Yacapaca

Suppose you want your students to complete a worksheet, and return their completed sheets to you for marking. Just a simple worksheet. How hard can that be? Well if you do it all by email, the answer is ‘quite hard’. Checking you’ve got them all, downloading (and printing?) each one separately – ugh!

Would you rather send all your worksheets out with just a few clicks, then get them back with just two clicks more?

Let me walk you through how to do that in Yacapaca.

Set your Quick Assignment

I have downloaded one of the free worksheets from Chalkface.com where there are thousands of free samples available across all subjects, and this is what I am going to assign.

More tab -> Set a Quick Assignment

• A: upload the worksheet here.
• B: in this case, I want only the result uploaded. No need for students to enter any additional text.

What the student sees

then

The student might now choose to edit the file on screen, but I’m going to imagine they prefer to print it out and work on the paper.

Students use their phones to upload

Students upload direct from the camera on their phones. Quick, easy, and does not require a scanner.

How you receive the students’ work

Monday morning (deadline day) rolls around. Here is the item in your Assignments List.

Click to open it

Use the Select All checkbox at the bottom, then download. All the files download in one neat zip file to unbundle, view and mark. That’s two clicks to get the full set of completed worksheets, and because Yacapaca is firm on deadlines, you know you will not need to check back for stragglers. And they know it too!

Whether you provide marks and feedback through Yacapaca or another system is up to you. There is a hidden benefit to doing it through Yacapaca; you are providing the system with extra information that it will use to calibrate the difficulty level of quizzes. I won’t go into how we do that, the algorithm is frighteningly complex, but suffice it to say that if you rely on Yacapaca for (e.g.) termly assessments, then having a few graded QAs will enhance the reliability of all the other assessments considerably.

Read next – Tutorial 9: How to preview quiz questions before you assign