Yacapaca

Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching

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  • 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 compiled 210 187
    Questions authored 503 1382
    New questions per quiz 2.4 7.4

    Authors created approximately as many quizzes as last Feb (within normal variation) but they  (more…)

  • New Activity Logs for Revision and Homework

    alogs bothWe 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 with what result.

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

    LeninYou 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 in the uprising in Kiev. So for the Yacapaca team, it has (more…)

  • 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 (more…)

  • The ‘loser’ problem

    Losers are made, not born.

    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 becomes a belief. A placid but dozy 5 year-old can be turned into a streetfighting petty criminal fairly reliably with 10 years of (more…)