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.Here you'll find answers to some of the most common questions our users have.
If you want to know about our newest features, click here.
Quia is the only Web site 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.)
| Presentation: | view | download now | |||
| Brochure: | view | request |
A subscription to Quia lasts one year. When you subscribe to Quia, your subscription expiration date will be included in your e-mail confirmation. After subscribing, you can view your expiration date by clicking Account at the top of your window.
You may renew at any time to extend your subscription by another full year. To renew, go to https://secure.quia.com/subscription/purchase and click Renew next to 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 using the left menu. Next to each activity is a link labeled Edit. Click this link to bring up an editing form that you can use to make changes to your activity or quiz. When you are finished, make sure to click Done to save changes.
Before others can use your activities or take your quizzes, they need
to be able to find them on the Quia Web site. After you create a new activity
or quiz, you will be given the URL (the Web site address beginning with
http://) where your material resides. On Quia, URLs look something like this:
http://www.quia.com/jg/7.html
or this:
http://www.quia.com/quiz/100001.html
You can share your activity or quiz with someone simply by telling that person the URL. Once someone knows the URL of your activity or quiz, he or she can type that 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, don't worry. The Activities page lists all of your activity URLs for easy reference. Quia can even e-mail the URL directly from the Activities page - just 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.
Another way to let people know about your activities is to add the activity to your profile. Simply go to the Activities page and click the profile icon 
for the activity. The icon turns blue, which indicates that the activity is displayed on your profile. To add multiple activities at once, select the check boxes for each activity, then click the Other Actions drop-down list and select Add to profile.
Note: Other people do not need to log in to use your activities. Anyone can use your activities simply by typing in the URL. For quizzes, you can choose whether to require users to be logged 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 find 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.
As a Quia subscriber, you have the ability to upload images and add them to your activities and quizzes. This is done in the File Manager, which you access by clicking Files in the left menu. Quia gives you the flexibility to upload files in any format, but for compatibility with most browsers, we recommend using GIF or JPG image format.
The matching, flashcards, concentration, and quiz templates provide a Browse button that lets you select an image from ones that you have previously uploaded.
To add images to all other activities, you must first identify the path of the image and construct an HTML <IMG> tag that refers to the image.
All images uploaded to the Quia Web site will begin with the path "/files/quia/users/yourusername/"
as listed in your File Manager after the words Current Folder.
You must complete this path with your username and the file name of your
image. For example, the following <IMG> tag refers to an image called "airplane.jpg"
uploaded by someone with the username "pegasus":
<IMG SRC="/files/quia/users/pegasus/airplane.jpg">
You can place this image tag in any field of your activity or quiz editor that is marked with a blue plus sign (+). Blue plus signs (+) are displayed next to fields in which you can enter HTML. HTML entered in these fields will only be interpreted if the Activate HTML option is checked in the settings section of your activity editor or the advanced section of your quiz editor.
As a Quia subscriber, you have the ability to upload audio files and add them to your activities and quizzes. This is done in the File Manager, which you access by clicking Files in the left menu. Quia gives you the flexibility to upload files in any format, but for compatibility with most browsers, we recommend using MP3 or WAV audio format.
The matching, flashcards, concentration, and quiz templates provide a Browse button that lets you select an audio file from ones that you have previously uploaded.
To add audio files to all other activities, you must first identify the path of the audio file and construct an HTML <A HREF> tag that refers to it.
All audio files uploaded to the Quia Web site will begin with the path "/files/quia/users/yourusername/"
as listed in your File Manager after the words Current Folder.
You must complete this path with your username and the file name of your
audio clip. For example, the following <A HREF> tag refers to an audio file called "vocabulary.mp3"
uploaded by someone with the username "pegasus":
<A HREF="/files/quia/users/pegasus/vocabulary.mp3">Listen</a>
The anchor text "Listen" will be provided as a link for your students to click and listen to the audio file. You can enter any text as an anchor for your audio files.
You can place an audio link in any field of your activity or quiz editor that is marked with a blue plus sign (+). Blue plus signs (+) are displayed next to fields in which you can enter HTML. HTML entered in these fields will only be interpreted if the Activate HTML option is checked in the settings section of your activity editor or the advanced section of your quiz editor.
As a Quia subscriber, you have the ability to upload files and link to them from activities and quizzes. First, you must upload your files in the File Manager, which you access by clicking Files in the left menu. Then, you must identify the path of the file and construct an <A HREF> tag that refers to the file.
All files uploaded to the Quia Web site will begin with the path "/files/quia/users/yourusername/"
as listed in your File Manager after the words Current Folder.
You must complete this path with the name of your file.
