Here you'll find answers to some of the most common questions our users have.
Please also visit our Tutorial Center for video introductions to the most popular Quia features.
Quia is the only website that lets you do all of the following (no other site or software product even comes close!):
Quia gives you a personal URL (Web address) that you can use to display your materials and share with anyone!
Quia is pronounced KEY-ah. It rhymes with Maria.
Thank you for spreading the word about Quia! We have a PowerPoint presentation that you can download, and we can also send you brochures that you can hand out to your attendees. (Windows users: to save the presentation to your hard drive, right-click and select Save Target As.)
A subscription to Quia lasts one year. When you subscribe to Quia, you will receive an e-mail confirmation which indicates your subscription expiration date. After subscribing, you can view your expiration date by logging in to your account and clicking Account at the top of the window.
You can renew at any time, and extend your subscription by another full year. To renew, go to https://www.quia.com/subscription/purchase and click Renew for your subscription type.
Visit the Shared Activities area for access to millions of activities created by educators around the world, or visit the top activities page to see what was most popular last month. You can even search for activities by category, textbook, keyword, and more.
Log in to your instructor account. Quia organizes your activities and quizzes on the Activities and Quizzes pages, respectively, which you access from the left menu. Click the Edit link for an item to open an editor where you can make changes. When you are finished, click Done to save your work.
Before others can use your activities or take your quizzes, they need to be able to find them on the Quia website. There are two ways to do this.
The easiest way to make your activities available to others is to post them on your Profile page.
To add activities to your profile, log in and click Activities in the left menu to view your list of activities. Each activity has a profile icon () beside it. If the icon is gray, the activity is not on your profile. Conversely, a blue icon indicates that the activity is on your profile. Click any gray icon to add that activity to your profile. If you need to add several activities at one time, select the check box for each one, then click the Other Actions list and select Add to profile.
Once you've added an activity to your profile, you only need to give users the URL of your profile to access it.
The other way to make your activities available to others is to provide them with the direct
URL to the activity, which Quia assigns to it after you
create it. Quia's URLs look something like this:
http://www.quia.com/jg/7.html
or this:
http://www.quia.com/quiz/100001.html
Anyone can type your activity's URL into a Web browser on any computer with Internet access to use your activity.
You can share your activities with as many people as you want. If you forget the URL of your Quia activity, simply return to the Activities page where Quia lists all of your activity URLs, for easy reference. Quia can even e-mail the URL directly from the Activities page. To do so, click the icon next to the title of the activity and enter the e-mail addresses. Quia will send a message with your activity URL to everyone you specified.
Note: For quizzes, you can choose whether you want to require users to log in.
No. Your students do not need to log in to Quia in order to use your activities. All they need to do is type the URL of your activity or quiz into their browsers. If you have forgotten the URL of an activity, you can retrieve it by going to the Activities page, which you access from the left menu. Look under the URL beneath your activity's title.
Students can also click activity links from any class Web page or profile where you've added it, without logging in.
If you have assigned an activity to a class, students will have their own accounts, and they can log in to complete the activity so that Quia can track the time spent on it. Without logging in, Quia does not track student activity. For more information, see How can I track activity results?
Yes, you can set up your quiz to allow students to save their work and return to complete it later, by selecting the Save for later option in the Global Settings section on the Quiz Assignments and Settings page. Quia displays this page when you click Done after creating or editing a quiz. Alternately, you can access this page by clicking Quizzes in the left menu, then click the Assign link for the quiz you want to modify.
Please note that you can only select this option for quizzes that require students to log in, which you specify in the Access section located near the top of the Quiz Assignments and Settings page.
As a Quia subscriber, you can upload images stored on your computer to Quia and add them to your activities and quizzes. You must upload the image you want to use first, before you can use it in your activities.
Note: Quia allows you to upload files in any format, but for compatibility with most browsers, we recommend using GIF, JPG, or PNG image format.
