Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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  • Teacher-created content just gets better and better

    If I had to pick one favourite from this month’s new courses, it would be Heidi Watkins’ very visual quiz on Maslow’s Hierarchy. But what characterises all of these new courses is their level of sophistication. Very graphic quizzes, high-quality formative feedback and thorough documentation are all in evidence.

    Here are my top 9 picks, listed by subject.

    Subject Title Author Description
    UK Biology Biology GCSE Nicola Fergurson at Okehampton College A thorough set of 5 quizzes for OCR Gateway, standard and higher tier. The questions are well written, though as they lack feedback, this is purely summative assessment.
    UK Business Cert. in Financial Studies U2 James Percival at Turin Grove School I really enjoyed trialling these 7 summative quizzes from the CeFS course, which I had not heard of before. Highly commended.
    UK Business Human Resources Heidi Watkins at King Charles 1 School Try the quiz on Maslow – it’s beautifully done!
    AUS Business Health and Safety in the Workplace John Crawley from the Chisholm Institute This set of tasks supports part of the Australian Diploma in Business. The tasks themselves form a straightforward framework in which the author has slotted some very comprehensive documentation.
    UK German German Grammar Practice Alastair McCullough at the Methodist College, Belfast How frustrating. I scored only 40% on Endings. 7 well-structured quizzes, though the naming convention is a little hard to follow.
    UK ICT 7.3 Healthy Living Anon What I really like about these four ePortfolio tasks is that the author has built in all the documentation, including lesson plans. A very sophisticated resource.
    USA Literacy Literacy Chris Reall at Roanoke City Public Schools, Virginia Check out ‘Organising Ideas’ to get a feel of the style. Fingers crossed Chris will add some more to this excellent beginning.
    UK Physics AQA Physics P1 & P2 Ralph Holmes at Langle School Ralph has further extended and reorganised his award-winning Physics course to include regular revision quizzes as well as topics. The structured route to better exam results.
    UK Science How Science Works Jeremy Reading at Presdales School These three short quizzes on the scientific method are some of the best Science resources on Yacapaca, in my opinion. The questions are well-written with good, formative feedback that challenges the students to think more deeply.

  • Make Cloze questions more useful with Fuzzy Match

    Cloze questions (where the student must type an answer of typically one word) are a really useful part of the question mix that goes into every great quiz. The restriction with auto-marking them has been that it’s an all-or-nothing affair. A slight misspelling, or even a failure to capitalise correctly, loses the student the mark. This is entirely appropriate in a spelling test, but it does limit the form.

    Now, we have extended Yacapaca cloze questions to offer three modes:

    1. Case-sensitive (strictly requires your exact answer)
    2. Case-tolerant (as above but ignores capitalisation)
    3. Fuzzy match

    Fuzzy match lets you give the students more leeway, and it’s capable of giving them partial marks for partially-correct answers. The screencast shows how it works: 2′ 30”; turn the sound up as the record volume was rather low.

    Use fuzzy match with discretion. It does let you do more with Cloze, but if you imagine it is going to mark an essay, or even a sentence, you will be disappointed. It’s just a little algorithm, and whilst it is quite clever, it has no common sense whatsoever. For example, against the correct response “god” it will award 0.8 of a mark for “dog”.

    Only the most ardent pet-lover would agree.

    Fuzzy-match cloze screencast

  • Why did VLEs fail?

    Ofsted reports that VLEs, which started coming into schools in 2000, are “still in the early stages of development”. You can say that again. Most teachers won’t touch them.

    A couple more quotes:

    We found that the exploitation of VLEs at curriculum level resembled more of a cottage industry than a national technological revolution.

    …used as a dumping ground or storage place for rarely used files.

    So what’s gone wrong? I’d identify three mistakes:

    • Poor software specification. The VLEs promoted by Becta were generally designed as distance learning platforms for universities. Schools do very little distance learning. It’s like trying to dig your garden with a JCB.
    • Failure to change systems. By trying to layer the VLE over the old system of teaching, all the old inefficiencies were retained. Hence, the VLE delivered no real benefit.
    • Failure to work through champions. In most secondary schools there is at least one true enthusiast for online learning. Time and again, I hear stories of that person being sidelined and ignored.

    And here is what needs doing to fix it:

    • Use software designed for schools, not universities. School elearning software should solve problems such as too much marking, large classes, lack of 1:1 contact.
    • Change the timetable. Much more independent study time, supported by suitable software. Use the freed-up teacher time to make classes smaller, or introduce small (6-12) tutor groups.
    • Work through Champions. I know this works, because it is what we have done with Yacapaca. Usage is growing like wildfire because the early adopters love it, and tell everybody else about it.

     

  • When they came for the Jews…

    First they came for the communists,
    I remained silent;
    I was not a communist.

    When they locked up the social democrats,
    I remained silent;
    I was not a social democrat.

    When they came for the trade unionists,
    I did not speak out;
    I was not a trade unionist.

    When they came for the Jews,
    I remained silent;
    I was not a Jew.

    Now they are coming for the Palestinians
    I am speaking out.

    Heaven knows, I am not a political person, and this is not a political blog. But Israel’s invasion of Gaza is barbaric and murderous. It would be gross hypocrisy for Chalkface to promote the teaching of citizenship and moral values, if I myself am unwilling to speak out when I see a great wrong being perpetrated.

    Poem by Martin Niemöller, via Wikipedia.

    Update 6/1/09: The Israelis have now attacked two schools. In one of them, they killed 40 people. The other, the American International School, was a customer of ours. There was one fatality and the building was entirely destroyed. I just cannot imagine how the teachers there feel, seeing their school destroyed and their students being bombed and shelled in their homes.

  • Two modest but useful improvements

    We have managed to squeeze one last update in before Christmas. It’s quite modest in feature terms, but significant in that it is the first fruits of a 9-month (and running) programme to rewrite Yacapaca into the Python programming language.

    Here’s what’s new:

    • Searchable student list. See all your students in a single alphabetical list. Find an individual student and see when they last logged in.
    • Assignments list with marking links. See what you assigned when, and click straight through to the results page for each assignment. The old assignments list was a bit of an orphan, but it has suddenly sprung into real usefulness with this update.