Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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  • If you have spotted old student sets disappearing, here’s why

    Since last October, we’ve been having what amounts to the most gigantic spring clean. Noticing that some teachers were re-uploading the same group of students each time they wanted to assign work (slap wrist!) we started cautiously de-duplicating the student list. And we went very cautiously; many schools have two or more students of the same name, so we took the approach that if there was any ambiguity at all, we would not de-duplicate.

    And it worked well. Over two months, we better than (more…)

  • Simpler authoring

    Today marks a milestone in a long-term project to simplify the authoring experience in Yacapaca. Bits of the new system have been in place for quite some time, but the whole thing is now there, sitting in parallel with (more…)

  • Introducing a gentler Student Set page

    Over the last few months we have added a lot of features to the Student Set page. A lot.

    Which is great, except that the page has been getting smothered in button. We replaced the top row of buttons a while back with a “Whole set actions” dropdown, but people were (more…)

  • More flexible Course authoring

    You can now include any quiz in any course – even if you did not author the quiz yourself. This enables you to compile courses for any purpose – for example to support your new Computing syllabus – on the fly.

    The corollary is also true: you are no longer required to (more…)

  • Actual student-written formative feedback statements

    Feedback entry with textIt’s coming up to lunchtime on the first day of our peer feedback experiment, and I’m incredibly excited at how well it is going. We have had about 1000 peer-written statements in so far and I wanted to share some of the best of them with you. If the authors of these are your students, you have the right to feel proud.

    (more…)