At the start of the recent school year we have seen a large growth in new students and teachers to the site which is always great to see! This year in particular has seen a particularly large spike in traffic and so upgrades are needed.
This weekend a site update was completed which increased server capacity and should result in improvements to site responsiveness.
As always thank you for continuing to use and grow ClassQuestion!
ClassQuestion now has support for asking questions in all modern languages and writing systems! All letters and symbols for every modern language (Chinese, Greek, Korean, German, etc.) are covered.
The full list of every supported character is too large to fully list, but to get an idea you can check out the UTF8 standard which the site now supports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters. UTF8 not only supports various languages, but also includes mathematical symbols â and emoji đ as well!
The gradebook has just received a performance update!
Loading the gradebook, searching for students, and exporting scores should all be quicker now. Smaller classes may not notice as much of a difference (because the gradebook should already should be pretty quick), however larger classes should definitely see an improvement.
An FAQ page is also now available on the site which should help to answer your most common questions.
It’s been a bit since the last update post so I’d like to take the opportunity to catch up on what’s been worked on!
Starting this week we are happy to announce that ClassQuestion.com is a completely free service for both teachers and students!
You and your class can now register and have access to the full ClassQuestion website without any kind of payment. Unlike using iClickers and other polling websites, you no longer have to worry about price being a barrier for students to participate and start answering questions in your class! Any student can simply register at classquestion.com/students and start sending you their answers immediately.
So how can this all be free? We’ve moved to a donation based model of running the site. Members can help support us by visiting our Patreon page and donating any amount they’d like. Don’t want to donate? You don’t have to! You and your class can always use the full classquestion website entirely for free without donating. Donating comes with benefits such as rewards such as fun reward icons for students and the removal of a small google banner ad on the student page.
Thanks to a new upgrade ClassQuestion is now speedier than ever. Today the overall memory of the server has been doubled which will allow more students to be logged on without anything slowing down!
A couple of updates on some site updates (redundant I know..)!
When asking a question in class it can be useful to show students how much time they have left as well as the current question.
One option is to put the computer in “mirror” mode, where the second display/projector just copies what is on the screen.
However, if you use an “extend monitor” function during your lecture to display different information on the projector than what is on your computer, ClassQuestion now has a way to show students the timer and question information in a separate window!
Clicking the popup button on the top-right of the timer will now open a window with the current question and and time remaining left on the question. This window is also automatically updated! Whenever the question or timer is changed this window will instantly show the new information.
This now allows you to drag the question popup window over to your second screen (the projector) while you manage the question/lecture from your screen!
A new question history page for students added to ClassQuestion!
This page allows students to review previous questions and answers, as well as see what the correct answer was for the question (if there was a correct answer) and what their response was. When studying for an exam students often ask where they should be focusing their attention. Being able to review what they know and where they went wrong gives them a natural starting point!
Don’t want student see previous questions? Don’t worry because this feature is completely optional. You can enable/disable it by going to Menu -> Class/Account Settings and clicking on your class. Use the toggle for: âAllow score and question viewingâ to turn this feature off and on.
Keep in mind that disabling this toggle will also prevent students seeing their participation and correct answer score (for more information on score viewing, see: https://blog.classquestion.com/2017/12/11/score-feedback/).
New features have recently been added to ClassQuestion.com so I thought I’d take some time to talk about them over the coming weeks!
As a teacher I’ve seen first hand how much students appreciate getting their scores back for assignments as quickly as humanly possible! With clicker questions this was always difficult because scores had to be manually uploaded to a course gradebook website.
This is why real-time score feedback has been added to ClassQuestion! Now when a questions ends, participation and correct answer points will be calculated and automatically displayed on their screen.
This feature is opt-in, meaning that you have a choice for whether you want students to see their scores or not (maybe because you are using a complex scoring system and want to avoid confusion).
When setting up a new class (Menu -> Class/Account Settings), enable score feedback by clicking yes on “Allow score and question viewing”
You can also enable this feature for an existing class by clicking on the class and toggling the feature, as shown below:
