| We’re still piloting our free ePortfolio system, but I thought you might like to see some of the work students are doing on it at the moment. These three examples, each from a different school, make great illustrations of the range of possibilities in the system. They are produced by students of different attainment levels, doing different courses, in three very different schools.
I have anonymised the names to John Smith/Jane Smith, but otherwise left them completely untouched as the students produced them. Note that only one of the three examples is actually a finished piece of work. So here they are, specified as
I’ve added the download links for two reasons. First, to demonstrate one of the features of the system; you can view ePortfolios direct online, or download them to CD as some exam boards require. And second to enable you to investigate the file structure should you wish to. My thanks, for permission to publish, to the teachers and students involved. The free ePortfolio system is available as part of Yacapaca. |
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The best teaching materials in the most practical format.
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When I decided last August to stop charging for Yacapaca, I knew I was taking a big risk. It was already making a good income and growing strongly, but I wanted the growth rate to speed up, and this seemed the best way to do it.
I reasoned that as a school starts to use Yacapaca across the board, they will find our training & support package a very sensible investment at £295. With 5000 secondary schools in the UK alone, we could make enough to cover the running costs. With luck, there would be enough left over for me to afford the car of my dreams as well.
Ever the optimist, I set us a target of 250,000 users by the end of this term, double the July figure. Some of my colleagues pulled that face, but I stuck to my guns. I believed we could do it.
And today, we sailed through the quarter of a million users a full month ahead of schedule. As of today we have 9,000 teachers and just over 241,000 students registered on Yacapaca.
I just can’t tell you how delighted I am that the concept has been validated in this way, and how grateful I am particularly to those teachers who have got behind it and pushed colleagues to try it out. Thank you!
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In a comment on my previous baby post I jokingly promised that we’d ramp up production. Little did I know…not only have we ramped it up; we’ve even outsourced some to Ukraine!
I am therefore delighted to celebrate the arrival of Maria Skokova (top in photo). Igor, her father, built the Yacapaca ePortfolio pilot which has garnered so much acclaim.
And hot on the heels comes Cameron Lunn (bottom in photo). Katherine, his mum, was responsible for the creation and updating of Chalkface packs up to the point in 2002 where we moved all our energies into online materials. If you look in the front of one of the Chalkface packs in your stock cupboard, you will most likely find her name there.
Congratulations Igor, Katherine and your respective spouses.
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Around the end of last term I came across Mike Highfield’s excellent SPB Helper for DiDA (here’s his demo). I was so impressed with the quality of Mike’s screencasts that I immediately approached him to produce a short series of screencasts explaining Yacapaca.
The original plan was that these would simply be freebies would help promote the system but, one thing led to another and what we ended up with was a massive project containing no fewer than 74 separate little movies talking you through every detail of the system (example 1, example 2).
What I’m hoping is that people will use it to introduce Yacapaca across a whole school. From experience of running Yacapaca INSET days, I think there’s about three days-worth of material here, if you are starting with novices. It will be interesting to see who uses it in formal day trainings, and who puts it on a school network so teachers can access it as and when they need.
By the time we’d done all this, the project had cost too much to just give away. Actually, this solved a problem. I want as many people as possible to be able to use Yacapaca, and charging money for using it gets in the way of this. At the same time, we have to do something to keep a roof over hour heads. The solution was to make using the system entirely free, bundle the screencasts with a support contract and sell that to schools. Give away the product, but sell training & support to those who want it. It’s the classic ‘open source’ model.
In the nature of projects that grow beyond their original scope, this one also grew beyond its original schedule. Finally, I’m pleased to say, it’s ready, and the first disks are going out this week to customers who pre-ordered it.
If you’re interested, there’s a downloadable demo here, and more information here.
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It’s true, Chalkface also makes babies. OK, it’s not true. Chalkface-associated people do though. And here are two to prove it. Organisational genius Sonia’s daugher Mollie-Rae, and top Yacapaca author Mark Bedding’s son Joshua. Photos attached. 
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