To upload an image, follow these steps:
You can add an image to a flashcards, matching, concentration, and word search activity type when you create it or by editing it. To do so, follow these steps:
You can add an image to a quiz when you create it or by editing it. To do so, follow these steps:
To add images to all other activity types, you must first retrieve the path of the image and construct an HTML <IMG> tag that refers to it, then place it in the appropriate field. To do so, follow these steps:
As a Quia subscriber, you can upload audio files stored on your computer to Quia and add them to your activities and quizzes. You must upload the audio file you want to use first, before you can use it in your activities.
Note: Quia allows you to upload audio files in any format, but you should make sure your students have the appropriate browser plug-in to play the files. The MP3 format is a good choice because of its broad compatibility and small file sizes.
To upload an audio file, follow these steps:
You can add an audio file to a flashcards, matching, concentration, and word search activity type when you create or edit it. To do so, follow these steps:
You can add an audio file to a quiz when you create or edit it. To do so, follow these steps:
To add audio files to all other activity types, you must first retrieve the path of the file and construct an HTML <A HREF> tag that refers to it, then place it in the appropriate field. To do so, follow these steps:
As a Quia subscriber, you can upload files stored on your computer to Quia and add them to your activities and quizzes. You must upload the file you want to use first, before you can use it in your activities.
To upload a file, follow these steps:
You can add a file to a quiz when you create or edit it. To do so, you must use the Advanced quiz editor and follow these steps:
To add files to all other activity types, you must first retrieve the path of the file and construct an HTML <A HREF> tag that refers to it, then place it in the appropriate field. To do so, follow these steps:
It's easy! Just complete our nomination form.
Yes. If you add your activities or quizzes to your profile, anyone can use them, regardless of whether they appear in the Top 50 list or Shared Activities area. To add activities and quizzes to your profile, click either Activities or Quizzes in the left menu, then locate the item you want to add and click the icon for it. Quia changes the color of the icon from gray to blue to indicate it is now on your profile. Be sure to give users the URL to your profile.
Alternately, you can share your activity with other people by giving them the activity's URL. If you have forgotten the URL, you can retrieve it by going to the Activities page and looking directly under the title of your activity.
It's easy to get the address (URL) of any activity that you have created. Just go to the Activities page and look directly under the title of your activity.
If you are a Quia subscriber, any activities that you have created while subscribed will remain on Quia indefinitely, unless you delete them. One of the great benefits of using Quia is that you can reuse your activities and quizzes year after year.
The count on the Activities page does not change every time you reload the page. It can take a short time for the display to "catch up" to the actual hit count. If you wait a minute or two and then reload, you should see the change.
If your activity or quiz has been added to the Shared Activities area, the number of hits will include the number of times someone viewed your activity from that page. Quia updates the number of hits from this page every few hours.
Log in to your instructor account. If the class you want to edit is displayed on your profile, you can click the icon for it. Otherwise, click the Classes link in the left menu to open the Class Manager page, then click the Edit link for the appropriate class. Make your changes in the Class editor and click Save changes at the bottom of the page.
When you create new activities and quizzes, Quia does not automatically assign them to your class. You can decide on your own whether or not you want to assign them and, if so, which classes you want to assign them to. To assign activities and quizzes to your class, follow these steps:
Quia allows you to track the amount of time students practice activities. You can use this data to review which activities students love, who's been spending a lot of time practicing, and the impact of your activities on student performance.
To track an activity, you must first assign it to a class using the Assign link for it on the Activities page. Alternately, you can go to the Activities page and select the check boxes for multiple activities you want to assign, then click the Other Actions drop-down list and select Assign to class. In the Assign to class window, select the appropriate class.
Once you have assigned the activity, Quia will record the practice time of students in that class who log in and practice the activity, in the gradebook. Note that it may take several minutes for activity statistics to display on this page after a student plays the activity.
If your class page is not displaying at all, you may have forgotten to close one of the HTML tags in your message to students. Or, there could be something in your message that looks like an HTML tag but isn't. For example, some <, >, or & symbols can be interpreted as HTML tags. If any tags such as <TABLE> or <A HREF> are left unclosed, then the page behavior varies among browsers. Some browsers may display the page correctly, while others may not.
