Then last August, former Google boss Eric Schmidt came to London and gave a well-publicised speech criticising English education system for promoting his competitor’s products in our schools. And he had a point. His proposed solution, though, was as biased as the previous one: we should teach all young people computer science so they can go and work at Google.

Now comes the bad bit. In a knee-jerk response, the Education Minister has today decreed that ICT is to be swept away and replaced by Computer Science in September. So we have eight months in which to retrain the 80% of ICT teachers who have no background in comp-sci, to write a new curriculum and devise new examinations – something that requires a lead time of at least two years.

Personally, I’ll not be sorry to see the back of the old ICT curriculum. It does a fair job of equipping young people for the office jobs of the late 20th Century, but that is not going to be of service to many when they enter the world of work in 2015 or beyond.

And I’ll be delighted to see a new emphasis on computing. Some students really get into it, and supporting their enthusiasm is a good investment for all of us.

But what about those kids for whom computers, like cars, are just boxes with functions? They are never going to become computer engineers and I see no reason to beat them about the head with that. They would be better served by an up-to-date – in fact future-oriented – Computer Literacy course.

We are not going to get that from Eric Schmidt, though, are we? Never mind; give it another decade and it will be Mark Zuckerberg’s turn. Let’s see what he tells us to do.

Update: this excellent and considered response to the speech from Daniel Needlestone is well-worth reading.

Update 2: two more good posts from Little Mavis and Zoe Ross.

You may already have noticed the little ‘Topic’ buttons sprouting in the Yacapaca Resources list. We are progressively re-classifying all 15,000 quizzes by syllabus and topic to make it easier for you to find the assessment(s) you need.

The feedback I’ve had from the beta-testers is that they have been stunned at how much content is actually available.

We are classifying one syllabus per day. Here is what we have done as at time of writing (9/1/12)…

Citizenship

• KS3 Citizenship (5 initial topics)

Geography

• KS3 Geography

History

• KS3 History (11 initial topics)

ICT

• AQA GCSE ICT
• CCEA GCSE ICT
• CIE iGCSE ICT
• Edexcel GCSE ICT
• KS3 ICT
• OCR GCSE ICT
• WJEC ICT GCSE 2010

Religion

• KS3 Religion

Science

• AQA GCSE Biology
• AQA GCSE Chemistry
• AQA GCSE Physics
• AQA Science A
• Common Entrance 13+ Science
• KS3 Science
• OCR Twenty First Century Biology
• OCR Twenty First Century Chemistry

Meanwhile the Finns, following an overtly Socialist agenda, find themselves topping the coveted PISA rankings as an accidental byproduct of their drive for educational equality.

What frustrates me is that 20 years ago we were perfectly positioned to go exactly the same way as Finland:

• Trust teachers to teach
• Pay teachers what they are worth
• Don’t interfere

But we didn’t and the rest is history. Or rather not history, because the present government is actually extending the destructive policies of its predecessors.

We are replacing the Tasks module that underpins Yacapaca ePortfolios and Short-text Tests with Quick Assignments.

Why?

Beyond a very small number of power-using enthusiasts, neither ePortfolios nor Short-text Tests have really caught the imaginations of Yacapaca users the way quizzes have. Accounting for about 2% of our throughput, they are not popular enough to be worth continuing to support.

When?

You will be able to run existing tasks until the end of this academic year (to July 2012). Task authoring tools have already been removed from the authors’ module.

What are Quick Assignments, and how are they different?

Quick Assignments are like setting work by email, but with all the inefficiencies removed. Here is how they work:

1. Give your students a simple instruction (one or two sentences), or send them a file.
2. They respond either in plain text or via an uploaded file.
3. You download all the files with a single click, or see all the typed responses on the same page.
4. You enter the grades via a simple dropdown.

What don’t they have?

ePortfolios and Short-text Tests were far more complicated; each feature had its aficionados, and I apologise in advance for the disappointment you may feel if you are one of them. On the way out are:

• Textbook mode
• Multi-page tasks
• Numeric marking rather than grading
• Conversations with students in the comments
• Tasks that are stored/shared between teachers

What new features do they have?

In designing Quick Assignments, we really focused on ease-of-use

• Set on the fly. No need to learn the authoring system.
• Works with your existing Word, Powerpoint, PDF, etc files.
• One-click download for a whole batch of files (they never get lost!)

And some additional features we are working on, that are not finished at time of writing:

• All-email working. Students can optionally receive assignments by email and respond the same way. No more lost-password excuses.
• Optionally restrict students to responding only in text, or only via file upload.
• Teacher comments with grades. You can actually comment QAs now, but the feature is a hidden legacy from the Tasks system. We are working on a combined simple comments module for Quick Assignments and Offline Assessments.

Where do I go to set a Quick Assignment

There is a button at the top of the Assignments List, and a link in the More menu.

How do I set one?

Follow the prescription in this one-minute screencast from John Cudlipp at Broughton High School in Edinburgh.

[Joni] Mitchell was drawn to art, but “growing up just at the time before arts were included as a part of education… at that time I was kind of a freak.” In seventh grade, she had “one radical teacher… a reverer of spirit… He criticized my habit of copying pictures. No one else did. They praised me as a prodigy for my technique. ‘You like to paint?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘If you can paint with a brush you can paint with words.’ He drew out my poetry. He was a great disciplinarian in his own punk style. We loved him… I wrote an epic poem in class – I labored to impress him. I got it back circled in red with ‘cliché, cliche.’ ‘White as newly fallen snow’ – ‘cliche’; ‘high upon a silver shadowed hill’ – ‘cliche.’ At the bottom he said, ‘Write about what you know, it’s more interesting.’” Mitchell talked about “going out after the rain and gathering tadpoles in an empty mayonnaise jar,” and he suggested she put her experience in writing. Mitchell’s debut album included a dedication to the teacher, “Mr. Kratzman, who taught me to love words.”

So here is my question. When did you last make the time to be a Mr Kratsman for one of your students? And if you saw an opportunity, but did not take it, what was the more important use of your time that prevented you? Marking? Form-filling? Sitting in a meeting?

Told you it was awkward.

More than half are straight multiple choice. Come on, folks – get more adventurous! Kids respond well to variety so you can improve the learning they get by mixing up the types of questions you use.

We measure the quality of each question in the database by looking at the proportion of passes to fails. The ideal question discriminates between those students who have ‘got it’ and those who have not, so we hope to see an average mark half way between perfect and random. That varies between question types: in a 4-option multiple choice, it would be 62.5%.

Different question types turn out to have somewhat different average qualities. The best are checkbox questions, and the worst multiple-choice cloze. Note, though, the scale on this graph. 59% and 67% are only 8% apart; it’s not that much.

I am now doing weekly online author training events – if you are a Yaquapacista you should already have had an invitation. One of the things I will be focusing on is different question types, and how to really get the best out of each.

Hope to see you there!