Paul Pilling, Head of Geography at CHES Alternative Provision Academy in Truro, shares how Educake has helped even the most reluctant learners gain a foothold on the mountain of knowledge and skills required at GCSE.
I use Educake to help provide retrieval practice for my students. It lets me set assessments easily, while still being able to choose the questions I want. It’s an added string to the bow that helps students engage and make progress outside of lessons. Here are the reasons why Educake’s low-stakes formative assessment has been great for my students’ knowledge, confidence and overall learning.
1. It’s easy
As much as we might not want to play to the crowd, we are talking about a generation that is so much about getting that reward in 5 seconds, 10 seconds – flipping through Youtube Shorts, clicking the TikTok clips and so on. The fact that they can open it up and have a bit of a bish-bash-bosh through some quickfire questions means they automatically have a way in.
It’s easy access, but it’s still reinforcing different content and concepts, responses to data, and geographical skills. They end up exploring maps, graphs and charts in quite a quick, spontaneous way.
Educake is definitely the simplest platform I’ve used to generate quizzes. It’s very easy to use.
2. It gives them something to work with
Educake questions are more than just filling in the gap. Even when it is, it’s not asking students to dream up the exact term that the computer happens to think is the right answer. Often there are multiple choice questions. I know some people think multiple choice is really just multiple guess, but when it comes to building student confidence and engagement, it’s a valuable tool.
Quite often, with a blank, students don’t know, but if you include a few prompts, they start to think, “Well, I know it’s not that… and I know that means such-and-such”. All of a sudden, they’re starting to think it through, and they’re building a bridge from no-information to known-information, and they can often think through to the right answer. It allows more reluctant students to give it a go instead of giving up.
Don’t get me wrong, typed answers are essential for active retrieval, and Educake offers plenty of those as well. What I really appreciate is that students have multiple points of entry to any quiz.
3. It lets them learn from their mistakes
Educake gives students instant feedback and corrections, which gives them the opportunity to consider what mistakes they’ve made.
A wrong answer followed by an explanation helps students to learn the content, but it can also reinforce the importance of understanding exactly what a question is asking. They realise that they got it wrong because they didn’t read the question carefully enough, so they take more care next time. They know that if they take time to decode the question, they can get more marks, which is a huge confidence boost. Much better than discovering they’ve made a mistake after half an hour’s work!
They also have the ability to query answers with me if they think they’ve been marked wrong unfairly. This is great, because if they were in fact wrong, I get a clear idea of exactly where their misconception is. Or sometimes, when they’ve queried it, they have a fair point, and what they’ve written is an equally valid answer. This will sometimes happen with typed answers, and it’s a great way of opening a dialogue.
I’ve been really pleased to find that not only will they take it on the chin that they’ve made mistakes, but sometimes they’ll go the extra step to advocate for themselves, saying, “Hang on, I don’t think that was a mistake, and here’s why.” It’s great for metacognition.
4. It helps their confidence grow over time
I’ve had students who will point blank refuse to do a whole host of different revision activities, who will then go, “Oh yeah, I can do a couple of Educake quizzes.” As a tool, I’ve found it’s something lots of my students will buy into, and that’s really powerful. As they start to feel themselves progressing with that, they’re then more likely to engage with other, less structured activities, because they’ve already had some success through formative assessment.
The bottom line
If I was to describe Educake to another teacher, I would say it’s a useful, user-friendly platform that allows for low-stakes engagement and instant feedback. It lets students consider their own misconceptions more deeply, explore content and concepts in depth, and generate classroom discussions and dialogue. It’s amazing that an online platform can do all that.
