Monkey is finished and has just been released, I hope you enjoy it.
It’s software to create productive groups, think Termites for groups. You provide the names and their relationships, and it places people with the good relationships into the same group and bad relationships into different groups. It will even cluster people of similar ability into the same group if you want.
You can read about it and download it from tinyrock.com/monkey
I’ve been busy polishing two new pieces of software:
Monkey - Automagically place students into groups based on the relationships between them, just like Termites but for groups. Or am I mistaken and you would prefer this to be a feature within Termites rather than a separate piece of software? It could be released within a week or two, pending time away from the classroom.
Litmus - A diagnostic tool for scientific literacy based on a decade of international research by an academic collaborator. Once diagnosed it generates worksheets which target the weaknesses of each student. It’s aimed at the whole school level and so can test and track as many students as you throw at it, all at the same time, and even aggregate the results.
It’s being bundled with a literacy text book and should be out within the year, an online version potentially sooner. Would you prefer installing the final version onto your own school servers, or accessing it through Tiny Rock?
I’ve crossed 300,000 400,000 unique viewers on my teacher resources. This was my goal when setting it up a few months ago so I’m happy. According to Scribd, this places me at around 90th in the world greater than 100th in the world.
I don’t particularly like scribd or it’s community because of bad experiences with spams, leaches, and trolls. So the plan is still to move all the resources to Tiny Rock, it’s just about finding the time to write the web-app to manage it all.
After reading this I’ve changed my approach to Termites. It’s now completely free, there is no longer a locked version.
However, it is not open source, it just costs $0. I hope to generate a stream of income indirectly.
Since freeing the Termites I feel much more comfortable. To be honest I never wanted to sell software or operate a business focused on it. Pitching Termites to everyone I met just felt like prostitution, it didn’t feel nice.
Now that it’s free I can focus on the art of creating useful software again.
I spent the last weekend throwing together an automated testimonials page.
It’s automated in the sense that anyone can add a testimonial without having to contact us. Just like adding comments on a blog. I know, I’m scared too.
Anyway, go check out what people are saying about us. And while your there please consider writing a little testimonial yourself.
Thanks!
Geeks: It was a 4 hour one night stand with PHP. Such a cheap, quick, and dirty language, it’s great.
A teacher contacted me to share a funny story about her class. She allowed the students to use Termites and they all spontaneously started creating arrangements for inanimate objects like shoes, musicians, cars, and movies. She said the criteria for the relationships was quite amusing! Seemingly unrelated objects had strong relationships according to the students.
I hadn’t considered using Termites as a teaching resource. But in hindsite it’s a great idea. To make the lesson a bit more structured and rewarding, perhaps the class could create seating plans for members of the UN, historical figures, or countries. It should help the students gain a deeper understanding about relationships.
Ofcourse the serious and intended use is for the teacher to create seating plans for the kids. However, allowing the kids to suggest their own relationships works too and is another way to engage the class.
It’s great to see the software being used for unintended purposes. It was designed from the beginning to be simple and general for that very reason.
It’s that time of year again, new classes with unknown students. So how do you create an effective seating plan when you don’t know the student relationships?
Even though I could easily have used Termites to create a random arrangement, I wanted to do better.
So yesterday I tried an experiment in one of my classes, a student directed seating plan. Each student wrote down two students they work well with, and two students they don’t work so well with. I then added these relationships to Termites and generated a seating plan.
Surprisingly, the student-suggested-relationships produced a seating plan which was quite good. Better than I could have drawn up with pen-and-paper anyway. And now with a bit of tweaking after today’s lesson the final arrangement looks great.
At last I can confirm a hunch and recommend that students should have more input into the class seating plan, especially in the early stages of the year. It increases their ownership and demonstrates that you trust and respect them. A great start towards that quality learning environment they deserve.
I have placed a link on the Tiny Rock front page to some of my teacher resources. They are stored at Scribd and all licenced under Creative Commons. So feel free to mash them up to suit your needs, just be sure to follow the licence conditions.
I hope you find them useful, 270,000 people cant be wrong. Feel free to leave a comment with ideas for improvements or any feedback in general, I love feedback.
A small request: If you do allow your students to download the resources directly from Scribd please monitor their comments. Removing inappropriate comments has become a pet hate of mine laterly 
