Next time someone makes you sit through a Powerpoint presentation you’d rather not suffer, you will remember this and be unable to suppress a giggle, I promise.

Via Ewan

The first computer I ever had was an Osborne 1 with a 5″ screen framed by two whopping great floppy disk drives. I didn’t actually own it; I blagged it from Osborne on the promise of including an illustration of it in a Chalkface pack. By the time it was due for return, they’d gone bust.

One of the reasons Chalkface used the two-column layout for our worksheets was that we could fit a column into that tiny screen. Not WYSIWYG of course; we specified all the layout in a typesetting language called CORA 5, which I got quite good at in the end.

And the reason for this nostalgia? I came across a photo of the Osborne on Tech Republic, and got all sentimental.

It looks like a few authors were busy over the Easter holiday, because we have another good haul of new courses this month. I am particularly pleased to see Sociology making an appearance, and I’ve now added a Sociology list to the New Assignments page.

If you use any of these resources with one of your classes, please remember etiquette: give feedback when asked. The authors have put a lot of time and thought into what they have written. They need both encouragement and and guidance in how to improve.

• Business GCSE Business
  (no further information)
• Chemistry David Wicks
  KS3 Physics and Chemistry
• Chemistry Year 8 Chemistry
  A selection of quizzes based around National Curriculum chemistry topics (8E, 8F, 8G, 8H)
• Chemistry, Physics, Science KS3 Science
  Two long Chemistry quizzes and a shorter Physics one.
• D&T KS3 Technology
  Moving Toys quiz for Year 8
• Engineering Year 9 Engineering
  Quizzes and short text tests on Engineering themes.
• English, Literature English Lan and lit
  GCSE English and Literature AQA
• Geography, Geology, Science Earth Science
  Quizzes and an excellent set of short-text tests for an Earth Science course.
• History History GCSE
  Quizzes on Medicine through Time, and the Home Front, plus a free-text pupil perception survey.
• ICT Public information
  8.1 Sensors and traffic reporting
• ICT ITQ
  ITQ is the National Vocational Qualification for IT Users
• ICT KS2 Basic Skills
  ICT basic skills assessments suitable for KS2
• Inset Inset
  Designed to show staff some of the features of Yacapaca.
• Maths maths
  Some times table quizzes with lots of randomisation.
• RE Worship and celebration
  Overview of the ideas behind worship and some examples of the motivation for celebrations and festivals.
• Science BASD-8
  …for the review of released Pennsylvania state assessment items.
• Sociology Year 11 Sociology
  Practice exam question technique

Several years ago, I presented my ideas about the benefits of online assessment to one of the major exam boards. I’d better not say which. They told me bluntly “we won’t switch to online exams until the risk of a scandal is lower than it is with paper-based exams.”

Gentlemen, that day has come.

Gill is a prolific author on Yacapaca, but she’s not what you might expect of an e-learning user: she’s just short of retirement age, and teaching a decidedly non-technical subject: drama. So, why does she use Yacapaca? Gill very kindly agreed to let me interview her yesterday; her answers were quite surprising.

Feeling on top of the upcoming diplomas? No, me neither. That’s why I was so pleased when Doug wrote this excellent(ly-brief) one-page Diplomas overview.

Yesterday we hit another milestone: 1000 authors on Yacapaca. By this measure, we must surely now be the largest educational publisher in the UK and possibly the Western world, which is quite cool to contemplate.

I’ve just been going through the stats and found some interesting data:

• 415 authors have created at least 10 items (an item can be as small as one question).
• The top author has created 1184 items.
• The average author has 360 students on the system (the non-author average is 30).
• 3.6% of all teachers on Yacapaca are authors.
• 25% of active teachers are authors.

So now you see why I’m happy to subsidise author training? The Yacapaca authors are the engine of our success.Thank you, guys!

I was really upset when I missed the seminar Assessment and Learning due to a calendar clash, but thankfully presenter Andrew Watts has now published his slides so I can at least get some idea of where he was going.

And that’s very challenging. The message coming through is that true AfL is not really happening in schools, because the crucial intention behind the assessment remains to get pupils through exams. You will immediately see the irony of this coming from Cambridge Assessment, aka the OCR exam board.

Not that I am criticising Andrew Watts or (much) Cambridge Assessment.  They, in turn, are constrained by Ed Balls‘ gutless unwillingness to get rid of the geriatric, content-obsessed A-levels.

Rather than end this post on such a bum note, let’s just speculate on what hypothetical replacement for A-levels actually would promote AfL. The crucial components of AfL are that students should take control of their own learning, and that they should learn collaboratively. Well, those in themselves seem to me to be measurable and able to be evidenced.

Here are just two ideas for how one might do that:

• Measurement of taking control of own learning: students should keep a blog in parallel with each learning project. The blog details how the student approaches each component of the learning task, including approaches they have considered but rejected. Exam moderators sample blogs at regular (but unannounced) intervals, and may engage directly into conversation with the student via the blog.
• Learning collaboratively: once again the blog provides the perfect medium for collaboration to both happen and be seen to happen, through blog comments. This does require the students to maintain an awareness that written collaboration earns marks where spoken collaboration may not (so not pure AfL) but it is still a step forward. Audio and video could play a strong part here too, for example by videoing crucial group processes and attaching these for the moderator to view.

So, that was my mini-brainstorm. In the spirit of collaborative learning, what are your ideas?

I hate this. My desk is messy enough already; the computer is where I come to escape. It’s terribly clever, though, I’ll give them that.

More general point: have you ever wondered at the mixed metaphor of putting a “window” on a “desktop”? I can’t help thinking that the GUI took a wrong turning when those two concepts were permitted to be mixed on one screen. What organisational metaphor would you use for a computer, given the chance? What would make most sense for an educational computer, if you weren’t worried about compatibility with ‘adult’ machines?

Via Scribble

There is an interesting debate on keyboarding skills (aka touch typing) over on Classroom 2.0. Some American schools are teaching it from age 5, and I strongly approve. Keyboarding is the Fourth ‘R’ in the 21st Century.