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.

You will no doubt have heard the claim that the average pupil only gets one minute a day of personal attention from a teacher. I’ve quoted it often enough, but have long-since lost touch with the original reference. Time to hit Google. Embarrassingly, I couldn’t find it. What I did find, however, was anecdotal but far more interesting.

The English Teachers Network in Israel has a fantastic page for its members called The Best Teacher Ever. It’s some 30-odd anecdotes, mainly from their members, about the teachers they recall as being the most important in their own education.

Some favourite quotes:

He was the one person who really understood me and he changed my life dramatically and i forever thank him for that.

He was respectful of us as pupils, he knew how to listen,

I felt most confortable in the environment he set up and it was fun every day. I had hated math up until that point, but he taught me to love it!

and one that I suspect may be from a current student:

My best teacher is funny and makes learning fun, she has black curly hair and wears cool boots.

While I was reading and enjoying these (do read them yourself!) it occurred to me that in any other service industry it is standard practise to follow-up former customers and solicit feedback. I’ve never before seen this done in Education.

A few themes leaped right out as I was reading. “Fun” is without doubt the most oft-cited criterion. There’s a more diffuse set of criteria around individual contact; ability to explain, to listen and to empathise all seemed to be highly valued. Notable by its absence was any mention of exam or test results, yet this is what the government insists on measuring teachers by.

Take a moment, if you will, to imagine how you might organise a school to maximise fun, listening, empathising and explaining so that students really understood. How about a clapometer in assemblies? Or rewarding teachers according to how much laughter is heard in their classrooms? Or polling parents about which subject their offspring talk most enthusiastically about?

All very well, I heasr you say, but to maximise one thing, you must first minimise another. On my hitlist are curriculum and marking.

I’d junk a good two-thirds of the curriculum. It’s fair that basic literacy and numeracy should be mandatory, but let’s allow the rest to arise from teachers’ desire to teach and students’ desire to learn. If the goal is to inspire, the choice of content is not critical, but personal commitment to it is.

Equally importantly, I would also ban or automate tasks that numb teachers’ minds like marking tests or filling in meaningless forms. You can’t be expected to exude fun and inspiration if your own brain is fogged by tedium.

And there would need to be a fair bit of retraining at Ofsted. What are the chances, do you think, of an Ofsted report praising a teacher for her cool boots?