Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

recent posts

about

  • New resources for October

    My favourite course this month is GCSE Spanish Vocabulary by Nick Verney at Standish Community High School, for the marvellous variety of question styles and excellent use of sound. Try this quiz on adjectives to get a flavour.

    A selection of the newest courses below. If setting any of these for your students, please remember Yacapaca etiquette: offer concise and constructive feedback when asked.

    1. BCS BCS coursework
      Portfolio for Business & Communication Systems (BCS) coursework, linked to the King’s High School course for the OCR syllabus.
    2. BCS Conyers GCSE BCS
      A sequence of 8 quizzes for Business and Communications Systems. If the author provides some information about the syllabus or materials they link to, they will be really useful.
    3. Biology Biology (AQA B1)
      Tests for B1a and B1b, to be extended in due course.
    4. Biology Intermediate One
      Intermediate One (Scotland)
    5. Biology KS3 Biology
      Quizzes on respiration, and food & digestion
    6. Business Business Studies
      GCSE ICAA Business Studies for year 10 and 11 student. Robert May’s School in Hampshire.
    7. Business OCR Business Studies GCSE
      A very exciting project designed to complement the Teaching Business website and its materials.
    8. Chemistry AQA Additional Science Y11
      AQA Y11 course by topic
    9. Chemistry Chemistry (AQA C1)
      AQA C1 Chemistry course.
    10. French French Comprehension
      A five-question comprehension exercise, with the questions in English.
    11. ICT AS ICT
      Five short-text tests with well-written markschemes.
    12. ICT Network Management
      One quiz on network management, designed for the BTEC National Diploma in IT.
    13. ICT Web Design
      Web Design covering topics of best design practices, and tools to asist you in your design.  Questions in HTML, XHTML, CSS, SQL, and PHP
    14. Literature (English) Beowulf
      The same quiz offered in two different formats:
      • Beowulf and His Adventures has feedback after each question.
      • Beowulf’s adventures puts all the feedback to the end
    15. Literature (American) To Kill a Mockingbird
      These three short quizzes cover the whole book and will give you an excellent snapshot of your students’ understanding of the work.
    16. Literature Greek Mythology
      Quizzes based on the text Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton. We do two separate units. The “mythology unit” is the portion taught in class and covers the Olympians, some minor gods, the creation myths, Hades, Hercules, and the
    17. Physics AQA AS Physics
      This is for students of AQA (A) AS Level Physics
    18. Physics AQA P1a Energy and elctricity
      Quizzes for the year 10 course P1a Energy and Electricity
    19. Physics AQA P2 Electricity
      Four quizzes on electricity, and a general survey on attitudes to homework
    20. Trivia Tutor time
      “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” done Yacapaca style. Kids seem to love it.

  • Getting your teaching materials published

    The author of some excellent Yacapaca assessments (who has asked me not to name him, for the moment) recently asked to pass my eye over a very complete set of offline teaching materials he had also created. He said:

    …over the last few years I have sweated blood on producing a whole set of these for [curriculum reference removed]. I think that they have got potential [for commercial publication], however, that is my opinion and could have some bias!!

    Does this sound like you? Many teachers have invested a great deal of time and effort into materials that they would love to see published, and to make money from. At Chalkface we receive two or three such manuscripts per week and, I have to warn you, we reject them all. Like nearly all educational publishers, we only publish materials we have planned and commissioned ourselves.

    The mistake many teachers make is to give up at that point. A better strategy is to re-think where the true value lies. It is not actually in what you have written, but in you. The materials you have written are a manifest expression of your ideas, and of your ability to organise them. That skill is marketable in many different ways. Three examples:

    • Writing fees from publisher-initiated projects
    • Running INSET courses
    • Boosting your CV: head teachers love having famous authors on their staffs!

    You can use the materials you have created to establish your reputation as a writer and educator. Focus on getting other teachers talking about how useful your materials are in the classroom. Listen to feedback, and spend time tweaking and developing them until they really are foolproof resources that can compete with any textbook out there.

    Just get your materials out there; there are lots of ways to do it. Make them free. Promote them every way you can think of. Make sure everyone knows who the author is, and how to contact you. It will take time – several years of diligent effort probably – but in the end your reputation will be established. That established reputation , will, if you want it to, boost your income significantly.

  • Bring back the red biro!

    How do you get the same flexibility that a red biro gives you, when marking text-based assessments online?

    That red pen really is a fantastic teaching tool, but it falls down when you want the student also to be able to edit the work afterwards. Fortunately, there is a way to have the best of both worlds. Here is a five-minute screencast to show you how:

    For your interest, the Google TiSP assignment is here. I think TiSP remains the best April Fool spoof Google have yet done, and it’s worth visiting if only to re-read their original page.

  • Loading the whole school onto Yacapaca (whilst keeping your sanity)

    Dawn Cox from Orwell High School has been a user and good friend of Yacapaca for some time now. She’s one of those people who pushes us to raise our game by demanding (albeit politely) new features.

    Today, Dawn has been pushing me for a way to organise students into all their classes without duplicating logins. Normally, I’d recommend handing access keys to the students. They can then use these to join whichever sets they want. Dawn wants to get it all organised up front, so that won’t work for her.

    Instead, here is the sequence I recommended Dawn use.

    1. Get all your teachers joined to your schools’ support group. This will save a lot of time later.
    2. Upload all students to their ‘primary’ sets (e.g. tutor groups, but you can consider any to be the primary ones).
    3. In the edit page of the first student set, select all students and click the ‘copy’ button. You can enter a new set name; this will create a new set with you as the teacher.
    4. Repeat (3) as many times as needed with each set. You can copy some or all students from each set and combine/recombine as much as needed.
    5. Visit each of your new sets and add the relevant teacher. If the teachers are already members of the support group, they will be in a convenient dropdown.
    6. Now remove yourself from each of these sets, leaving the relevant teacher(s) in control. Or don’t, and retain a supervisory role for yourself.

    Here is a screencast covering the Student Set edit page:

  • Yes, Yacapaca works with Google Chrome

    Chrome
    Google launched their own web browser, Chrome yesterday. It is likely to prove popular because it is faster and safer than Internet Explorer.

    Every website owner meets the launch of a new browser with a mixture of excitement and dread. They each have their foibles (whilst staunchly maintaining that they are ‘standards compliant’ and everyone else has got it wrong), and they often mangle otherwise beautiful websites horribly. Well I’m glad to say that Yacapaca works fine in Chrome. Even the heavily Javascripted pages flew along in our tests.

    Most of the pundits are raving about Chrome, you may want to try it out for yourself.