EDUCATORS TOUT NEW WEB SITE

Author: By Marie C. Franklin, Globe Staff Date: 12/17/2000 Page: B17 Section: Learning

TEACHING TOOLS
Looking for the perfect holiday gift for your favorite teachers? Tell them about Quia.com.

Quia.com is a new Web site that allows teachers to create online learning activities based on their own classroom material. The site, developed by Quia Corporation of Burlingame, Calif., an Internet technology company that specializes in educational tools and content, is free to access and easy to use. Among other features, the site allows instructors to post tests and homework assignments, to e-mail students and parents, to evaluate test difficulty, and to analyze student performance in several ways, including the percentage of a class that answered a particular question correctly.

Locally, educators are raving about the site, describing Quia.com as one of the best electronic teaching tools available.

Cynthia Dalpe, a French and Spanish teacher at Thomas Blake Middle School in Medfield, is a Quia.com aficionado. She uses the site to create Web pages for her classes, to post curriculum-related games and tests, and to communicate with students and their parents. Dalpe has created two Web sites - one for her French classes, the other for students of Spanish.

And the numbers bode well for the site's popularity with students. Since creating the foreign language Web sites last year, Dalpe has noticed a phenomenal hit rate among her 100 students, according to the number of visitors to each site. "As of today, the French page has 2,655 hits and the Spanish page has 3,056 hits," she says.

Dalpe is also using the site to fight the test-taking blues. Instead of holding oral review sessions like many teachers do, she supplements review instruction by letting the students play an online version of "Jeopardy," one of Quia.com's 500,000 online games and quizzes in more than 40 subject areas.

Jen Bassett teaches English at Waltham High School. She says Quia.com is one of the most useful teaching tools she has found so far. Bassett also uses the site to e-mail students, post homework and notes, and create quizzes.

"Other sites allow me to do that but the Quia.com site does all of that quickly, and in one place," she says.

Bassett loves the site's ability to help her create quizzes online that her students can take and then see their scores immediately. The Waltham teacher says she has never seen her students so enthused about taking quizzes. It's also not unusual for students to access the quizzes "over and over again to see if they can improve their scores," giving students more time to review educational content as well as the opportunity to improve their knowledge base, Bassett says.

Another benefit is that Quia.com makes it much easier for Bassett to determine which areas of the curriculum she needs to devote more time to reviewing, she says. For example, after giving a test, Bassett runs the students' results through the computer, question by question, to see how students performed. Using this technology, she can uncover information like the percentage of a class that answered a particular question correctly, or a list of the most commonly missed exam questions, with reference to the students who missed them, according to David Roscow, company spokesperson.

"I realize that all of this information can be obtained manually, but it would take a good deal of time for me to review all 50 answers to every question," Bassett says. "With Quia.com, I have access to this information within seconds of the students taking the test."

Joyce Miller instructs fifth-grade science and language arts at Cushing Elementary School in Scituate. She says effective teachers have no choice but to access resources such as Quia.com with today's technologically savvy students.

"Technological tools are a must if we are to get students' attention in the age of computers," she says. Miller adds: "More than likely, they will be on the computer at home anyway. Why not provide them with a curriculum-related, interesting, safe alternative?"

Besides posting quizzes, messages, homework assignments, and test dates, Miller accesses Quia.com to provide her students with other science-related links. "It's given me an opportunity to create fun ways for kids to learn science vocabulary and concepts," Miller says. And parents feel comfortable letting their children go to this site, she says. "They trust it as a kid-friendly site that I have pre-approved."

Quia.com recently announced several new enhancements to its already popular site, attracting more than 400,000 users a month, according to Roscow. Teachers can now design quizzes and tests on the site with interchangeable question formats, such as multiple-choice; fill-in-the-blank, pop-up, and short essay, all in one quiz. Instructors can also incorporate clip art into their Web site lessons. The company has also added a hybrid grading system that permits a test or exam to be graded both by the computer and the teacher.

"The computer grades multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions, but it still gives instructors the flexibility to grade essay questions and manually override the computer grading system," according to Roscow.

For more information about the site, visit www.quia.com on the Web. Or wrap up this column, tie it in a bow, and send it along as a holiday gift to your favorite teacher, or two.

Teaching Tools is a regular column designed to discuss ideas and techniques used by teachers. Teachers interested in submitting ideas should write to Teaching Tools, Learning, Boston Sunday Globe, Boston, MA 02107. They may also be sent by e-mail to this address: mfrank@globe.com.

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