Sketchcast has just launched, and in my view it is the most intuitive web tool for teachers ever created. It works just like a markerboard. You write or draw, and talk. It is all recorded and can be played back at any time. The service is still pretty basic, and I suspect it will take off so fast that their server will get overwhelmed sometime, but I still urge you to give it a go. Here is my first attempt: it’s a bit wobbly, but it does seem to get the point across reasonably well.
Yacapaca
Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching
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It has been quite a chuffing weekend, numbers-wise.
- On Friday, Yacapaca hit the half-million member milestone. That’s up from 150,000 last September, and 10,000 the September before.
- Then this morning, a single assessment (the ICT Baselines) passed one million tests served. The actual numbers this evening are 1,016,037 tests completed by 165,559 students – just over six tests per student, which suggests most teachers are following the assessment prescription.
- And this evening, I see that over 500 different schools have been logged on today. That is the first time we have broken the 500 barrier.
I should give credit where it is due. Yacapaca’s phenomenal growth is largely down to a small group of teachers who saw its potential, and started creating tests, quizzes and other assessments that were good enough that everyone else wanted to use them. If you’re a Yacapaca member, why not feast your eyes on some of the best of this user-created content?
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I still hate podcasts, but I admit they are far more palatable when they are about my baby.
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I’ve given a talk a few times on the why of Yacapaca, but it seems a bit daft with all this technology at our disposal to go running round the country just to give a didactic presentation. So, today I finally got around to converting the ePortfolio I was using as a slideshow to a multimedia presentation. I used Flektor, a really nice online multimedia composer. Flektor is fairly new and the movie embed is still a little unreliable, but just follow this link and you’ll get to the presentation. About 7 minutes long, and maybe worth using as a starter for an INSET presentation?
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Getting your students to write blogs is becoming increasingly popular, and the most eloquent exponent of the form is undoubtedly Konrad Glogowski. I recently challenged Konrad to lay out his ‘utopian vision’ student blogging. Here’s part of his reply:
I know that blogging is about conversations and building networks. So far, my students have been building networks within our class community and with some amazing results. It’s time to extend those network-building efforts to include the world outside of their immediate environment.
What benefit would my students get from the comments? I look at it as breaking down the classroom walls. That’s what I want to do next. I want the students to build knowledge by building networks, and I also want them to be able to take those networks with them once they leave my classroom.
I want my student to keep blogging about child soldiers and communicating with experts in this field even after she leaves my class in June so that next time one of my students says “I’m interested in child soldiers,” I can say: “Take a look at this blog. She was in my class a couple of years ago. Send her an e-mail. Subscribe to her blog. You’ll learn a lot.”
Note “communicating with experts in this field”. In classroom blogging, usually only other students from the class are permitted to comment. Konrad wants to extend that, but most schools would see it as inappropriate to allow open commenting on a student blog.
It occurs to me, though, that the ‘share my class with another teacher’ feature in Yacapaca would be perfect for this. It’s a very simple way to permit another adult whom you trust to communicate with your students.
At the moment, Yacapaca doesn’t offer blogs. But it does offer eportfolios, and the two are kissing cousins. The only differences really are that blogs are organised by date, and they traditionally permit permit peer-commenting. In fact, that’s coming for Yacapaca eportfolios anyway.
It’s quite an exciting thought that, with a little interface tweaking, Yacapaca could become the blogging platform of choice for Utopian educators.
Yacapaca 