Hello, and welcome to this teachers guide to using examWizard. In this short video I'm
going to be introducing the software talking about how and why you might use it and then
talking you through how to log into the software, how to find papers and how to build, save
and export your own papers from a series of past paper questions. So, how and why would
you want to use exam wizard. Well, I m a past teacher myself with 17 years of experience
and many of the things that I would be doing as a teacher included, amongst other things,
the writing of mock exam papers or perhaps the setting of mock exam papers (if I'm not
writing them myself) and also, the setting of homework or various class-based tasks over
the course of the academic year or as part of a scheme of work.
Now, exam wizard makes all of these tasks much, much easier. If I was setting a past
paper as a mock exam, what I would probably do in the traditional sense is I'd go on to
an exam boards website, such as Pearson, I'd go through and look for the most appropriate
mock exam paper; I might choose a few over the course of an academic year so I'm strategically
placing these to test various elements of my students understanding in relation to my
program of study. But this can be sometimes quite taxing it can be difficult to find papers
on a website and certainly quite difficult to find the paper, the mark scheme and perhaps
the examiner's report that we might need to use if we're supporting new teachers to the
department as well.
Now, exam wizard brings all of these things together in one easy place and it's all nicely
organised and it updates year on year with each series of exam as it gets added, alongside
SAM as well. In addition to this, as I said you may wish to set a series of homework s
or you may wish to use past paper questions (not full papers), in your lessons as part
of a bigger scheme or as part of your wider programme of study planning for the entire
year or even planning through key stages. examWizard makes this easier as well; not
only can you use full exam papers, you can also pick and select from all of the available
materials, to make your own shorter papers. Or even just choose questions individually
and just like the full papers, these can be printed off alongside mark schemes (and) alongside
examiners reports to help support your teachers and also your learners. So, in my opinion
this is a huge timesaving, labour-saving device and it makes the process of finding and setting
exam papers or even exam style questions a lot easier.
In order to use the exam wizard software, I suggest the first thing you do is open up
an internet browser, such as Google Chrome, and type in exam wizard into the search bar
one of the first instances that should pop up is the link to the examWizard page there,
So I'm just going to go on to that; to my index page. Now, here you'll choose the qualification
that's applying to you; so general qualification subjects, Btec, Functional skills and T-Levels
are all included. In my instance, I'm going to be choosing Religious Studies . When you've
chosen your subject, click proceed to login. Now here, you'll be asked to type in your
username and password, and this is your Edexcel online password, that you can get provided
by your exams officer. If you don't have it already, this is also used for other Pearson
software, such as ResultsPlus. Make sure, when you log in to click the box I accept
the terms and conditions and then press the login button.
Here, we'll be presented with the exam wizard home page where you can do a range of things,
which I'll be talking through in this guide. Now one of the things I discussed in the introduction,
was this ability on examWizard to easily find past papers so, quite simply, we click on
find past papers there and it will go through a series of questions. So, I'm going to just
choose the most, simple option. I'm going to choose the new series, the GCSE 9-1 papers
(obviously we have got the legacy papers on there as well), and you can see from the drop-down
menus on the side we can refine this further and further down, but at the moment it's displaying
206 results there, of all the papers across the whole spectrum of nine to one availability.
So, I'm just going to click the top options. As you can see, I'm using Religious Studies
we'll choose the SAM materials there and again, unit 1a and if we click search, it should
just pull up the papers that apply to those criteria but, as I said you've got the whole
breadth of the Pearson catalogue to select from there. So, if we click on this paper
there we brought to a preview of the paper, so we can scroll down and have a look just
to see what the content is and as I said earlier, you have access also, to the mark scheme for
the paper and if this was a live series paper as well, we would also have the examiner's
report; obviously, I chose the SAM in this particular case, so that wasn't the case.
Now, from here we can then choose to download the report, print it or obviously export it
so we can see it in pdf format.
Now, in this final part of the video I want to talk about a feature that I think is the
most powerful within exam wizard if used correctly, and that's this idea of building a paper.
So, here we can search for questions across the whole back catalogue of Pearson past papers
and SAM material and build our individual mock exam, or perhaps a series of homework
activities, or even lesson content for a scheme of work for example. So, I'm just going to
click on there, build a paper. Now, just with the idea of finding the past papers, it comes
out with these drop-down menus as well. So, I'm just going to choose GCSE nine to one,
because I want the new series of papers and again it'll give us a series of drop-down
menus again, so we can select the specification.
Let's try spec B this time. We can select from a series of years but, obviously if we
leave these unticked it will select from all of those areas which you might want to do.
I'm just going to select a couple of years 2018 and 19 live series. Obviously, these
are both, from June. If you had other series, perhaps running later in the year, they would
come up as well. Now, in terms of the unit, I might focus just on one paper. So, let's
choose Christianity there, and obviously I can choose a lot of other sections if they're
available but, this one might be interesting as well selecting the type of question. So,
for example, if as a teacher you were practicing just on question D for example, you might
choose that (or any of the others in that particular case). I'm going to leave that
unchecked, because that will give me more of a selection of questions, when I hit the
search bar. So, let's hit that and see what comes up.
Okay, so we've got 48 results here and they are shown down the side. If they're not all
displayed, we can click show more, and it will keep adding to the question bank that
I can see down the side. Now, with each of these questions you can see it gives you a
little bit of a preview, a bit of information about what the questions like. So, you can
think very carefully about how you want to kind of level up your paper as it goes through;
you might want to start with simpler questions or harder questions, or you might just want
to focus on one thing, and it gives you that information there. So, for example, I might
just be focusing on some of these smaller, shorter four-minute questions, or four-mark
questions. So, if I click on view, I can see the question previewed over here, and just
like when we were finding past papers before, it will give us the mark scheme if it's available
and obviously an examiner's report with, in some cases exemplar answers or, past answers
from students who have attempted this question from the past series.
So, if I'm happy with that question, I can click on add and you can see up the top here,
it is adding questions to my existing paper. You can see I've already added a few in a
previous trial of this software so, we've got four questions there, and it's totalling
up to 17 minutes or, 17 marks. So, this is really good, because you can preview how long
these questions might be and if he was doing a series of homework tasks over a scheme,
you might be trying to aim to keep these within a certain time boundary and also, if you're
focusing on a particular type of questions, you can choose those and select those in the
earlier drop-down menus as well. So, if I'm happy with the amount of questions and the
time, and marks available there, I'd probably go to view and edit the paper first.
Now, this shows me all the questions that I've chosen; here's some earlier ones that
I added on a different paper there, but obviously it saves your progress as you're going through
and at this point you can scroll down and see what the layout of the paper is like now.
If you want to change the layout again, it's very simple, we can just go over to the arrows
on the side (the up down arrows) and just move the questions about. It takes a few seconds,
but then it will readjust the paper and move things around so, perhaps a better layout
for you. If you're then happy with the paper, what we can do is choose to save this and
this will go into your my paper section, or we can export it, if we want to go; just like
before when we were finding the papers, and print or save the paper directly there as
well.
So, I'm just going to go to save. I'll give it a name, we'll call it paper one . I suppose
it's more like a homework but, we'll call it paper one there, and that is now saved.
So, if I go to save and finish now, you'll see paper one now appears in my paper . So,
it's saved on there, so I can go back to it if I need to. All of the actions that we had
when I was finding a paper here, about editing, about making copies, printing and obviously
if we want to discard the paper, we can do that there, and it gives us all the details
of the paper here. How many questions there are, the total number of marks and roughly
how much time it should take a student to complete this paper.
So that's the end of the video I hope it was interesting and informative to you and I very
much recommend, that you try out using examWizard yourself!