Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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  • Lots (and lots!) of new content in Yacapaca

    If you are a Yacapaca author you will know about this already; if not, you are in for a treat. After procrastinating for a full year, I have finally done the decent thing and allowed any teacher to make their own Yacapaca content public. The result is that we now have an astonishing 554 courses available to use, across a big range of subjects.

    In ICT alone there are 189 courses, ranging from the well-known KS3 Baseline assessments to a whole course on Java programming. Of course ICT is best-represented, but the main subjects all have a lot to offer:

    But it’s not all mainstream. One of the great delights of Yacapaca for me is the way people are using it to create courses in real niche subjects:

    …and my favourite: Judo! Just look at this fantastic quiz on hold-downs. Great use of images and extremely well-written formative feedback.

    If you want to find your own favourites, don’t just look at the subject categories. Use the search, and see what else is hiding in there to delight you and assess your students!

  • Falling behind in elearning (not)

    Everyone seems to think their country has fallen behind. I’ve had the same conversation with teachers in Brazil, Hong Kong, Qatar, USA… everywhere. I think it results from a sampling error. The teachers you meet in your own country are probably a representative spectrum, but those from other countries you meet typically through elearning events/websites, and are a strongly self-selected group.

    But never mind, here is my favourite counter-example.

  • International Edubloggers Directory

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    Patricia Donaghy has been kind enough to add me to the International Edubloggers Directory. I feel all growed up.

  • 25,000 teachers in Yacapaca

    Yesterday we hit a long-awaited milestone; 25,000 teachers are now Yacapaca members. Thanks everyone who has invested time and energy into our project and helped it grow over the last three years. For interest, the 30:1 student:teacher ratio we had when we started has remained remarkably constant; we now have just over 780,000 registered students.

  • Ebay's tragic error teaches us about assessment

    ebayEbay just announced that they are banning sellers from providing negative feedback on buyers. This solves the problem of ‘revenge feedback’, or the threat of it being used to bully buyers into accepting a bad deal. But it also breaks the symmetry of the system and denies essential protection to sellers. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

    I would have liked Ebay to introduce feedback escrow. Each party’s feedback is kept hidden until the other has provided theirs, then both are published at once. I suspect Ebay won’t do this because, freed to be honest, users on both sides would start reporting honestly and typical ratings would plummet from 99%+ where they are now, closer to 50%. But for users it would provide much, much better information about the people they are dealing with, thus building confidence in the system itself.

    What is this to do with education? Ebay’s users are up in arms because of a change that makes their feedback process slightly less symmetrical. But what about ours? Teacher gives marks to the student… and that’s it. We are starting to introduce occasional student voice surveys, which is great, but it is a long, long, way from Ebay’s (almost) symmetrical feedback mechanism.

    Let’s postulate Assessment for Teaching. It’s a mirror image of AfL. Teachers set targets for themselves for each lesson, and measures success against them (happens now, hopefully), but in addition, students provide both summative and formative feedback for every lesson.

    Could it work? What would be the pros and cons?