Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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  • Chalkface sponsors Edublogs

    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.

  • Top Dog

    When we first introduced the Avatar template in Yacapaca, we only had one avatar, Bobo. Since then, he’s been joined by 14 friends – some human, some not, some … indeterminate. Bobo, having a head start, was the most popular – until yesterday.

    Now we have a new number one! It can be exclusively revealed right here on Radio Chalkface that Britain’s Number One avatar is ….. [naff jingle] …… Amber!

    Yacapaca avatar popularity chart

    Amber probably owes her popularity to her resemblance to an Andrex Puppy, but her real namesake is this wonderful creature.

  • The Valentine's Day Survey

    In a previous career, I used to write quizzes for teenage magazines, so when Valentine’s day came around, I couldn’t resist doing an online one. It’s in the Freebies section if you’ve not already seen it. Miranda claims it’s trashy, and she’s probably right. But it’s fun.

    Writing for magazines, I never knew how my quizzes got answered. With Yacapaca, I finally can. Built into the admin tools (but not the teacher-authoring suite yet, sorry) is an analysis screen that shows me the combined marks of all users. It doesn’t show which school or students, just a total. Here’s how Q2 of the Valentine’s survey looked this evening.

    Valentine survey

    So far, too little data to really tell, but after half-term there should be quite a lot, and we’ll get a truer view of the the state of teenage morality across the nation. If there’s interest, I will publish the data in a couple of weeks.

    There may not be, because it’s just a fun survey. But… think what else you could use it for. If you have ideas national (regional, whatever) surveys that you’d like to do, let me know (ian_gs[at]chalkface.com). I will see what I can do to help.

  • Loved Up

    Here are the Urban Dictionary’s definitions of “loved up”. For the record, I was unaware of the drug-use connotation when I wrote my last email.

    Exactly what I did mean, I leave to your imagination. Which, judging by the feedback to the email, is vivid.
    Click to enlarge

  • More ammo for Moodlers

    Some very well-informed discussion of VLE issues going on over at Zacker’s blog at the moment. If you are trying to gen up on VLEs generally, read the comments on his Sakai vs. Moodle post. Never mind that it’s about Sakai, which is virtually unknown in the UK. What’s really useful in the debate is how it reveals the evolved criteria of people who have been involved in VLEs for some time. I enriched my knowledge of the scalability issue, particularly.

    Also, if you’re in the pro-Moodle camp, there are some lovely graphs to warm yer cockles.

    via Edubloggers Link Feeds (RSS)