In this chapter

This the creative heart of the Imvoto: where you can write new questions or find other teachers’ questions to build collections you will use with your students.

Whether you create a new collection or edit an existing one, this screen is where you will start. In the example below we are looking at an existing collection made up of 8 questions.

## Navigating through a collection

The icons shown below are used to navigate between questions and question sets. We call this the hierarchy.

This collection consists of two question sets. The first, called Finding sums of series, is question set A. It consists of five questions, A1, A2, up to A5. To look in more detail at a question, click on its icon.

You can also quickly add a new question or question set by clicking on the + icons. Alternatively you can use the buttons below.

The left and right arrows allow you to navigate between questions and question sets. The hide hierarchy button makes the hierarchy view disappear: this can be useful when writing longer questions.

## Blank collections

Initially your collection will be empty and you won’t see the hierarchy. You can add new questions using the buttons as described above. Alternatively, read on to learn how to add existing questions to your new collection.

Questions are at the heart of teaching and learning, so let’s write a new question for your students to answer.

Imvoto allows a variety of question types. All have the common feature of needing a title and a question body:

1. Enter a question title. Students won’t see this on their screens, so it can be as descriptive as you like without giving away hints about the solution to your question. In the example below, the title helps other teachers understand some key features of this particular addition question.
2. Use the text editor to type the question. There are some formatting options here, including adding images or videos to your question.

Next, choose what type of responses you want your students to provide. The default is multiple choice.

## Multiple-choice questions

Type your responses (both correct and ‘distractor’ incorrect responses) in the text boxes. Use the Add additional response button to get more response boxes.  Don’t forget to check the correct response checkbox next to the response(s) that are correct.

You may want to Shuffle answers to randomise the answer order. Computers are much better at doing this than humans.

You can decide how many answers students can choose using these controls:

Click Save to add the question to your collection. The drop down option Save and clone another allows you to start another new question using this one as a starting point. This speeds up the question writing process if you are creating a number of similar questions.

## Special content: formulae, etc

See our blog posting explaining how to type in mathematical and scientific formulae.

Coming soon: how to embed YouTube videos and GeoGebra diagrams into questions.

## Free-response questions: numeric and text

Just like multiple-choice questions, free-response questions require you to add a private question title and the student-facing question in the text editor.

The response type you choose will alter how you specify the correct answer to your question. In the example below, students would only be allowed to enter a numeric answer. Their answer would be marked correct if it was the number 12 (exactly, including 12.0 but not 12.1), any number that rounds to 15 (eg 14.9 or 15.49 but not 15.5) or any number between 20 and 25 inclusive. Any other answer would be marked incorrect.

Long-text answers cannot be automatically marked by Imvoto, they are for gathering student ideas and opinions only. This is the appropriate type to choose if you export more than a short sentence as an answer. The text box that students type in grows as they type, where as a standard ‘text’ answer is fixed to a single line.

Imvoto supports common mathematical answers such as fractions, coordinates and surds. These are accessible by choosing LaTeX template as the response type.

The Choose template button provides a menu of common answer types. If there is a particular style of answer you require that you can’t find, get in touch. We can help you create pretty much anything you might imagine, for example this matrix answer (with some components partially completed) featured in a recent collection:

Once you have chosen your answer type, complete the answer boxes to show the correct answer. In this case, if the student types in the fraction 2/3 they would be marked correct. In cases with more than one correct answer, use the Add alternative answer button.

Many of the answer types have options. In the case of fractions, a checkbox allows you to designate whether equivalent fractions would be accepted as correct. In this example, 4/6 would also be considered correct.

Finally, most of these answer types have ‘add ons’ such as prefixes and suffixes. In this example, we have turned the answer into the equation of a line, where the student must give the gradient of the line as a fraction.

Advanced users can update the difficulty for adaptive learning or categorise the question for easy discovery and organisation later.

## Clone a question

Speed up your workflow by cloning finished questions

It’s very common to create questions similar to those you have already created. To speed this up, we allow you to clone a question. It takes a copy of an existing question and allows you to make changes before you save the new question. The old question won’t be changed.

Cloning is useful, too, if another teacher has written a question you like, but want to tweak slightly.

From an existing question, use the Clone button.

If you are creating a new question, you can also start a new clone using the drop-down menu on the Save button.

## Search for a question

Click on the magnifying glass button and enter a search term.

Click on Search to find matching questions.

You can add any of these questions to your collection using the + button.

Alternatively click on the title of the question to see more details. The Add button will add the question to your collection.

The Recent button lists just your questions, with the most recent first. You can use this to quickly add questions to a new collection.

Three (5? 7? 99?) part lessons…

Question sets add structure to your collection. We find teachers like to group questions together by topic of by the phase of the lesson during which they will be used. All of the questions in a question set can be controlled together (for example they can all be turned off together).

### Remove or rearrange your questions

Selecting a question or question set in the navigation gives you the ability to Remove or Move it. When moving questions or question sets, you will be asked to type in the reference of its final destination. So, if you want:

• a question to be the third question of the second question set, enter B3.
• a question set to become the first question set, enter A.

Use the New question set button to create a new question set.

### Remove a question

Note that removing a question does not delete it from the Imvoto question library. You will still be able to find it in future using the search feature.