We’ve been censored

A teacher I’d better not name just told me that Yacapaca was blocked in his school because a student submitted an assignment about internet safety that included the phrase “child porn”.

The student solved the problem by editing his assignment on his iPhone and resubmitting it. Score 1 for mobile technology and -5000 for misguided censorship.

When students find that in order to continue their education, they must subvert the school’s systems, they will increasingly ask why exactly they are supposed to be going to school in the first place.

Maximising your students’ motivation

How come the PE department can get students to turn out on a cold, wet Saturday afternoon to do their subject, when you find it hard to get them to even turn in their homework on time?

Part of the answer is that the PE department have harnessed the power of teams. Teams create a context for celebrating victory, and for commiserating defeat. They also exert a strong peer pressure to not let your mates down. Team sports are more popular than individual sports because they hook into that very human desire to be part of something.

You can now use Yacapaca to turn any test or assignment into a team competition with a single click. Here’s how.

To really maximise team motivation, steal some techniques from the PE Department’s playbook, and…

• offer a prize, even if it’s nominal.
• keep the same teams over several quizzes (the system does this by default).
• set the teams in advance, and give teams time to study together.
• engage each team in a debate about the best strategy for winning. It
  is preferred that they work out for themselves that actively coaching
  their weaker members will result in the biggest lift in points.
• encourage rivalry.

Teams mode in Yacapaca

Dividing the class into two or more teams is an old-established trick to raise energy and motivation. We have just launched a feature that lets you do it on Yacapaca, too.

What I’m particularly proud about is just how easy it is. You just decide how many teams you want, and Yacapaca does the rest. It even uses students’ previous results (if we have them) to create teams with equal abilities, so every student knows they have the same chance of being in the winning team.

Try it out for yourself! Here’s how:

Update:perhaps I should have mentioned that Teams Mode does not work with casual student sets – those in which the students sign themselves up. Pretty obvious really; you cannot create teams unless the students are already in the set. Fortunately, pasting in a list of students only takes 10 seconds.

The Yacapaca philosophy (in 3 lines)

Teachers’ time is too valuable to be wasted grading assignments…
…so let computers do the mundane work, and just give you the results.

Students’ time is too valuable to be wasted on summative assessments…
…so turn every assessment into a formative learning experience as well.

Let’s all work together…
…so anything one person does will help improve the service for everyone.

Video: I need my teacher to learn

With news coming in of Yacapaca being blocked in Lancashire (it’s subversive, you know), I thought this video was apposite.

If you cannot see the video from school, chalk one up to irony and check it from home.

Thanks Jeff Utecht for spotting it.

A look back on 2009

The new blog comes with better blog stats than the old one – it’s easier to see which posts have been popular, and which not. Here are a few that seem to deserve a special mention:

• Why have VLEs not succeeded?
• Funniest Powerpoint presentation ever
• Publishing is Dead
• Google ChromeOS will kill textbooks stone dead next year
• How to cheat in exams
• Drugs education: Science vs. Orthodoxy
• ‘Six Question Types’ competition winner
• Why is Yacapaca free?

Enjoy, and I hope you find them at least a little bit informative, entertaining or enraging.

New blog host, design

I have moved this blog to wordpress.com so that it gets hosted for us. In the process, I am experimenting with new designs to match the much greater focus on Yacapaca that it has now.

The old blog had become the target of regular ddos (distributed-denial-of-service) attacks which prevented normal users accessing either the blog or chalkface.com. By moving the target away from our own server, we should be able to restore a normal level of accessibility.

Please bear with me whilst I get all the chinaware unpacked in our new home.

Add accurate NC or GCSE grading to Yacapaca assessments

It is now 10x easier to have your courses report results as either GCSE grades, or National Curriculum levels, with more grading schemes to follow.

It took me a while to realise that the runaway popularity of our ICT Baseline scheme, (with over 1,000,000 quizzes served per year) is because it returns reliable NC levels. Once I did, we got to work reprogramming the whole system.

Now you can convert any course you authored to grade reporting, by simply choosing the relevant grade scheme from a menu. Here’s how.

Google ChromeOS will kill textbooks stone dead next year

I have been predicting for some time that a class set of computers will soon be cheaper than the equivalent pile of textbooks. Now I’ll put a date on it. Christmas 2010.

Today Google announced ChromeOS, an operating system for netbooks and other small, cheap devices. They are showing it off now, but make it clear that they have another 12 months of work before it will be ready for sale giving away to the general public.

Why is this such a big deal? Because it’s designed from scratch for computers with tiny processors, no hard drives, very little memory and therefore a very low price. It will simply become so much cheaper to supply information to students in an online format than a paper one; something you might bear in mind if you have been thinking of buying into a new textbook scheme next year.

Is my data safe?

Three different people today asked me variations on “but is my data safe in Yacapaca?” Lazy git that I am, I’ll group some of my previous writings on the subject here to save time in future:

• An overview of the issues.
• Specifics on security and encryption (a little ironic given what’s happened since to the banks)
• The principle involved