To fix this problem, go to the class editor and make sure that all HTML tags are closed appropriately with a closing tag. For example every <TABLE> needs to have a </TABLE>.
If, after trying these suggestions, your page is still not displaying, contact our support desk and we'll research the problem.
Click the Classes link in the left menu to see the list of your classes, then click the Edit link for the appropriate class to open the class editor. Scroll down to the My quizzes, activities, and surveys section and find the activity that you want to remove and click the Remove link for it. Click Save changes at the bottom of the page to save the change.
Please note that removing an activity from your class doesn't delete the activity itself, and you can always reassign the activity to your class later.
As a Quia subscriber, you can upload images, audio files, and other files stored on your computer to Quia and add them to your class page. You must upload the file you want to use first, before you can add it to your page.
To upload a file, follow these steps:
To add a file to your class page, follow these steps:
In addition to images, you can also include links on your class page to images located elsewhere on the Web. To do this, you must first identify a URL that points to the image that you want to display. There are different ways of finding the URL depending on the browser you are using.
If using Internet Explorer:
Right-click the image and select Properties. Note the URL of the image and copy it.
If using Firefox:
Right-click on the image (or Control-click on a Mac) and select Copy image location.
If using Safari:
Press [CTRL] while clicking the image and select Copy image.
If using Chrome:
Right-click on the image (or Control-click on a Mac) and select Copy image URL.
The count Quia displays will not change every time you reload the page. It can take a short time for the display to "catch up" to the actual hit count. If you wait a minute or two and then reload the page, you should see the change.
Your profile is a place where you can display information about yourself, link to your classes, quizzes, activities, surveys, and more. It provides one personalized link you can share with students, parents, and colleagues for easy access to all the materials you've created. Students and other teachers can even find the page by searching for your name, so they'll never have to remember a URL again.
Read more on the benefits of using your profile.
You'll only ever have one profile for your Quia account, and it includes everything you want to display—current activities, future assignments, surveys for other educators, material from expired classes, and more. It has links to your class Web pages, which are specific to a certain subset (class) of students. A class Web page is where students go to find activities and quizzes that are assigned, or class-specific messages, deadlines, and so on.
The "Find a teacher" feature is designed to help educators develop and maintain collaborative connections with other educators. Thus, only active educational subscribers show up here. Any trial accounts, expired accounts, and corporate users (active or expired) will not appear in search results. Active educational subscribers who have hidden their profiles will also not appear in search results.
To enable your profile for use, click Account in the banner at the top of the page and select the Enable profile check box.
To start a subscription so you can use profiles and appear in searches, click here.
You may have hidden your profile. To enable display of your profile, click Account in the banner at the top of the page and select the Enable profile check box.
Take a look at the My Profile icon in the left menu right now. Whenever you see that icon, there's an activity, quiz, class, or survey that can be added to your profile.
If the icon is gray, the corresponding item is not yet displayed on your profile, so click the icon to turn it blue—this means the item is now displayed on your profile.
You will find these icons on your Activities, Quizzes, Classes, and Surveys pages.
If you want to do a mass action, such as adding all of your activities at once, select all of the check boxes at the very right of the list of activities, then click the Other Actions drop-down list and select Add to profile.
If you have been trying to log in, but your browser keeps looping back to the login page, your browser is not accepting cookies. You can fix this by changing a configuration setting in your browser. Click here for step-by-step instructions. If you are using an unsupported browser and are having this problem, you will need to use a supported browser to access Quia. We recommend that you download Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or Chrome.
If you are still unable to log in after setting your browser to accept cookies, contact us. We'll try our best to help.
If, after logging in, you see a list of activities that belong to someone else, that person's activity page may have been incorrectly saved by either your browser or your proxy server. See this link for possible solutions.
I forgot my password. What can I do?
I forgot my username. What can I do?
