It feels like the end of an era. Google has become so dominant in our lives, that you may need reminding that when it first appeared its spartan looks were quite shocking. Now, white backgrounds are almost de rigueur. Or they were until today!

Look at this skin that just appeared on my Google Mail! There are 20-odd skins to choose from, some looking suspiciously inspired by our wilder ePortfolio themes. If you’re a Gmail user, check out Graffiti, for instance.

All of a sudden I feel vindicated in my holding out for black backgrounds!

I received a long and very thoughtful email yesterday from Calum Munro, who teaches IT in Melbourne, Australia. Calum said

Yacapaca is not … a resource to ‘over use’ as the students have a low concentration/interest span and if they use a quiz a lot (even with the shuffling that the program does) they just start to do the answers automatically without really reading the questions or feedback - they seem to be able to pick out the keywords in the questions and the answers.

Calum went on to suggest some new interesting features, which we’ll certainly research. But… he set me wondering how many teachers know how to use the existing features to maximise motivation. So, here is my mini-primer…

Quizzes

• If you are using quizzes on the avatar template, encourage the students to select their own avatars, and make a point of asking them why they chose their particular selection. Most teachers don’t ‘get’ avatars, but the kids do. Choice of avatar represents ownership, and this increases involvement and motivation.
• Understand that the kids’ motivations in the moment are to score points and not to learn per se. Feedback makes sense if it will help you get a higher score. How? Run a quiz twice, and tell students you will record their second attempt to your markbook. If you authored the quiz yourself, run the first first attempt on the ‘feedback-at-end’ template, then give the students pair item to read through it and discuss their answers.
• Most users know about the Analysis Whiteboard, but if you want to promote competition, and your kids are emotionally robust enough to handle it, try the student rank whiteboard button on the Results -> Quizzes page.
• If you are an author, look at the function of your questions. If your quizzes only promote rote memorisation, then of course the kids will get bored. Make sure most of your questions address understanding and evaluation. The links are to how-to posts.

Tasks (short-text, ePortfolio, etc)

• Don’t stop short at quizzes. Use all the features Yacapaca offers for creative input!
• Use ePortfolios even for small projects. Encourage students to embellish them with images, videos, sounds. All kids love to express themselves, and the Bebo generation like to do it on screen.
• Create a place on the school network for kids to upload their completed ePortfolios and show them off to each other.
• Encourage kids to take ePortfolios home on CD to show their parents. This gets you extra love on parents’ evenings, too.
• Comment promptly (online) on students’ work. Get out of the habit of waiting for it to be ‘handed in’. You can encourage and reward right now.

Over on the TES R.E. Forum, user fpno asked

Are there any data protection issues with inserting the names of our students into [Yacapaca]?

It’s a question that (quite rightly) comes up regularly, so I thought it worthwhile to reflect here the answer I gave in the forum:

Under the Data Protection Act, you have a general responsibility to store and use your students’ data safely so, yes, there is an issue. You have to be sure that Yacapaca is at least as safe as the conventional alternative, and preferably safer. Here is what Yacapaca does to give you that reassurance:

• Yacapaca’s digital site security is better than that of most banks’ online banking sites. See this report for details of how that is measured.
• The site is hosted at Interxion London, one of the highest-security data centers in the UK. Here is their safety/security page.
• And if somebody did get through all of that, there isn’t much they could do with the data. Yacapaca does not store students’ email addresses, so there is no way to contact your students other than through you.

Now let’s consider the alternative you are moving from. Most teachers are moving to Yacapaca from paper notebooks and worksheets. How secure are they? Do you ever leave a pile of notebooks in the back of the car whilst you pop into the shop? Probably. If you take them home, do keep them in a safe overnight? Of course not. I have never known students’ notebooks be treated as a security risk, but in fact they contain the exact same type of data that Yacapaca does.

A conversation with established Yacapaca author Nick Verney reminded me that about 16 months ago I overviewed the very nascent state of Spanish language resources. There were seven groups, of which five were public. None had really got off the starting blocks. Here is what they looked like:

I predicted a shakeout and offered tips for those who wanted to run the most successful group. A year and a half later, this is the result:

What a difference! In total, we’ve seen 2,400% growth in that time. I am not sure if some of the old groups have disappeared or been renamed, but either way there are clearly two groups that have succeeded (out of a total of 15 now; the rest are so small they don’t appear in the list).

The top group is Nick’s (no surprise there). So, Did he follow my advice? Well, partly. The group certainly is well named and described, with a good colophon. But Nick has restricted membership to his own department, rather than keeping it open as I recommended. I’m beginning to think he may be right about this; a tight authoring team is hard to build remotely.

I also recommended that authors produce a range of objective and subjective (free text) material. Nick and his group have ignored free text altogether, but they have worked hard to introduce variety into the quizzes. They use the full range of question types, with lots of images and sounds. They also integrate them with resources from elsewhere, which I think is excellent practice.

So Nick scores 10/10 for a great group which produces excellent, and popular, Spanish resources. I think I’ll give myself a 5 and a “must try harder”.

Inspired by this video and its associated commentary, I have updated our Guy Fawkes resources. Take a look, and let me know what you think.

My favourite course this month is GCSE Spanish Vocabulary by Nick Verney at Standish Community High School, for the marvellous variety of question styles and excellent use of sound. Try this quiz on adjectives to get a flavour.

A selection of the newest courses below. If setting any of these for your students, please remember Yacapaca etiquette: offer concise and constructive feedback when asked.

