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  • How much does your school spend on marking?

    I have yet to meet a single head or senior teacher who can answer this off the top of their heads, but it is easy to work out using government-published figures.
    1. Teachers work 55.7 hours/week total1, and spend 9.4 hours/week marking2. That’s 17%.
    2. The average teacher salary is £28,9513, but we have to add the employer’s NI contribution of 13.8% to give an employer cost of £32,946, ignoring all overheads.
    3. 17% of £32,946 of is £5,601. That’s what we spend on marking per teacher, per year.
    4. The average secondary school employs 654 qualified teachers, so the total cost per school is £364,053.
    I’ll repeat that. The average state secondary school spends well over a third of a (more…)

  • Instant Assign Again comes to Quick Assignments

    Quick Assignments are a way to quickly assign, collect and grade written work. Unlike quizzes they won’t do the marking for you, but they will save you a lot of time and temper.
    Now we have made them even quicker, by copying the Assign Again feature from quiz assignments.
    Once you have created a Quick Assignment for one student sets, it is the work of seconds to assign it to more sets. In the assignments list:
    Actions ->Assign again
    qa-assign-again
    Select the new student set and (more…)

  • Analysing spelling errors

    When students misspell a common word, what is driving the error? I analysed 35,000 Peer Feedback entries in which the student had intended to write “wrong” and found 1614 instances of misspellings – about 5% of the total.

     

    wrong again

    Of the misspellings,

    • 62% entered “rong”, a phonetic error
    • 27% entered “worng”, a typographical error.

    My own spelling changed from atrocious to moderately good overnight, when a psychologist colleague taught me the visual spelling strategy. It looks like a good proportion of these students could still benefit from the same thing. The rest just need to learn touch typing.

  • Introducing Exam Mode

    If you want to deliver a traditional summative test, use Exam Mode.

    Exam Mode excludes

    • multiple attempts
    • right or wrong notification after each question
    • formative feedback after each question

    but is otherwise (more…)

  • Charting progression

    Log into your Yacapaca teacher account and go to

    More tab -> Progression Charts

    For each of your student sets, you will see something like this:

    Progression chart all

    You can select some or all sets to compare with a simple search field.

    But you can do a lot more than this. You can also (more…)