The site started off as a custom learning environment, which was then changed into my own content management system for sharing teaching resources.  The reason why I developed my own systems as opposed to using the likes of platforms such as ‘WordPress’ was to give me the flexibility to develop my own custom multimedia activities.  The site is a shell of what I originally envisaged it to be.  Today, however, it exists purely to maintain my ‘Clickschool’ brand and to make learning more engaging by sharing interactive resources – the most popular of which is the ‘cloze’ activity.

What I have always found perplexing from my first stint at teaching many years ago, right up until today; is the number of teachers up and down the country who basically replicate very similar lesson planning tasks.  I wonder just how much time could be gained if all planning were more centralised.  This is not to say that teachers should be dictated to in terms of how they should deliver a curriculum, but that they could be given far greater help to minimise duplication.

The original online cloze activity was created at a time when there were no other suitable online cloze activities already online to be found.  Yes, there were PC programs that generated web pages, but they were tiresome to use.  The original ‘cloze’ used “Flash” technology.  This was all good and well, but then Flash was largely superseded by newer technologies.  The app was rewritten to be compatible with modern web browsers and touch-screen devices.  Whilst being very usable, there are still features I’d like to add. But bearing in mind that it is not a commercial venture, its relative popularity suggests that it is a very good resource.

It is good to see the cloze app being used by so many language tutors, and it is my hope that there are many, many people who have benefitted from its existence.  Providing such resources is a thankless task as it is very rare that someone sends a message to thank me for the web site, though it is clearly being used, and to me, this makes it worthwhile.

I’ve wanted to develop multimedia resources for many years, though seldom get the opportunity to develop them to the extent I would like to, owing to working as a fulltime teacher.  If you’re intrigued by this article then do contact me on Twitter: @clickschool.

Laurence is a former software developer and fulltime teacher of Computer Science at Magdalen College School, Brackley.

Visit his web site at http://www.clickschool.co.uk