How can Learnclick complement Language Coaching?

Teaching Business English has a lot to do with giving students confidence in using similar vocabulary and phrases over and over. They not only need to know the vocabulary of their business sector, but also how to do introductions and negotiations. Now that a lot of communication is done online, teaching to write emails is often also an important component.

Giving your student’s homework that focuses on areas that need improvement will help your students to make quick progress and they will appreciate your extra effort of providing them with custom-made quizzes.

Learnclick is a versatile quiz creator, especially loved by language teachers for the ease of creating gap-filling exercises. There are lots of question types like drag & drop, dropdowns and multiple-choice quizzes. You can record your student’s answers to see where they are struggling. Create exercises that will help them gain confidence in how to use grammar and vocabulary in context. You can also ask open-ended/essay type questions and correct the given answers in the online editor. Start with a free trial at www.learnclick.com

Version 2 for Classroom Quizzes

We’ve been working on version 2 of the quizzes for a long time now. Most of the changes are in the background. Essentially the whole code was rewritten for the actual display of the quizzes (not yet for the rest of the website). The new cleaner code will make it easier to add new features.
But while rewriting the code, I made some improvements also. The main noticeable improvements are that all the cloze boxes are now the same size and expand when one starts to type or drags a box into them.

For the quizzes that are assigned to a class, e.g. the students are required to login, the biggest improvement is, that the answers get saved immediately as soon as one clicks out of the text box. So should one for instance lose connection, the already inserted answers will still be there when one logs back in. We had something in place like that previously with ‘auto save’, but it didn’t work as well.

Recording how long a student spent doing a quiz works now a lot better also. So if you set a timer and the student logs back in, the timer will continue where it left off.

Learn more about the advantages of assigning your quiz to a class for recording answers: Create Classes and Usernames One of the benefits is that you can release the results after the students submitted the answers, so that they can view them by themselves.

While quizzes now not only look better, but also should work better, I appreciate if you could test if everything works the same for you as before. Learnclick quizzes have many settings and although I tested everything thoroughly it’s entirely possible that I forgot about something.

Remember to leave feedback if you decide not to use version 2 so that if an issue comes up, it can be resolved quickly. Please help with testing before the summer vacation is over so that any bugs can be fixed before the new term starts.

On August 8th, all quizzes have been migrated to use version 2.

Sentence Ideas for creating Gap-Filling Quizzes

Creating a quiz can be time-consuming and you might have a black-out when it comes to creating sentences. One great free online resource is Tatoeba. Tatoeba is a collection of sentences and translations.

You can search for any word you want to find sentences for. I also find the tags quite useful. Here are some example tags that will help you to find sentences quickly by a topic:

Vocabulary:
Location
Weather
School

Grammar:
Past simple
Present continuous
Comparison
Future simple
Questions

PS: To quickly create a gap in Learnclick, you don’t need to click on the button “Create Gap” after selecting the text. You can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+G (Windows) / Cmd+G (Mac)

Why I switched to Learnclick…

Online homework and quizzes are the best way to offload the tedium of marking student work that falls low on Bloom’s taxonomy of learning.

I’m a French teacher. There’s no escaping the fact that students will have to memorize vocabulary lists and practice grammar structures over and over again. Like it or not, these are the building blocks for communication. Over the years, I’ve used many online platforms to create and manage students’ online language exercises. Some of the better ones were Quizlet, ProProfs, Quia, and the Google Quizmaker (part of Google Classroom); but they each had their limitations.

Recently, I switched to Learnclick and I couldn’t be happier. This is by far the most versatile quiz-making platform out there. You can create cloze exercises, embed audio and video files, and easily keep a record of students’ results. It leaves me plenty of time to support students in the way I’m most useful: creating engaging, authentic contexts for oral and written communication.
To top it off, the developer is always very responsive in answering emails and has even implemented some of my suggestions for improvements.

Thank you Learnclick for doing the most boring part of my job!

Raphael Jenks

Version 2 – update on progress

For the past few months we’ve been busy rewriting Learnclick from scratch. Learnclick has evolved to be rather complex, so that it has become increasingly difficult to add new features without breaking anything. So we decided to do it properly this time round, making the code more maintainable. Along the way we’re also making some minor improvements, perfecting the user experience.

The main difference you will notice is that for cloze quizzes, all boxes are the same size. If you have a blank box, it will expand automatically as soon as you start writing a text longer than the size of the box. For drag&drop questions, the answer box expands when dragging a box into it. If the answer was dragged into the wrong box, you can just click on it and it will go back to the top. Update 23rd December: An additional improvement is, that now the drag&drop boxes always remain visible when scrolling.

The mobile experience has become better too. For instance, if you click on a hint, it will now always be visible and not go over the edges. Clicking on a multiple choice option is easier as you can also click on the answer text. There are lots of small improvements that you will hardly notice, but help perfect the experience of doing a quiz.

Next, we’ll start working on migrating the code for storing quiz answers for users that login with their Learnclick username.