Yacapaca

Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching

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  • A look back on 2009

    The new blog comes with better blog stats than the old one – it’s easier to see which posts have been popular, and which not. Here are a few that seem to deserve a special mention:

    Enjoy, and I hope you find them at least a little bit informative, entertaining or enraging.

  • New blog host, design

    I have moved this blog to wordpress.com so that it gets hosted for us. In the process, I am experimenting with new designs to match the much greater focus on Yacapaca that it has now.

    The old blog had become the target of regular ddos (distributed-denial-of-service) attacks which prevented normal users accessing either the blog or chalkface.com. By moving the target away from our own server, we should be able to restore a normal level of accessibility.

    Please bear with me whilst I get all the chinaware unpacked in our new home.

  • Add accurate NC or GCSE grading to Yacapaca assessments

    It is now 10x easier to have your courses report results as either GCSE grades, or National Curriculum levels, with more grading schemes to follow.

    It took me a while to realise that the runaway popularity of our ICT Baseline scheme, (with over 1,000,000 quizzes served per year) is because it returns reliable NC levels. Once I did, we got to work reprogramming the whole system.

    Now you can convert any course you authored to grade reporting, by simply choosing the relevant grade scheme from a menu. Here’s how.

    Vodpod videos no longer available.

  • Google ChromeOS will kill textbooks stone dead next year

    I have been predicting for some time that a class set of computers will soon be cheaper than the equivalent pile of textbooks. Now I’ll put a date on it. Christmas 2010.

    Today Google announced ChromeOS, an operating system for netbooks and other small, cheap devices. They are showing it off now, but make it clear that they have another 12 months of work before it will be ready for sale giving away to the general public.

    Why is this such a big deal? Because it’s designed from scratch for computers with tiny processors, no hard drives, very little memory and therefore a very low price. It will simply become so much cheaper to supply information to students in an online format than a paper one; something you might bear in mind if you have been thinking of buying into a new textbook scheme next year.

    Update December 2012: Well I got that wrong! First it took until 2012 before cheap Chromebooks came out. Second, they have been completely eclipsed by tablets. We can now see that iPads, in particular, are killing textbooks and the rate of slaughter will increase sharply this year.

  • Is my data safe?

    Three different people today asked me variations on “but is my data safe in Yacapaca?” Lazy git that I am, I’ll group some of my previous writings on the subject here to save time in future: