Yacapaca

All UK schools are now closed due to the Coronavirus/COVID-19 outbreak. Suddenly, face-to-face teaching methods are no longer available.

China and Hong Kong, where schools have been shut for over a month, have moved all teaching and learning online – mostly using national resources, but in some cases using Yacapaca.

Yacapaca is the perfect tool maintain teaching and learning with students at home, so I feel it is our duty to step up and help at a time of national emergency. Here is how we are going to do that.

Any school in the world may now use Yacapaca free. To do so:

1. Make sure you have a Yacapaca membership (always free)
2. Request a free 2-month whole-school subscription here. 

The tools Yacapaca offers to bridge the school-home divide

It was Peter Drucker who first observed that

if you can measure it, you can manage it

and this is truer than ever when managing learning at a distance. You can’t see your students learning, but you can monitor what they have learned. Yacapaca is the tool to do that, with a full suite of formative assessment tools:

• Over 20,000 multiple choice tests, each tightly bound to its syllabus (we track hundreds of different syllabi).
• Short-text tests – the only ones available with instant auto-marking.
• Longer-text responses and file uploads designed to be easy to manage and mark.
• Easy-to-use authoring tools to create your own tests if don’t find one that fits the need.
• Student-written peer feedback.
• Detailed reporting and analytics for you.

How to use Yacapaca: the sequence

Once your classes are set up (very quick!)

1. Find the assessment(s) you want with our built-in search engine. No need to write your own unless you teach something really obscure.
2. Assign them to your class(es). Set a due date, number of questions and other parameters.
3. Tell the students where to find the content they’ll need to study, or leave them to work that out for themselves – it depends on how self-reliant they are as learners. There’s a built-in to-do list in Yacapaca, but there’s no reason not to use your VLE or plain email if you prefer.
4. You get notifications of student progress both by email and inside Yacapaca, along with results and the analytic tools you need to plan further tasks. I was going to say ‘lessons’ there, but with the students all at home, there won’t be lessons as such.

Want to try out Yacapaca immediately, for free?

You can. When you first join Yacapaca, we give you a free allowance of 250 assigned quiz attempts per month, which is enough to run several assessments with one class and get a feel for how it works with your students. To give it a go, visit the Yacapaca home page and enter your next teaching topic in the search field. The system will walk you through from there right through to analysing the results. Try it now!

Want a free, unrestricted whole-school account?

If you are already a member, you should have had an emailed invitation already. If not, join first and start using the service, and your invite will be on its way. Naturally, we prioritise the most active users.