for Revision

    topics

    2. Set the topics you have (more…)

  • Eloquence

    Whoever taught Suli Breaks such eloquence must feel very proud…

    …so why isn’t eloquence taught as a formal discipline? It is far more (more…)

  • Managing students

    How to add, remove and move students to and from your student sets.

  • 5 tips for success with Mastery Mode

    mastery-learning2

    1. Keep it short.
      Students will do 5 minutes per day quite happily. Keep your assignment to a single quiz, at least until you have feedback from the students.
    2. Explain the principle to your students.
      They many not be used to homeworks that enforce a daily routine, and some will moan like heck at you that they can’t do it all at once.
    3. Demand, and enforce, the first attempt on the first day.
      If the majority of your students leave homework until the last minute of the last day, they will get caught out and may feel you have deliberately trapped them.
    4. To track progress, sort results by Attempts.
      Assignments > Results > Results (beta) > click on the top of the Attempts column.
    5. To check completion, sort results by Mark.
      Assignments > Results > Results in detail > Sort by Mark, and look for those who scored >80%.

    More on Mastery Mode here.

  • Introducing Mastery Mode

    If you are a fan of Mastery Learning  you are going to love our latest feature.

    When assigning, you will find the setup dialog has changed slightly. There is a new item “Mode”.

    dialog 1
    When you change this, you see (more…)