Q. Do we need any special software to use this site service?

A. The main requirement is to have a fairly up-to-date version of Adobe Reader. Adobe is currently shipping version 10 of their Reader software. However, the site materials are accessible with version 9 and upwards. Adobe Reader must be installed on your computer and additionally, you need to ensure that PDF files are opened by default by the Adobe Reader software.

There are other software requirements for this site and these are listed here.

Q. Why am I not able to press the submit button when I have completed an exercise?

A. This is caused by the use of a browser, which is using a preview mode to render the exercise PDF file. To avoid this problem, you need to ensure that you are actually running an up-to-date version of the free Adobe Reader software to view the exercise file.

Q. How can I get the submit button to work in Google's Chrome browser?

A. Follow this three step process:

1. Enter the command chrome://plugins into Chrome's addess bar. See below:

2. A list of Plug-ins will be shown. In the example below, there are 17 Plug-ins. Ensure that the Adobe PDF plugin is enabled:

3. Ensure that the Chrome PDF viewer is disabled:

Q. Can we use the site with Apple Mac computers?

A. Yes. However, you will need to ensure that you have downloaded the latest version of Adobe Reader software for your particular operating system. It is not enough to use Apple's Preview mode; you will need the actual Adobe Reader software installed on your computer. Additionally, you will need to ensure that Safari is being used in 32 bit mode rather than in 64 bit mode.

Q Can we download the exercises from icthomework.com onto our own VLE?

A. The short answer to this question is no. Here is a more complete answer:

Copyright issues: we licence a number of resources in developing our materials. These copyright licences prevent us from distributing our materials to other VLE's.

Supporting resources: each exercise on the icthomework site is supported by a number of back end server resources. These are based on Linux, AJAX, MySQL and PHP. Thus, localised versions of our exercises would need their own LAMP installations, with a concomitant requirement for local technical support.

Exercise updating: one of the strengths of the icthomework site is that our resources are often modified as a result of student feedback. This is viable because of the centralised nature of the resources. If our materials were to be distributed, it would become impossible for us to maintain any kind of consistency.

Q. How many exercises are there on this site?

A. There are 20 sample exercises for guests to access. The site currently has 97 exercises for subscribing schools. We will add more exercises on a regular basis.

Q. How much will it cost for our school to take out a subscription?

A. The cost is dependent on the size of a school. Click here to access the price table to determine the cost for a particular size of school.

Q. How do teachers manage their students' homework exercises?

A. When a teacher logs in, his or her groups and students are filtered against the Login ID. It is then a straightforward operation to run reports for these classes and students, for example to set homework for a particular class or to get the marks achieved by a class.

Q. Why can I not change the class details of my students?

A. Student data is normally managed centrally by a school database administrator (DBA). It is the responsibility of this person to ensure that student data is accurate and up to date. If individual teachers were enabled to amend student data on our site, then, inevitably, the data would not be synchronised with the school's database system. For this reason, we provide a separate account to enable school DBAs to manage school data on our database server.

Q. Is it possible to export student exercise data from the site?

A. Yes. The site reports enable teachers to export exercise data as CSV files. These can be opened directly from the site by Microsoft Excel or they can be saved to a local disk.

Q. If there is something lacking in terms of an appropriate exercise to support KS3 students, can we ask for it be provided?

A. We will happily consider requests for exercises. There is a suggestions page to enable schools to do this.

Q. How do we place an order and how long will it take for the student accounts to be activated?

A. Full details of how to place an order are available here. Login accounts can generally be setup within 24 hours. If there are problems with the data supplied by a school then the setup process can take a little longer.

Typical problems with data include: students who are not allocated to classes, teachers who are not linked to classes, classes that contain no students, non-existent classes, duplicate student records, etc.

Q. Where should we send our school's data?

Alternatively, you can post the data to us. Click here for our contact details..

Q. If we decide that we want to cancel our subscription, can we get a refund?

A. Yes. A school can cancel a subscription within 30 days of placing an order. In this event, the school will only be liable for the set-up charge. This is a non-refundable charge that is incurred when student and teacher accounts are created on our database server. The other portion of the subscription charge will be waived