Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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Author: Ian Grove-Stephensen

  • Revision primer

    If you are new to Yacapaca, here is how to get your students up and running on our advanced (and free!) revision system in just 5 steps.

  • Quiz Builder is making quiz authoring three times easier

    Last month we completed our Quiz Builder project. The aim was to make quiz authoring easier, and to increase quality by encouraging authors to choose the highest-quality available questions in preference to writing new ones. Did it work? Here are the monthly statistics for February, compared with the same month last year: February of 2014 2013 Quizzes…

  • New Activity Logs for Revision and Homework

    We have been working very hard to improve Homework (red) and Revision (yellow), both in the accuracy of the content selection, and in the tracking tools we provide for teachers. The new Activity Log is accessed from the Assignments List and provides you with a straightforward log of who studied what, for how long and…

  • The Ukrainian revolution. For us, it’s personal.

    You may know that whilst I am based in the UK, the Yacapaca office is in Kharkov, Ukraine; currently in the news because the statue of Lenin here was uniquely not demolished after the fall of the dictator Viktor Yanukovich. Although there has been no serious fighting here, two colleagues from local software companies were killed…

  • Why tag questions?

    When you are building a quiz using pre-existing questions from the question bank, you are going to wind up with very inconsistent tagging. Why is this important, and what