Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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  • Students setting their own assessment targets

    I’m very happy today because for once I have an easy-to-explain new feature to introduce: self-set targets.

    The mechanism is very simple. Students set themselves a percentage target at the beginning of each test. At the end, the target is re-shown together with the result. The reward (in the example below, the avatar’s victory dance) is triggered by achieving the target.

    The target is not recorded, quite deliberately. This is a tool for students to use (or not) for themselves, as part of taking responsibility for their own learning. There is anecdotal evidence that students will set themselves higher targets, and be more motivated by them, if they know the teacher will not see them.

    We are rolling the self-set target feature out across our most popular test templates during this week, starting with the Avatar version.

    test

    test

  • Has Chalkface fallen victim to your spam filter?

    A lost-confirmation complaint prompted me to research how good different ISPs are at delivering email.

    I looked at the number of failed signups to Yacapaca, and compared them against successful signups. Here are the results for the big ISPs:

    • AOL.com 33%
    • Yahoo.co.uk 24%
    • Hotmail.com 23%
    • Tiscali.co.uk 20%
    • Yahoo.com 17%
    • BTinternet.com 17%
    • Hotmail.co.uk 10%

    So, what’s going on? Those percentages must include some people who mistyped their emails and others who simply lost interest – but 33%? I don’t think so.

    I am pretty sure the problem is overly-aggressive spam filters. The ISPs are busting a gut to deal with the torrent of spam that is swamping them at the moment. In the absence of good long-term solutions, they are increasingly filtering out anything from sources not already known to you.

    I have asked our software team to investigate all possible solutions. Meanwhile, it might behove you to check your Junk Mail folder once in a while. After all, where there’s muck, there’s brass.

  • Horndean Technology College visit

    Just after half term I had great pleasure of visiting three schools in the South West. Ostensibly, I was escorting my colleague Victoria Yegorenkova during her induction training, but it was a great excuse to get in some classroom observation and meet several teachers I knew previously only by reputation.

    First up was Horndean TC. Horndean are using both Paperless School and Yacapaca, so it was a good chance to compare the two systems.

    Highlights of the visit for me:

    • Sarah Wood’s classroom. All four walls and even the ceiling were covered in stimulus material.
    • The high-energy intensity of Sarah’s lessons, and the enthusiasm with which her students moved from task to task.
    • Patrick Sheppard’s creative use of a Yacapaca test as a whiteboard tool. We had designed the test as an individual learning tool and it wasn’t completely legible from the back of the room, but nonetheless it made a great exercise for a closing plenary.

    My thanks to Sarah and Patrick for an absolutely fascinating visit.

  • Free Exam Prep resources

    Doing classroom observation last week (of which more later), I noticed that Year 11s fall into three groups:

    1. those who have have effective revision plans
    2. those who are revising, but are not doing so effectively
    3. those who are still in denial

    As it happens, my colleage Mike has been working on a resource aimed precisely at groups two and three. Specifically, here is what he has done.

    You can use them directly from the Previews in this email, but to analyse the results you need to set your students up in Yacapaca. This takes 5-10 minutes, and costs nothing. Start from the signup page.

    BTW, both the exam prep resources and Yacapaca itself are free.

  • Improved practicality for Yacapaca

    If you are one of the (many) teachers who has told us “Each student in my school has many teachers, but should only have one Yacapaca login”, then I have good news. Over Easter, we added just this feature.

    Here’s how it works. Suppose Mr. Smith wants to set assessments for a class who have already used Yacapaca with another teacher:

    1. Mr. Smith joins Yacapaca himself from the signup page.
    2. He is automatically taken to the Add Students page when he first logs in. Instead of adding student names, he clicks through to the Access Key page.
    3. Now he enters just two things. The name of the set, and the number of days students have in which to join it. This latter detail prevents admin headaches, by stopping other students from blundering into the set by accident later on.
    4. The website will then produce an Access Key that looks something like ‘1234-ABCD’. Mr Smith writes this up on the markerboard, or broadcasts it to the students by some other means.
    5. The students log in using their existing IDs, and type the key into their ‘Me’ pages to join the set.

    And that’s it! Mr Smith and his class are up and running with Yacapaca. He can add as many sets as he likes this way. If, by mistake, he does create second logins for students who are already members, they can clip these together themselves from their ‘Me’ pages.

    I feel really, really proud of this feature, most particularly because it is so easy to use. When you try it, you’ll see for yourself that the programming team have made it so natural that your first reaction is “what’s all the fuss about?”. Which is exactly how it should be.