Yacapaca

Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching

recent posts

about

  • 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.

  • 1,000,000 members

    I woke up late this morning, as it’s my birthday. Here’s my birthday present from Yacapaca:

    Yacapaca memberships at 10:00 on 12/12/2008
    Teachers 38,399
    Students 965,001
    Total 1,003,400

    This happened because half a dozen very talented computer programmers enabled around a thousand equally talented teachers to create some amazing assessments – quizzes, surveys, ePortfolios, short-text tests. These were (are!) so good that almost 40,000 other teachers wanted over 960,000 students to enjoy learning through them.

    The one person who deserves most credit for this is our original systems architect Sergej Terent’ev. Sergej left the team earlier this year, but there is no doubt that it was his work that laid the foundation for Yacapaca’s success.