Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching
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.
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.
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.
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.
It feels like the end of an era. Google has become so dominant in our lives, that you may need reminding that when it first appeared its spartan looks were quite shocking. Now, white backgrounds are almost de rigueur. Or they were until today!
Look at this skin that just appeared on my Google Mail! There are 20-odd skins to choose from, some looking suspiciously inspired by our wilder ePortfolio themes. If you’re a Gmail user, check out Graffiti, for instance.
All of a sudden I feel vindicated in my holding out for black backgrounds!
Yacapaca 