Yacapaca

Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching

recent posts

about

  • Author of the Year Nominations

    Of course this was photoshopped!

    Over 1,000 teachers have now authored educational resources in Yacapaca. The best of those resources are really quite staggeringly good, as we see from the rave reviews they get from users.

    It is long past time to honour our best authors, so I am delighted to announce the 2008 Author of the Year Awards.

    The seven nominees have been selected from the most popular subjects in Yacapaca. They are each very different; what they have in common is excellence as teaching and assessment resources.

    The nominees are:

    The judging panel are experienced Yacapaca users, authors and moderators. More importantly, they are all teachers:

    • Aidan McCanny, Assistant Advisory Officer for eLearning and ICT, Southern Education and Library Board (SELB).
    • Gill Chesney-Green, Drama Teacher, John Flamsteed Community School, Derbyshire & author of several popular Drama resources including Foundation Drama.
    • Jerome Thompson, Alderman Peel High School, Norfolk & moderator of the Year 7 ICT authoring group.
    • Helen Barnes, teacher of Mathematics, Priory School, Portsmouth & author of the HBR Maths assessments.
    • Julie Mason, Wellingborough School and moderator of the Design & Technology authoring group.
    • John Boyle, teacher of Businesss and Enterprise, Grace Academy, Solihul & moderator of the Business authoring group.

    The winner will be announced on June 16th on this blog, and will win an Apple iPod Touch. Both the winner and the runner-up will receive Yacapaca trophies.

  • Today…

    …is my wedding day. Wish me luck.

    [Update: photos & slideshow.]

  • How to cheat in exams

    A whole page of “how to…” videos, courtesy of Tony Vincent. Ah, brings back happy memories. Only kidding.

    I found these via Glen Moses’s rant about how “mobile phones can be used for cheating” is a really naff excuse for banning them.

    Anyway, here’s my favourite, both for the elegance of the method and the congruence of the presenter.

     

     

    And here by way of contrast is the James Bond fear fantasy of exam cheating you are being sold by equipment suppliers. I would give long odds that for every SMERSH agent in your exam room there are 100 rubber-banders.

    In 2002, I sat on the committee that wrote British Standard BS7988: Code of practice for the use of information technology (IT) in the delivery of assessments, which subsequently morphed into ISO/IEC 23988 Information technology — A code of practice for the use of information technology (IT) in the delivery of assessments. In retrospect I think we, too, over-focused on the technical aspects, and largely ignored the way that many problems (not just cheating) carry over from paper to electronic means of assessment.

  • Funniest powerpoint presentation ever

    Next time someone makes you sit through a Powerpoint presentation you’d rather not suffer, you will remember this and be unable to suppress a giggle, I promise.

    Via Ewan

    Update April 2017: I first published this nine years ago, and since then nothing has improved in the way presentations are typically made. Tragically funny.

  • My first computer

    The first computer I ever had was an Osborne 1 with a 5″ screen framed by two whopping great floppy disk drives. I didn’t actually own it; I blagged it from Osborne on the promise of including an illustration of it in a Chalkface pack. By the time it was due for return, they’d gone bust.

    One of the reasons Chalkface used the two-column layout for our worksheets was that we could fit a column into that tiny screen. Not WYSIWYG of course; we specified all the layout in a typesetting language called CORA 5, which I got quite good at in the end.

    And the reason for this nostalgia? I came across a photo of the Osborne on Tech Republic, and got all sentimental.

    Osborn 1