Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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  • Dave Corbett's great KS3 History course

    Dave Corbett, the author of all these History tests is now setting homework via his blog. What I really love is the way Dave is pulling in resources from all over the web – podcasts from the BBC, Wikpedia pages, other History teachers’ sites, Yacapaca (of course) – and linking them up with minimal text of his own to manage his childrens’ homeworks. And it’s not costing Dave or his school a bean.

    Inspiring.

  • Cyber Bullying

    Danah Boyd is always a worthwhile read, but today’s post is directly relevant to anyone who is involved in anti-bullying.

    Bullies can be enthusiastic adopters of new technology and will experiment avidly to find the most effective ways of making life unbearable for others. Techniques such as poison email campaigns and character-assassinating MySpace/Bebo profiles can easily induce media hysteria and disempower those very adults who need to be most active confronting bullies and bullying. Danah’s measured approach brings welcome sanity to the debate.

    My key takeaways

    • There is no reason to suppose that the internet (or any new technology) increases bullying in aggregate. Rather, the bullying moves from one medium to another.
    • Cyber bullying can happen anywhere at any time, unlike physical bullying that requires physical presence. This is bad news.
    • Cyber bullying is more visible to adults, not less. You just have to learn where to look. This is good news.
    • Online bullying requires offline intervention. Your own tools and strategies do not need to change.

  • How to educate for the future, not the present?

    This six-minute video presentation from Karl Fisch (via David Warwick) neatly encapsulates the consequences for education of two trends: the exponential growth in computing power and the maturing of the educational systems of both China and India. Required viewing for any PGCE student!

    The concepts themselves are familiar themes on this blog; what shocked me though was the comments left on YouTube. YouTube’s audience is young, yet these commenters were responding with denial, aggression, even religion. I found no-one in the first two pages who wanted to celebrate the potential to end hunger and poverty, and create a more beautiful world.

    This, for me, is the message to educators. We have a duty to show young people how to embrace the future, and to walk into it without fear.

  • When is the best time to give feedback?

    We have always put great stress on the formative value of good feedback in Yacapaca quizzes. There is something about getting instant results that really engages the brain, and that creates a fantastic, but fleeting, opportunity to hit the student with an insight or challenge.

    Sometimes this works, but sometimes it does not. I have observed in the classroom, that answering the next question is often more (more…)

  • Chalkface website updated

    We are updating the Chalkface website today. It’s a little chaotic, as these things always are, but the wrinkles are slowly disappearing. If you are just browsing round the site, you probably won’t notice any difference but underneath it has been completely rebuilt. For the technically-minded, we have dumped Plone in favour of Django, and moved the blog to WordPress.

    These are the new features we have got as a result:

    • Faster. Much faster
    • Better search. More of each product record is searched, and the results are more intelligently ranked.
      Improved credit-card processing. We have dropped PayPal in favour of Protx, which works particularly well with British banks. Protx is simple, reliable and secure.
    • More-trustworthy book reviews. My first job in the morning used to be to delete the inappropriate and unhelful graffiti left by spammers and VI-formers overnight. They are now blocked, but instead we will write to every genuine purchaser of each book and ask them to rate it and write a short review. This way, you know you are seeing reviews from real users. Incidentally, our policy remains that remove reviews that are completely uninformative, and keep the rest – whether they are positive or negative in tone.