Not my best-ever screencast, this one, but you may find it useful nonetheless. A Yacapaca member was strugging to set for her kids a quiz that she had just authored. When I looked at it, I realised that the process is not nearly as intuitive as I had imagined. So…

The ever thoughtful Ian Usher just blogged about the challenges of introducing online reporting to parents. This is an issue much in my mind, as we are in the early stages of planning exactly this feature for Yacapaca. It will be part of the free service, of course, and completely automated once set up.

Ian has a great checklist of issues, but he misses the problem uppermost in my mind. How long before some child gets badly beaten because we reported a poor test result to their cro-magnon parents? Such parents do exist, sadly.

What I would like to do is report only the child’s successes, and not only to protect children from violence. Behavioural principle dictates rewarding appropriate behaviour and ignoring inappropriate behaviour, so I want to give parents the best tools to do exactly this. But… under the Government’s 2010 rule, will schools dare to do the right thing?

A teacher emailed me this question a few days ago:

I have managed to upload some some pictures as a zip. I can see them in the image library, and as thumbnails in a popup. However, if I try and drag them into my question, all I get is a new window with the image in it.

This is a common request, so I thought you might appreciate me sharing the answer with you.

The drag and drop method only works in Firefox. Try as we might, we could never get Internet Explorer to do it right. Here is the more reliable way.

1. Right-click on the image and select “properties”.
2. Find and copy the complete URL of the image.
3. Now paste that into the image field in the question.

New solution coming soon

For the past six months we have been working on a completely new way to create and edit questions. I shall introduce it in the Masterclass on July 4th, and after that invite a few authors to beta-test it prior to the full roll-out in September.

To whet your appetite, here are some of the features…

• Image drag and drop that works everywhere (of course)
• Attach sounds to questions or responses
• Record sound directly into the question
• Duplicate and adapt existing questions

…and here’s a screenshot:

My hearty congratulations to Ralph Holmes of Langley School, Norfolk, for winning Yacapaca’s Author of the Year award. I announced the award here, but briefy the 1000+ courses on Yacapaca were whittled down to a shortlist of seven best-in-subject exemplars. A panel of judges then selected the winner and runner up. The winner gets a seriously groovy iPod Touch.

So why did they pick Ralph’s Years 9,10 and 11 Physics course? The judges felt it was excellent for revision work, and particularly praised the comprehensive feedback and the quality of presentation.

Runner-up was Hannah Mohon of Huntcliff School in Saltburn-by-Sea, for her AQA GCSE History course. I was not surprised it did well - it is a huge resource, certainly the most comprehensive in Yacapaca.

Perhaps the most succinct judging comment was from John Boyle:

I thought both the top placed courses were by far the most student orientated and visually pleasing, even though the two winning courses are not areas of interest for me personally, I found both courses extremely interesting, and am sure pupils would feel the same.

I am really glad it was not me doing the judging. I loved all the resources in the shortlist, and would have agonised forever over denying the top prize to any of them. Fortunately, the judges were made of sterner stuff! I would really like to thank them for the hard work they have put in.

How secure is your learning platform? The TLS Report measures the quality of encryption used by different web services. I tested Yacapaca against online banking from the UK’s major high street banks. Only Lloyds TSB matched our rating. Here are links to the reports.

• Yacapaca grade B
• Lloyds TSB grade B
• HSBC grade C
• Barclays grade C
• NatWest grade C

So your students’ assessment data is safer than your money. Which is the way it should be.

Honora Mbiadop Grove-Stephensen was born at 00:17 this morning, weighing 3.63kg.

I’m taking a month’s paternity leave, so no more blogging for a while. Except more baby pics of course.

We had a lovely email today from a teacher in Australia, who asked:

I am a regional ICT Trainer in Australia, and I am absolutley amazed by your Yacapaca site! The functionality is like nothing I’ve seen anywhere else!! I signed up to try it out and was blown away. I would love to recommend this site to teachers in my district, but I wanted to ask you first if you would give your permission for us to use your site from over here in Australia. I know it was set up for UK teachers, but I wondered if you might be willing to stretch the borders - we may be able to provide some good resources to share - hopefully!

Yes! Of course! Even if you don’t write such a nice introduction. But it set me wondering where all our users do come from. So I took a look. Of 640 schools that used Yacapaca yesterday, 562 (86.5%) were in the UK. Here is how the remaining 15.5% broke down:

That’s the most ever in one month. I am not going to be too hasty to claim a trend, though. Several of these are actually quite old, but have only just hit ‘maturity’ i.e. the requisite level of real usage to become eligible for publication. I’m not sure if this is artificially inflating the figures or not.

