Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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Category: Yacapaca

  • 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

  • The ‘loser’ problem

    Every winner begets a loser. In a class of 30 who are kept ranked, 15 students are consistently being told they are below average, and probably no more than three trade the epithet ‘bottom of the class’. Tell someone (especially a teenager) something about themselves often enough, support it with peer feedback, and it rapidly…

  • Power authors: make your Author Group questions work in Quiz Builder

    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