When you load an activity in your browser, it stores the activity in memory. Some browsers are unable to tell when an activity has changed, so they redisplay the activity from memory instead of loading a new version from the Quia website.
The first thing you should try is clicking your browser's Reload or Refresh button. If this doesn't work, another way you can clear the browser memory is to quit and restart your browser before revisiting the activity page. A third solution is to clear out your browser's cache, thereby forcing it to reload the activity. Click here for step-by-step directions on how to clear your browser's cache.
If, after trying these three steps, you still cannot see your changes, it may be because your school's network proxy server is caching (saving copies of) Quia's Web pages. In this particular case, it may have cached an outdated version of your activity page. Instead of fetching your latest activity page from Quia, it is just returning you its saved copy.
There are a few ways to fix this problem. Most pages on the Quia website tell proxy servers not to save them in a cache. If your proxy server still saves such pages, that may indicate a problem with the proxy server itself. Contact your technical support staff or ISP and report the problem. They may be willing to upgrade or fix the proxy server. If not, they may be willing to at least turn off caching for all pages on www.quia.com.
As an intermediate solution or a last resort, you can use the following trick. Suppose that the page you are trying to load has this URL:
http://www.quia.com/jg/1000.html
Your proxy server recognizes that URL and returns a cached page. However, if instead you enter the URL
http://www.quia.com/jg/1000.html?tiger
(where "tiger" is any word of your choosing) your proxy server will interpret it as a brand-new URL and will be forced to fetch the page directly from www.quia.com. To Quia, however, either URL means the same thing, so you should still get the page that you want. If you use this trick, you must be sure to vary the word that you enter after the question mark. Otherwise, you may once again start receiving cached pages. Also, do not try this trick if the URL you are trying to access already contains a question mark.
For more information about this type of problem, please contact our support desk.
This happens when your school's network proxy server is caching (saving copies of) Quia's Web pages. In this particular case, it has cached an outdated version of the page. To fix this problem, you'll need to contact your school's technical support staff and tell them to turn off caching for all pages from www.quia.com.
For more information about this type of problem, please contact our support desk.
First, try clicking your browser's Reload or Refresh button. If this doesn't work, try clearing out your browser's cache, which will force your browser to reload the activities. Click here for step-by-step directions on how to clear your browser's cache. After you clear your browser's cache, you should quit and restart your browser.
This happens when your school's network proxy server is caching (saving copies of) Quia's Web pages. In this particular case, it has cached the page belonging to another teacher in your school or district. Instead of fetching your personal page from Quia, it is just returning you its saved copy (which happens to be another teacher's). To fix this problem, you'll need to contact your school's technical support staff and tell them to turn off caching for all pages from www.quia.com.
For more information about this type of problem, please contact our support desk.
Some browsers automatically remember passwords for you when you type in your username. This can obviously cause a security problem when other people use your computer. In that case, we recommend that you disable this feature.
To disable the Internet Explorer AutoComplete feature:
When you type into a text field, some browsers' auto-completion feature sometimes presents a drop-down list of values that have been previously entered into that text field. This can cause problems when, for example, two different classes use the same computers for the same Quia activities. The second class can see the answers entered by the first class!
To disable the Internet Explorer AutoComplete feature:
To support Chinese pinyin characters, your browser must display Quia Web pages in a different font. If you enable Chinese pinyin language tools on the Account information page, the display font will change on all of your Quia pages. To revert to your activities' previous appearance, remove pinyin as your selection on the Account information page. Quia will no longer display the pinyin accent bar, and some browsers will no longer display pinyin characters correctly.
Quia strives to work well with as little bandwidth as possible. However, for optimal performance, we recommend that you allow 30-80 Kbps (kilobits per second) of bandwidth for each simultaneous Quia user at your site.
To determine how much unused bandwidth is currently available to you, you can use the following bandwidth test tool:
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
Note that this tool determines how much bandwidth is available at the current time, and does not account for how others at your site may use the Internet at various times during the day. Therefore, you should always check with your network administrator to determine the amount of bandwidth you can expect to be available during a given time period.
