Yacapaca

Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching

recent posts

about

  • Ralph Holmes wins Author of the Year

    winner

    My hearty congratulations to Ralph Holmes of Langley School, Norfolk, for winning Yacapaca’s Author of the Year award. I announced the award here, but briefy the 1000+ courses on Yacapaca were whittled down to a shortlist of seven best-in-subject exemplars. A panel of judges then selected the winner and runner up. The winner gets a seriously groovy iPod Touch.

    So why did they pick Ralph’s Years 9,10 and 11 Physics course? The judges felt it was excellent for revision work, and particularly praised the comprehensive feedback and the quality of presentation.

    Runner-up was Hannah Mohon of Huntcliff School in Saltburn-by-Sea, for her AQA GCSE History course. I was not surprised it did well – it is a huge resource, certainly the most comprehensive in Yacapaca.

    Perhaps the most succinct judging comment was from John Boyle:

    I thought both the top placed courses were by far the most student orientated and visually pleasing, even though the two winning courses are not areas of interest for me personally, I found both courses extremely interesting, and am sure pupils would feel the same.

    I am really glad it was not me doing the judging. I loved all the resources in the shortlist, and would have agonised forever over denying the top prize to any of them. Fortunately, the judges were made of sterner stuff! I would really like to thank them for the hard work they have put in.

  • Safer than your bank

    How secure is your learning platform? The TLS Report measures the quality of encryption used by different web services. I tested Yacapaca against online banking from the UK’s major high street banks. Only Lloyds TSB matched our rating. Here are links to the reports.

    So your students’ assessment data is safer than your money. Which is the way it should be.

    TLS Report

  • I'm a dad!

    Honora Grove-Stephensen

    Honora Mbiadop Grove-Stephensen was born at 00:17 this morning, weighing 3.63kg.

    I’m taking a month’s paternity leave, so no more blogging for a while. Except more baby pics of course.

  • Global Yacapaca usage snapshot

    We had a lovely email today from a teacher in Australia, who asked:

    I am a regional ICT Trainer in Australia, and I am absolutley amazed by your Yacapaca site! The functionality is like nothing I’ve seen anywhere else!! I signed up to try it out and was blown away. I would love to recommend this site to teachers in my district, but I wanted to ask you first if you would give your permission for us to use your site from over here in Australia. I know it was set up for UK teachers, but I wondered if you might be willing to stretch the borders – we may be able to provide some good resources to share – hopefully!

    Yes! Of course! Even if you don’t write such a nice introduction. But it set me wondering where all our users do come from. So I took a look. Of 640 schools that used Yacapaca yesterday, 562 (86.5%) were in the UK. Here is how the remaining 15.5% broke down:

    Yacapaca global usage survey

  • 31 New courses on Yacapaca during May

    That’s the most ever in one month. I am not going to be too hasty to claim a trend, though. Several of these are actually quite old, but have only just hit ‘maturity’ i.e. the requisite level of real usage to become eligible for publication. I’m not sure if this is artificially inflating the figures or not.

    I have been noticing for some time that some teachers prefer to write their own assessments, even when near-identical ones are already available. Nothing at all wrong with that, but it does create a problem of duplicate public content. In fact, one teacher has even been complaining about it in the TES Staffroom. Olivero said

    I can see Yacapaca has potential – the trouble is finding the good, relevant quizzes as there is so much there.

    So, to keep this list within bounds, I have eliminated all the courses on spreadsheets, Microsoft Office icons, etc, and focused on the more innovative material. Following the links requires you to have Yacapaca membership – but as that is free, it should not be too much of an inhibition for you.

    • Business GCSE Business
      Seven GCSE quizzes labeled ‘pilot’. Good mix of question types to keep interest.
    • Business Mr Howard’s Business
      Two versions of the same test – choose your template!
    • Chemistry Common Entrance 13+ Chemistry
      This section of Common Entrance 13+ covers the three Chemistry topics of Classifying Materials, Changing Materials and Pattens of Behaviour.
    • Chemistry Edexcel
      Chemistry GCSE assessments.
    • Chemistry year 8
      Chemistry & Geology quizzes.
    • Chemistry Year 8 Chemistry
      A selection of quizzes based around National Curriculum chemistry topics (8E, 8F, 8G, 8H)
    • Citizenship Communities
      (no further information)
    • D&T Design Technology
      Short D&T student voice survey
    • D&T KS3 DT – North Walsham High
      (no further information)
    • D&T summer test
      Some really great questions, but the giant image files and large number of questions make these quizzes slow to load.
    • History AQA GCSE History 9 – The Cuban Missile Crisis
      The usual thorough coverage we have come to expect from this author.
    • ICT Expert Systems
      (no further information)
    • ICT OCR Nationals Survey
      The survey canvases student opinion of OCR Nationals.
    • ICT Potential VLE access
      Survey on students’ access to ICT, including mobile and gaming devices.
    • ICT Python Development
      Python is probably the single most useful programming language to learn right now, and it is surprisingly easy to get started with.
    • ICT 12 more ICT courses
      Too many to list in detail, and largely repeating work that has already been done.
    • Maths Recurring Decimals
      Grade A/A* practice
    • PE GCSE PE (number 2)
      Includes some very useful-looking short text exercises for BTEC.
    • Physics Common Entrance 13+ Physics
      This section of Common Entrance 13+ covers the five physics topics of Electricity & Magnetism, Forces and Motion, Light and Sound, The Earth and Beyond and Energy Resources & Energy Transfer
    • Science Mr. Riordan’s Tests
      Two copies of a quiz on electricity with excellent diagrams. Not clear what the difference between the two copies is.