If you are one of the (many) teachers who has told us “Each student in my school has many teachers, but should only have one Yacapaca login”, then I have good news. Over Easter, we added just this feature.
Here’s how it works. Suppose Mr. Smith wants to set assessments for a class who have already used Yacapaca with another teacher:
- Mr. Smith joins Yacapaca himself from the signup page.
- He is automatically taken to the Add Students page when he first logs in. Instead of adding student names, he clicks through to the Access Key page.
- Now he enters just two things. The name of the set, and the number of days students have in which to join it. This latter detail prevents admin headaches, by stopping other students from blundering into the set by accident later on.
- The website will then produce an Access Key that looks something like ‘1234-ABCD’. Mr Smith writes this up on the markerboard, or broadcasts it to the students by some other means.
- The students log in using their existing IDs, and type the key into their ‘Me’ pages to join the set.
And that’s it! Mr Smith and his class are up and running with Yacapaca. He can add as many sets as he likes this way. If, by mistake, he does create second logins for students who are already members, they can clip these together themselves from their ‘Me’ pages.
I feel really, really proud of this feature, most particularly because it is so easy to use. When you try it, you’ll see for yourself that the programming team have made it so natural that your first reaction is “what’s all the fuss about?”. Which is exactly how it should be.
Yacapaca 