Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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  • 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.

  • Super-quick signup option for students

    If you are planning to get your students to try the Yacapaca Xmas Goodies, you may well need to create some new student accounts.

    You will probably be interested, then, in the new “Student pick-list” feature we have launched this morning. Briefly, it is a way of getting your whole class up and running on Yacapaca, each with their own account, in under five minutes. We’ve been working like stink to get this feature out before Christmas, and I really hope you enjoy it.

  • Seasonal peak?

    One day last February, for the first time ever, we had just over 1,000 teachers on Yacapaca in 24 hours. That record stood until yesterday, when at midnight we had had exactly 1,210 teachers visit.

    All credit for this goes to the authors who have made and shared some really incredible assessment material, and what’s more, done it for no reward other than satisfaction. In particular, I should credit Helen Barnes and Mark Ricketts, from Priory School and St. Luke’s School respectively, both in Portsmouth. Helen wrote Christmaths and Mark wrote 12 Days of Christmas: The hidden meaning, both super-popular Christmas resources that are really grabbing peoples’ interest right now. Login needed for both, but it’s worth it I promise.

  • Bye bye PSP

    0.005% of Yacapaca users run quizzes on the Sony PSP. That is not enough to justify the additional complexity in the user interface for everyone else, so as of today the PSP quiz template is no longer available. We will migrate all the old PSP quizzes to the Flash 10 templates very soon.

    This does not mean we are giving up on mobile platforms forever. I am particularly taken with Android as a platform that makes huge sense in the third world especially, so look out for new excuses to buy cool gadgets in future.

  • Creative Commons Video

    Out of 35,000 registered teachers on Yacapaca, I only have direct evidence that precisely one has actually read our Terms of Service.

    He pointed out that our use of the Creative Commons license for all teacher-created content imposes responsibilities, as well as rights, on the author. Quite true. So just in case anyone else is interested in this, here’s a short video about it.

    Discovered via Ellen Trude, whom I met on Twitter.