I have been noticing for some time that some teachers prefer to write their own assessments, even when near-identical ones are already available. Nothing at all wrong with that, but it does create a problem of duplicate public content. In fact, one teacher has even been complaining about it in the TES Staffroom. Olivero said

I can see Yacapaca has potential - the trouble is finding the good, relevant quizzes as there is so much there.

So, to keep this list within bounds, I have eliminated all the courses on spreadsheets, Microsoft Office icons, etc, and focused on the more innovative material. Following the links requires you to have Yacapaca membership - but as that is free, it should not be too much of an inhibition for you.

• Business GCSE Business
  Seven GCSE quizzes labeled ‘pilot’. Good mix of question types to keep interest.
• Business Mr Howard’s Business
  Two versions of the same test - choose your template!
• Chemistry Common Entrance 13+ Chemistry
  This section of Common Entrance 13+ covers the three Chemistry topics of Classifying Materials, Changing Materials and Pattens of Behaviour.
• Chemistry Edexcel
  Chemistry GCSE assessments.
• Chemistry year 8
  Chemistry & Geology quizzes.
• Chemistry Year 8 Chemistry
  A selection of quizzes based around National Curriculum chemistry topics (8E, 8F, 8G, 8H)
• Citizenship Communities
  (no further information)
• D&T Design Technology
  Short D&T student voice survey
• D&T KS3 DT - North Walsham High
  (no further information)
• D&T summer test
  Some really great questions, but the giant image files and large number of questions make these quizzes slow to load.
• History AQA GCSE History 9 - The Cuban Missile Crisis
  The usual thorough coverage we have come to expect from this author.
• ICT Expert Systems
  (no further information)
• ICT OCR Nationals Survey
  The survey canvases student opinion of OCR Nationals.
• ICT Potential VLE access
  Survey on students’ access to ICT, including mobile and gaming devices.
• ICT Python Development
  Python is probably the single most useful programming language to learn right now, and it is surprisingly easy to get started with.
• ICT 12 more ICT courses
  Too many to list in detail, and largely repeating work that has already been done.
• Maths Recurring Decimals
  Grade A/A* practice
• PE GCSE PE (number 2)
  Includes some very useful-looking short text exercises for BTEC.
• Physics Common Entrance 13+ Physics
  This section of Common Entrance 13+ covers the five physics topics of Electricity & Magnetism, Forces and Motion, Light and Sound, The Earth and Beyond and Energy Resources & Energy Transfer
• Science Mr. Riordan’s Tests
  Two copies of a quiz on electricity with excellent diagrams. Not clear what the difference between the two copies is.

Over 1,000 teachers have now authored educational resources in Yacapaca. The best of those resources are really quite staggeringly good, as we see from the rave reviews they get from users.

It is long past time to honour our best authors, so I am delighted to announce the 2008 Author of the Year Awards.

The seven nominees have been selected from the most popular subjects in Yacapaca. They are each very different; what they have in common is excellence as teaching and assessment resources.

The nominees are:

• English: Kara Huck from Dodge City High School, Kansas
  Word Roots
• French: Grace Agbogun-Toko from Sarah Bonnell School, London
  French/English Bilingual Stories and Poems
• German: Rob Courtney from King Edward VI School, Southampton
  Schreiben auf Deutsch
• History: Hannah Mohon from Huntcliff School, Saltburn-by-Sea
  AQA GCSE History
• ICT: Martyn Dulake of St Josephs Catholic School, Port Talbot
  ICT GCSE Homework
• PSHE: Norman Scott from the Sefton Childrens’ Service PSHE Team.
  Summative self-assessments in PSHE for primary Schools
• Science: Ralph Holmes from Langley School, Norfolk
  Years 9, 10 and 11 Physics

The judging panel are experienced Yacapaca users, authors and moderators. More importantly, they are all teachers:

• Aidan McCanny, Assistant Advisory Officer for eLearning and ICT, Southern Education and Library Board (SELB).
• Gill Chesney-Green, Drama Teacher, John Flamsteed Community School, Derbyshire & author of several popular Drama resources including Foundation Drama.
• Jerome Thompson, Alderman Peel High School, Norfolk & moderator of the Year 7 ICT authoring group.
• Helen Barnes, teacher of Mathematics, Priory School, Portsmouth & author of the HBR Maths assessments.
• Julie Mason, Wellingborough School and moderator of the Design & Technology authoring group.
• John Boyle, teacher of Businesss and Enterprise, Grace Academy, Solihul & moderator of the Business authoring group.

The winner will be announced on June 16th on this blog, and will win an Apple iPod Touch. Both the winner and the runner-up will receive Yacapaca trophies.

…is my wedding day. Wish me luck.

[Update: photos & slideshow.]