Yacapaca

Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching

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  • Beautiful illustrations

    Today I have been working on Activities and Puzzles to Improve Thinking Skills, which is the free mini-pack for June.  It’s a long time since I last worked on this pack, and I had quite forgotten how good it was.

    It’s tempting to think that a freebie will have been produced on the cheap, but actually the team lavished love on this particular project. The ideas in it are fantastic, but what really stood out when I revisited it was the quality of the artwork. I’m not in the habit of writing knocking copy, but today I shall break my own rule. Take a look at these two illustrations, and compare them with what you find in photocopy masters from any other company. They’re just gorgeous. Click on either illustration to see a larger version.

    This particular pack was illustrated by Liam Powell, and I am delighted to see that he still has several Chalkface examples featured on his website. If you have an educational project that needs real quality illustration, I just can’t recommend Liam highly enough.

  • Is Yacapaca the largest e-learning system in the world?

    I think it is. The Open University’s Moodle is often cited as “one of the largest”, but the OU has 250,000 students, as against our over-2,000,000 registered members.

    The US military has a system that “serves 1.2 million people” which is impressive, but still smaller than Yacapaca.

    The only candidate I can find for a larger system is Indira Gandhi National Open University with 3.5 million students but I cannot find details anywhere whether they have an integrated elearning system or not.

    Whether we are actually the largest or not, with 80,562 teachers and 2,010,440 students registered, I think we have done quite well for a free service with absolutely no marketing or promotion. The growth has all happened because teachers have told each other about us.

    If you know of a larger system, let me know in the comments.

  • Helping students who struggle with revision

    All my life I have struggled with an attention span that would disgrace a gnat; most especially during my schooldays. Come revision time, I would certainly put in the hours but productive, focussed attention eluded me. So I know what it’s like for many of the kids you are sending off for study leave this week and next.

    The problem is, what can you do to support students who are working from home? And the answer is a lot more than you could have done in pre-internet days. Yacapaca now has good coverage of most subjects, and our quizzes make great revision aids.

    Here are the assigning patterns that will give the most help those students who struggle:

    • Assign only 2-3 quizzes at a time; don’t overwhelm. If you want to get all the assigning done at once, design a schedule and edit the start dates so that new quizzes appear daily in students’ to-do lists.
    • Set very short deadlines of 1-3 days for each assignment. The aim is to make sure that work does not build up. Vulnerable students will get very demotivated by growing lists of things to do; with short deadlines, quizzes will disappear from the to-do list if not attempted quickly so the list never gets scary-long.
    • Use Quick Assignments to communicate directly with students when you need to. They don’t have to be actual assignments; they might just be short personal notes of encouragement.
    • Be prepared to individualise work. Remember you can edit an assignment to so it applies to just one or a few students from a student set. You can also quickly copy students into mini-sets on the fly; Yacapaca gives you huge flexibility in how you group your students.

  • Student and Class Progress Charts

    This four-minute screencast will show you have to use progress charts to get a deeper understanding of students’ progress, and to share it (where appropriate) with the whole class via the whiteboard.

    Vodpod videos no longer available.

  • Can students spell? Here are the data for homophones

    Our Grammar Soundalikes course has been getting more popular recently, with over 17,000 uses
    in the last year alone. The diagnostic assessment has had over 10,000
    runs just by itself, so I thought it would be interesting to look at
    what students know – and what they don’t know.

    Best and worst spelling results: