I have been in conversation over the past week or so with Zach Ishani from Royal Wootton Bassett Academy, Yacapaca’s #17-ranked author. Zach is in the middle of a big authoring project at the moment, and he needs to get up to speed as fast as possible with Quiz Builder.
Zach’s problem is that he is used to dealing with questions that are organised in author groups, and he’s having trouble finding them in the main Question Bank, even with intelligent use of the search and authorship filter.
The solution I have proposed to Zach is to re-tag his questions from within his author groups. At the bottom of each question list there is a set of buttons that act on all questions that have been checked. Additionally, there is a ‘check all’ checkbox. The one you want here is ‘set tag‘.
It is worth spending a little time planning a tagging scheme that will do two jobs at once:
- Be easy search terms that make sense to the author when building quizzes.
- Provide useful analysis categories for both teachers and students after a quiz has been completed by a class. It’s immensely irritating to other teachers when tags are so cryptic that they don’t help to understand the summative results.
Having done this, you can move to the Quiz Builder to name your quiz (sensibly, please!) and start compiling it. You may wish to limit your search to just your own questions…
…but you may be amazed at the quality and richness of other authors’ questions, now that they have finally been liberated from their author group silos.
Either way, from here on, it’s plain sailing. Here’s the complete Quiz Builder primer if you have not read it already.
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