• Yacapaca passed the 2500 registered teachers mark mid-last week – in fact as I write we have 2681 teacher members. A quick sample of the data suggests that approx 75% are from UK secondary school, and that each school has an average of 1.5 teachers registered. That would indicate that 1340 UK Secondary Schools now use Yacapaca, which is just over 25% of the total.

    But the number I’m really proud of is the 77,533 students currently registered. That’s how many kids are now being more effectively educated through Yacapaca.

  • James was ribbing me a few weeks back, about not having comments on this blog. So….comments there are!

    But more than that. Nataly (who programs this site) has applied the same structure to the resource records in the main site, and extended the reviews section so that you can add your own review. There’s even an RSS feed so I can keep an eye and remove the inevitable occasional vandalism. Really nice.

    To be honest, I don’t know what proportion of Chalkface’s customers will choose to write reviews. We had an open reviews system a while back and it wasn’t popular – but that was before most teachers switched to the web as their key source of information. Chalkface has some 90,000 members now so let’s see…

  • How would you teach, if you had one of these?

  • It wasn’t that long ago that we would celebrate in the Chalkface office if a real teacher had been on Yacapaca that day. It felt hugely validating that someone had wanted to use our litte system to run some tests with a class of perhaps 30 students.

    Recently it’s been a bit busier. A good weekday would see teacher numbers climbing towards 50 – that’s 1500 students or so – or even peaking a little higher than that. I started to hope we would see the 100 milestone soon.

    And today, something shifted. Perhaps because of last night’s email, perhaps because of the edubloggers who are starting to join us, we were up above 50 by lunchtime. Sometime around 3pm we hit the magic 100.

    And kept going.

    At the time of writing (11.30 at night) we’re up to 183. I’m just bowled over. And I’d like to say a huge thankyou to every teacher who has put trust in Yacapaca’s ability to deliver good quality, motivating, formative assessments to your students.

  • I’ve said before how impressed I am with Edublogs. Perhaps I should have been a little less fulsome because James called me to put my money where my mouth is when he outgrew his old server.

    The result of that conversation is that Chalkface is now the proud sponsor of Edublogs. James has slightly jumped the gun in announcing integration between Edublogs and Yacapaca. That’s coming, once Alex and Sergej have stopped shedding each others’ blood over exactly how to implement it.

    Anyway, the main benefit is that I can now promote this excellent free blogging service for teachers with a clean conscience, as I am no longer expecting somebody else to pick up the bill for your bandwidth.