Don't worry. Go to the password request form. A new password will be automatically sent to the e-mail address you specified during registration.
Don't worry. Go to the username request form. Your username will be automatically sent to the e-mail address specified in your profile.
Go to the change password form. You will be prompted to log in if you have not already done so.
Click the Account link at the top of your window and make your changes. After changing your information, your activity pages will immediately display your updated information. If they don't, you may need to click your browser's Reload or Refresh button.
Quia provides an easy way for you to create the diacritics found in languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, Latin, German, and other languages.
Click the Account link at the top of your window and select your language in the Enable Language Tools drop-down list. Once you select a language, Quia displays a convenient accent bar the next time you create or edit an activity. Note that you can choose the Combined languages option instead of just one language. This gives you a keypad that includes accented characters for French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and German, which is useful if you teach multiple languages.
If your language is not available, you can use the Windows Character Map utility, which you access by selecting Start Menu -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools ->Character Map. In the Font drop-down list, select System. You will see a chart of available characters. Locate the accented character you need and double-click it. When you see it in the Characters to copy field, click Copy. Return to Quia, place your cursor in the appropriate location in your text, and press [CTRL]+v to paste the character into that spot.
Most operating systems and browsers now have Asian language support built in. To verify that your browser supports Asian languages, go to the language test page.
If your browser does not display the characters properly on the language test page, you must enable the appropriate language support for your operating system to be able to view Asian and non-Western-European characters in Quia activities. If you are using Windows, follow the instructions found here to enable "International Support." If you are using Mac OS, follow the instructions found here to enable the appropriate language support for your desired language.
When working with non-Western languages, you must set your browser to use Unicode or UTF-8 encoding, to ensure that Quia can accurately process and store your data. Once you've done this, it's a good idea to create a small test activity to verify that Quia can display your character data correctly.
For more information, or to suggest a correction, please contact our support desk.
If Quia does not display Asian or non-Western-European characters correctly in your activities, you should first verify that you can correctly view Quia's language test page. If not, make sure your browser is using the correct character encoding.
In Internet Explorer or Firefox, you can see the current Web page's character encoding by selecting View->Encoding or View->Character encoding. The encoding should be Unicode or UTF8. If your browser is using some other encoding, such as Western European or ISO-8859-1, change it to Unicode/UTF8 and refresh the language test page.
If you still cannot view your desired language on the language test page, you may need further browser setup, as described below.
The following instructions apply to the Internet Explorer and Firefox Web browsers.
Return to the language test page and verify that you can view the characters on this page. You may need to refresh the page first. If you still cannot view the desired characters, please contact our support desk.
For more information about this type of problem, or to suggest a correction, please contact our support desk.
To support Chinese pinyin characters, your browser must display Quia Web pages in a different font. When you enable Chinese pinyin language tools on the Account information page, your browser will change the display font on all of your Quia pages. Your browser can display pinyin characters correctly in all Quia activities except Word Search.
While you can remove pinyin as your selection on the Account information page at any time by reverting to the original font and appearance of your pages, some browsers will no longer display pinyin correctly if you do, and Quia will no longer display the accent bar allowing students to enter pinyin characters. In addition, Quia will not display results containing pinyin characters correctly if you do not select pinyin on your Account information page.
Even when you do select pinyin on your Account information page, your browser may not display pinyin characters correctly in window titles and bookmark lists. This setting is controlled by your operating system and is not related to Quia's pinyin support.
If you have any other problems with the display of pinyin, please contact the support desk.
To view Quia's complete privacy policy, click here.
Yes. When you are done using Quia, you should log out. Most Quia pages (including this one) have a blue bar at the top, on the right side of which is either a Log In or Log Out link. To log out, simply click on the Log Out link. If there is no Log Out link, don't worry. You're already logged out.
Yes. Many people add links from their personal or school Web pages to activities they have created at Quia. There is no need to ask for permission before linking to Quia.
Contact our support desk. We'll do our best to find a solution for you.