Yacapaca

Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching

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  • Moodle at BETT

    I remain mystified as to why Grids for Learning and Regional Broadband Consortia are so keen to spend huge amounts of money on proprietary VLEs. Ever since I started working in the elearning area, the best services have been free. Not just the Chalkface ones (we charge for content but not service); Think.com is another excellent example, and of course there are free blogging and wiki services all over the place.

    Of the free VLEs, the best-supported is undoubtedly Moodle. There is a big developer community behind it now and new features appear all the time. So it was great pleasure that I discovered my old friend Drew Buddie was setting up a stand to promote Moodle at BETT. Drew says

    We want to promote Moodle as the first choice learning platform for UK schools, by presenting it as a viable, and we would argue preferable, alternative to the commercial learning platforms on show at BETT. We’re giving our time and expertise for free, as our way of saying thanks for how Moodle has transformed learning in our schools.

    Drew and I have been Skyping about it all evening and as a result Chalkface is now proud to be one of the stand’s sponsors. If you are interested in VLEs, and you’re going to BETT, then I strongly recommend you stop by the Moodle stand at SW154.

  • Yacapaca reaches 1500

    Blimey, that was quick! We added 50% more schools in just a week. It’s those quizzes wot did it, but the really cheering thing is the number of teachers who are now starting to experiment with quiz authoring for themselves.

  • Yacapaca reaches 1000

    Round about midnight last night we passed 1000 schools landmark on Yacapaca. Approximately 20% of UK secondary schools now have Yacapaca accounts. I’m over the moon.

  • Christmas Quizzes

    This year, Mike and Miranda have replaced Christmas cards with Christmas quizzes, running on Yacapaca of course. They come in three flavours:

    If you want to run them with your students, and are not already a Yacapaca subscriber, you can sign up here for free.

    You’ll find some suggestions for using them with your students here

    Enjoy!

  • Strategies of Genius

    Twenty years ago, I decided to learn to touch type. Struggling with conventional classes, I looked for an alternative and discovered that the psychologist Robert Dilts had just invented a computer program that could teach me. No Google in those days; it was fortuitous that I already knew Robert, having trained under him. So I bought a copy and became the first person in the UK to learn to type without tears. Such programs are now commonplace (e.g. Mavis Beacon) but Robert was the genius behind them.

    The relevance of this is that I was trying to find a copy of Robert’s book Strategies of Genius III to give context to the photomontage. Volumes I and II are out of print but available from AA Books. Volume III has, however, disappeared into the Twighlight Zone.

    I feel really sad that this book is no longer available. It is a valuable contribution to our thinking about Leonardo (also Freud and Tesla) and the beginnings of a discussion, at least, about how we might teach ourselves and our students to think like he did. In a rational society, such books would not be permitted to simply disappear.

    Which brings me, in a roundabaout way, to Google Print. Google has taken upon itself to digitise some 10 million books, the vast majority of them out of print. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. American libraries alone list 32 million books of which just 4% are in print. Even allowing for duplications, translations and so forth, the total number of books that exist as at least one copy somewhere in the world must be in the range of 100-250 million.

    Even using these amazing machines, it’s likely to take Google a while to get around to my particular book, or to the one that you feel equally strongly about. After all, to quote the Kirtas promotional video, we have a 500-year backlog.

    Update: Look what Miranda found!
    Click to enlarge