For example, the following <A HREF> tag refers to a file called "Assignments.doc" uploaded
by someone with the username "pegasus":
<A HREF="/files/quia/users/pegasus/Assignments.doc">View Assignments</a>
In this example, the anchor text "View Assignments" will be provided as a link for students to click and open the file. You can enter any text as an anchor for your files.
You can place this file tag in any field of your activity or quiz editor that is marked with a blue plus sign (+). Blue plus signs (+) are displayed next to fields in which you can enter HTML. HTML entered in these fields will only be interpreted if the Activate HTML option is checked in the settings section of your activity editor or the advanced section of your quiz editor.
Simply fill out our nomination form.
Yes. Anyone can use your activities or take your quizzes regardless of whether they appear in the Top 50 list or Shared Activities area. To share your activity with other people, you just need to let them know the URL. If you have forgotten the URL of an activity, you can find 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 benefits of using Quia is that you can reuse your activities and quizzes year after year.
Any activities created during a 30-day trial will be deleted when the trial expires. However, if you subscribe within 30 days after your trial account expires, your trial activities will be restored for you.
The count that appears on the Activities page will not change every time you reload the page. It needs a little while to "catch up" to the actual hit count. If you wait a minute or two and then reload, you should be able to observe the change.
If your activity or quiz has been added to the to the Shared Activities area, the number of hits will include the number of times your activity was viewed from that page. The number of hits is updated every few hours.
Log in to your instructor account. Click the Classes link in the left menu to open the Class Manager page. Click the Edit link next to the class you want to make changes to. The class editor will appear, allowing you to make changes. When you are done, be sure to click Save changes at the bottom of the screen.
When you create new activities, they do not automatically get assigned to your class. You get to decide on your own whether you want to assign them and, if so, which classes you want to assign them to. To assign activities to your class, follow these steps:
If your class page is not showing up at all, then it's possible that you forgot 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 back to the class editor and check to 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 look into the problem.
Click the Classes link in the left menu to display the list of your classes. Then, click the Edit link next to the appropriate class. This will bring up the class editor. Scroll down to the My quizzes, activities, and surveys section and find the activity that you want to remove. Click the Remove link for that activity. Then, save your page by clicking Save changes at the bottom of the screen.
Don't worry, 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 have the ability to upload images, audio files, and other files and add them to your class page. First, upload your files in the File Manager, which you access by clicking Files in the left menu. Then, to insert a file into your class page, follow these steps:
Besides uploading images to Quia, you can also include links on your class page to images that appear 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 Microsoft Internet Explorer:
Right-click the image and select Properties. A Properties screen
should appear, and next to Address (URL) is the URL required for
the image. Copy that URL.
If using Firefox:
Right-click on the image (or Control-click on a Mac) and select Copy image location.
If using Safari:
Control-click on the image and select Copy image.
The count that appears on your screen will not change every time you reload the page. It needs a little while to "catch up" to the actual hit count. If you wait a minute or two and then reload, you should be able to observe the change.
If you have been trying to log in, but your browser keeps looping back to the login page, it means that 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 the AOL browser and are having this problem, you will need to use another browser to access Quia. We recommend that you download Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari.
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 are shown 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, your browser 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 Web site. The first thing you should try is pressing your browser's Reload or Refresh button. If this doesn't work, another solution 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 Web site 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 is happening because 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, make sure that you are using a Java-enabled browser. If you are using Internet Explorer, it should be version 6 or higher. All versions of Firefox and Safari are Java-enabled. If your browser version is correct, make sure that Java is enabled:
In Internet Explorer, select Tools -> Internet Options from the menu. Click the Advanced tab and select the "Use JRE" check box.
In Firefox, select Tools -> Options from the menu. Click the Content tab and select the "Enable Java" and "Enable Java Script" check boxes.
In Safari, select Safari -> Preferences from the menu. Click the Security tab and select the "Enable Java" and "Enable Java Script" check boxes.
First, try pressing 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 is happening because 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 schools and companies use a type of firewall that is incompatible with Quia's Java applets. For more information about this problem, click here (external link).
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 gets to see the answers entered by the first class!
To disable the Internet Explorer AutoComplete feature:
In order 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 on 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 press 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, an alternate approach is to 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 the 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.
To correctly view the matching, flashcards, concentration, mini quizzes, and columns activities, you may need to download the Java plug-in compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. After you install this plug-in, you must restart your computer.
Still not working? If you can see your desired language on the language test page and you have installed the Java plug-in, but you still cannot view your language in the activity, do the following:
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. For similar reasons, Internet Explorer 5 for Mac does not display pinyin characters correctly.
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.