News

Recently we followed up with Dr Michael Rehm from University of Auckland’s Business School, on how he uses student response systems such as Xorro Q in his courses. According to Michael, the student response system has totally changed education. Traditionally, engagement in a classroom has ...

This week Xorro releases version 2.2 of its Workbook whiteboarding software, co-branded Alphateach in the UK and Europe. The new version includes features such as PDF import, enhanced design of the ruler tool, added grid functions and much more. Workbook whiteboarding software combines the simp...

This summer, the University of Auckland Department of Civil Engineering has supplied eight student interns to work with Xorro on developing a targeted learning solution. These interns have been working alongside another intern group (numbering seven) from Massey University contributing to product d...

A few weeks back, the Xorro team released heat map visualisation for Xorro-Q 's hotspot questions. This enables a much clearer interpretation of the many thousands of data points contributed by an audience to a live hot spot question. In August a University of Auckland lecturer collaborated wit...

In September Xorro quietly released Label questions for the Xorro-Q audience assessment platform. Label questions provide a flexible and fast assessment tool suited to any topic. The Label Question concept in Xorro-Q can be applied to a range of needs, from cloze-activities to test phrase completi...

This week, after months of beta testing and progressive improvements, Xorro finally released version 2.0 of the powerful whiteboarding software Workbook (alternately branded Alphateach). Workbook was originally writen by 2Touch Technologies for use with 2Touch interactive whiteboards. Today Xor...

We know that regularly asking "instant" questions in class is a sure-fire way of lifting and sustaining engagement. Now, using Xorro-Q, the responses to these instant questions can be rewarded: either by assessing them for correctness or by recognising the contributor through participation points. ...

One of the compromises in automatically assessed numeric (and text) response questions is that they demand exact responses from participants. For example, in asking a group of participants "Who was the leader of Nazi Germany?" - we might demand "Adolf Hitler" as the "correct" answer, but we will in...

From 1 January, all users - both facilitators and participants - have full access to Xorro-Q for free. Anyone can now create learning games, contests and competitions, and run brainstorm and collaboration activities with live audiences, all for free using Xorro-Q. The free access is limited to...

Before Christmas, a Xorro-Q customer enthused on how useful it would be to have large banks of maths practice questions appropriate to his college classes. These could easily be included in contests and games which motivate students to have fun practicing algebra through the term. Here at Xorro,...

For far too long, "instant" assessments has meant multiple choice polling, or voting, questions. This question format has been easy to produce and (until now) unique in providing a "closed answer" outcome which can be auto-assessed easily. Ingenuity and careful design leads to very effective use o...

Xorro has released free access for school educators to its gamification and real-time assessment solution, Xorro-Q. Xorro-Q's dashboard enables educators in BYOD classrooms and lecture theaters, to ensure the active participation of every single student in instant challenges. Challenges can be pr...

Following the debut in mid 2014 of Xorro's faculty-wide engagement dashboards, the kiwi edtech innovator has been awarded a $90,000 grant from Ministry of Business Innovation to leverage the dashboard's value for all educators. The R&D Fellowship grant has been awarded to Xorro Solutions to e...

Text response questions were the very first to be released by Xorro, and have always been the quickest to impress. However, their usefulness in large groups has been limited due to the difficulty of instantly extracting value from high volumes of text responses. This week we release the long-awa...

In Xorro, we're fond of arguing that the only anxiety a participant should ever feel is if not participating when they are supposed to be. We know that participation is central to learning in group settings. And yet, it can be a tough challenge for lecturers, speakers and trainers to achieve hig...

Following hard on the heels of the April release of scored numeric response questions, Xorro has released a simple scoring template for its text response question type. Scoring is achieved by comparing the response with a pre-determined string of text. Try these questions to see how it works....

You've had Hotspot questions since late last year. Now, in response to frequent requests we've added a new multi-select hotspot question type. We've prepared some samples for you to enjoy - try them out ! It's simple to produce a multiple hotspot question: Just upload an image; create the ho...

Xorro's Institution Dashboard (released July) provides an instant view on the participant experience over multiple sessions and across multiple facilitators in an institution. As Faculty managers work to maximise student retention and to provide a competitive offering, they are helped by metrics ...

In August we released a flurry of new functionality for our Xorro facilitators: Text response questions now allow scoring based on matching the response with your predetermined answer. This is the same approach taken in April for our numeric question scoring, and will soon be extended somewhat t...

Today, we feature the latest from Dr Will Thalheimer , the long-respected instructional design expert and contemporary education blogger on education best-practice ( www.willatworklearning.com ). Will has just re-issued his ground-breaking 2003 tome " The Learning Benefits of Questions: Resear...