Red herrings in user-defined gap-fill

If you make a user-defined gap-fill on textivate (as explained here and here) you can now add "RED HERRING" words to the word list.

These are words that cannot fit into any of the gaps that you have selected and they make the exercise more challenging for the student.

To add red herrings, first create your user-defined gap-fill by clicking on the "User-defined gapfill" button on the textivate home page:

With the user-defined gap-fill edit screen open, scroll down to beneath the box containing your text and you should see a section like this:

You can add extra words (or groups of words) into this box, separating your red herrings with semi-colons, like this:

Clues / prompts for user-defined gaps

If you make a user-defined gap-fill on textivate (as explained here and here) you can now add clues or prompts for some or all of your gaps.

To do this, first create your user-defined gap-fill by clicking on the button on the textivate home page:

Then close the user-defined gap-fill edit box. This adds [#] in front of the words (or groups of words) that you have selected as gaps. 

Then type your clue or prompt after the # on the textivate edit screen (in the "Text" box or the "Show all" box), like this:
[#your clue here]the_gapped_word

You might end up with a text that looks something like this:

Two types of gap-fill (cloze)

A new button has been added to the textivate front page / editor screen: "Extra gap-fill" (see image below):

This allows you to create an extra gap-fill exercise (funnily enough) based on your own gaps, in addition to the automatically generated one. If you click this button you are presented with a screen on which you can toggle gapped words simply by clicking them.

"La tomatina" (embedded video + embedded Spanish gap-fill)

This blog post features a video from RTVE showing some footage from today's "Tomatina" festival in Buñol (Comunidad Valenciana). The video has no commentary, but sets the scene nicely for the text / exercise which follows, which is a gapfill exercise based on a text about the history of "La tomatina" taken from the official tomatina website at http://www.latomatina.es/historia/

The Tomatina festival takes place each year on the last Wednesday in August. Watch the video below of this year's Tomatina, which took place on Wednesday 29th of August, and then have a look at the exercise beneath it based on a text describing the origins of "La Tomatina".

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (gap-fill example)

Here's another example of embedding a textivity on a blog. This gap-fill exercise is based on Shakespeare's sonnet XVIII.

The gap-fill exercise is accessed via this button on the textivate menu screen:

Note that if you click on the "textivate.com" image at the top left of the exercise, you'll be directed to the textivate front page. From there, you can access lots more exercises based on this and other texts.