Ben Philcox, Head of History at The Nobel School, was spending hours every week creating his own resources when a colleague in the science department recommended Educake to him. The rest, as they say, is history.
Historical knowledge AND skills
A lot of other history quizzing platforms only cover straightforward knowledge, but Educake covers skills as well. The questions are differentiated, so you can set students a load of questions on basic content, and then we can talk about second-order concepts and look at questions that ask, “What would you use to support this statement?” or “Which is the best-fit answer?”
It asks students to evaluate and gets them thinking about the “why”, which isn’t something I’ve found you can do anywhere else without writing all the questions yourself.
Saving time
In September, we’ll set up and schedule every homework quiz for the rest of the year. We can always go back and adapt them to how an individual class is doing later, but essentially all of our homework is pre-planned. All that’s left to do is roll out the quizzes, and that’s saved us countless hours just setting homework. And then there’s no marking to do later!
Accessibility and completion of homework
I love how accessible it is. Anyone can do it no matter their ability. We ask all students to retake quizzes until they get 70% correct, because that’s achievable for everyone. Students can also choose to complete questions outside of their assigned homework, and some of them, particularly at GCSE, have done thousands of extra questions. It’s been such an easy win, because it gets them to learn effectively without noticing they’re putting in much work.
Every school has a battle over homework, we haven’t really had that for the last couple of years. Out of the 800 students we have using Educake, 99% of them are completing it regularly.
Clear, easy data
Being able to see where students are struggling means you can then tailor what support you give. If the whole class is doing badly on a certain topic, that’s evidence that we need to go over it again. We can also see what individual students find challenging, which is great for intervention.
I’m a big fan of the Analyse Results page. It’s brilliant. It means that for parents’ evenings, instead of having to do umpteen levels of analysis myself, I can just print the report, show it to them and say, “Here they’re stronger, while they’re weaker in this area.” It saves so much time.
We’ve got our own spreadsheet for our exam questions and mocks, but everything else is just on Educake. I can open it and sit there in a meeting comparing all the different classes and go, “This is weaker, this is stronger”. It’s saved so much pointless admin, because now instead of putting everything into our own spreadsheets, we’ll just look at Educake.
Impact
Since we started using Educake we’ve been in the top 10% nationally for our history results. That was the only change we made. Our students’ knowledge has just gone off the charts, all through doing little-and-often assessments again and again.
We had one girl who was very anxious and lacking in confidence. Her target was a 4, which always felt like a bit of a struggle. She walked out of her GCSEs with a 7. And that’s all because she did something like 7000 extra questions on Educake. She just answered them over and over, so she got the validation of knowing she was right, and she ended up achieving 3 grades above her target grade.
Conclusion
It’s the best teaching tool I’ve come across in a decade. Amongst all the fads that have come and gone, it is the most useful tool that I’ve found. I don’t see why you wouldn’t do something that saves your workload and is proven to be good.