1. BCS BCS coursework
   Portfolio for Business & Communication Systems (BCS) coursework, linked to the King’s High School course for the OCR syllabus.
2. BCS Conyers GCSE BCS
   A sequence of 8 quizzes for Business and Communications Systems. If the author provides some information about the syllabus or materials they link to, they will be really useful.
3. Biology Biology (AQA B1)
   Tests for B1a and B1b, to be extended in due course.
4. Biology Intermediate One
   Intermediate One (Scotland)
5. Biology KS3 Biology
   Quizzes on respiration, and food & digestion
6. Business Business Studies
   GCSE ICAA Business Studies for year 10 and 11 student. Robert May’s School in Hampshire.
7. Business OCR Business Studies GCSE
   A very exciting project designed to complement the Teaching Business website and its materials.
8. Chemistry AQA Additional Science Y11
   AQA Y11 course by topic
9. Chemistry Chemistry (AQA C1)
   AQA C1 Chemistry course.
10. French French Comprehension
    A five-question comprehension exercise, with the questions in English.
11. ICT AS ICT
    Five short-text tests with well-written markschemes.
12. ICT Network Management
    One quiz on network management, designed for the BTEC National Diploma in IT.
13. ICT Web Design
    Web Design covering topics of best design practices, and tools to asist you in your design.  Questions in HTML, XHTML, CSS, SQL, and PHP
14. Literature (English) Beowulf
    The same quiz offered in two different formats:
    • Beowulf and His Adventures has feedback after each question.
    • Beowulf’s adventures puts all the feedback to the end
15. Literature (American) To Kill a Mockingbird
    These three short quizzes cover the whole book and will give you an excellent snapshot of your students’ understanding of the work.
16. Literature Greek Mythology
    Quizzes based on the text Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton. We do two separate units. The “mythology unit” is the portion taught in class and covers the Olympians, some minor gods, the creation myths, Hades, Hercules, and the
17. Physics AQA AS Physics
    This is for students of AQA (A) AS Level Physics
18. Physics AQA P1a Energy and elctricity
    Quizzes for the year 10 course P1a Energy and Electricity
19. Physics AQA P2 Electricity
    Four quizzes on electricity, and a general survey on attitudes to homework
20. Trivia Tutor time
    “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” done Yacapaca style. Kids seem to love it.

The author of some excellent Yacapaca assessments (who has asked me not to name him, for the moment) recently asked to pass my eye over a very complete set of offline teaching materials he had also created. He said:

…over the last few years I have sweated blood on producing a whole set of these for [curriculum reference removed]. I think that they have got potential [for commercial publication], however, that is my opinion and could have some bias!!

Does this sound like you? Many teachers have invested a great deal of time and effort into materials that they would love to see published, and to make money from. At Chalkface we receive two or three such manuscripts per week and, I have to warn you, we reject them all. Like nearly all educational publishers, we only publish materials we have planned and commissioned ourselves.

The mistake many teachers make is to give up at that point. A better strategy is to re-think where the true value lies. It is not actually in what you have written, but in you. The materials you have written are a manifest expression of your ideas, and of your ability to organise them. That skill is marketable in many different ways. Three examples:

• Writing fees from publisher-initiated projects
• Running INSET courses
• Boosting your CV: head teachers love having famous authors on their staffs!

You can use the materials you have created to establish your reputation as a writer and educator. Focus on getting other teachers talking about how useful your materials are in the classroom. Listen to feedback, and spend time tweaking and developing them until they really are foolproof resources that can compete with any textbook out there.

Just get your materials out there; there are lots of ways to do it. Make them free. Promote them every way you can think of. Make sure everyone knows who the author is, and how to contact you. It will take time - several years of diligent effort probably - but in the end your reputation will be established. That established reputation , will, if you want it to, boost your income significantly.

How do you get the same flexibility that a red biro gives you, when marking text-based assessments online?

That red pen really is a fantastic teaching tool, but it falls down when you want the student also to be able to edit the work afterwards. Fortunately, there is a way to have the best of both worlds. Here is a five-minute screencast to show you how:

For your interest, the Google TiSP assignment is here. I think TiSP remains the best April Fool spoof Google have yet done, and it’s worth visiting if only to re-read their original page.

Dawn Cox from Orwell High School has been a user and good friend of Yacapaca for some time now. She’s one of those people who pushes us to raise our game by demanding (albeit politely) new features.

Today, Dawn has been pushing me for a way to organise students into all their classes without duplicating logins. Normally, I’d recommend handing access keys to the students. They can then use these to join whichever sets they want. Dawn wants to get it all organised up front, so that won’t work for her.

Instead, here is the sequence I recommended Dawn use.

1. Get all your teachers joined to your schools’ support group. This will save a lot of time later.
2. Upload all students to their ‘primary’ sets (e.g. tutor groups, but you can consider any to be the primary ones).
3. In the edit page of the first student set, select all students and click the ‘copy’ button. You can enter a new set name; this will create a new set with you as the teacher.
4. Repeat (3) as many times as needed with each set. You can copy some or all students from each set and combine/recombine as much as needed.
5. Visit each of your new sets and add the relevant teacher. If the teachers are already members of the support group, they will be in a convenient dropdown.
6. Now remove yourself from each of these sets, leaving the relevant teacher(s) in control. Or don’t, and retain a supervisory role for yourself.

Here is a screencast covering the Student Set edit page:

Google launched their own web browser, Chrome yesterday. It is likely to prove popular because it is faster and safer than Internet Explorer.

Every website owner meets the launch of a new browser with a mixture of excitement and dread. They each have their foibles (whilst staunchly maintaining that they are ’standards compliant’ and everyone else has got it wrong), and they often mangle otherwise beautiful websites horribly. Well I’m glad to say that Yacapaca works fine in Chrome. Even the heavily Javascripted pages flew along in our tests.

Most of the pundits are raving about Chrome, you may want to try it out for yourself.