A quick look at some of the things to consider when using textivate with a character-based language such as Chinese or Japanese...
The Gap-fill (random) and the Gap-fill (user-defined) activities have changed in the following ways:
"Protected" resources are intended for these sorts of situations:
- you want to set a textivate activity but you don't want students to be able to access the resource on the textivate home page or access any of the other activities for the resource;
or... - you want to set a textivate sequence as a test / assessment, so it's important that students can't access the source text.
Click the "protected" checkbox to add ###protected### to the top of your textivate resource in the "Show all" box (you won't see it in the "Text" box). This has the following result:
- via the share icon, all links (and embed codes) for individual activities have a longer "scrambled" url with no reference to the original resource url
- similarly, if your resource contains a sequence, the sequence link will also have a different type of "scrambled" url, with no reference to the resource url, so students can't open the original resource in a new tab or window
The idea is essentially to try to stop students getting access to the resource home page. (Note that links to the menu screen and the home page are not scrambled.)
N.B. If you are going to make a resource "protected", it is a good idea...
- NOT to list your resource as a public resource -- make it shareable instead
- NOT to give students a link to the home page or menu page for the resource to get the sequence link themselves -- this defeats the object of what you are trying to do
Is this a useful feature? See what you think...
Spanish, reading comprehension sequence
French, reading comprehension, single activity
EFL - PET reading test - single activity sequence
And in case you're wondering, yes, you can still use the url tweaks to modify the landing page for your students if linking to a single activity.
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Related posts:
Introducing Sequences on textivate
LIGHT - an embedded KS3 Science sequence of 10 activities
Chez moi (a textivate sequence = a substantial bit of homework)
How to submit work at the end of a textivate homework sequence
Sequences based on activities from more than one resource
A simple How-to guide for making a variety of reading comprehension exercises on textivate.
1. Start by adding a text
Clear the text box on the textivate home page by clicking on the "New" icon.
Then, in the "Text" box, type or paste in the text for your reading comprehension. e.g.:
2. Add questions and correct answers as Match data
Then click the "Match" tab and add matching items (in this case questions and answers) separated by ==, with each new pair on a separate line, as in the image below:
The Multi Match activities or the MATCH side of Textivate (1 in 3, 1 in 4, 1 in 5, 1 in 10) and the Million activity (also on the MATCH side) have always presented the correct answer along with incorrect answers randomly selected from the rest of the answers for your resource.
BUT now you can specify your own incorrect answers!
In the following way:
Simply add a vertical bar followed by hash |# after the correct answer, then as many incorrect answers as you like each separated by hash #
So you might end up with matching items that look something like this in your finished resource:
a house==une maison |#un appartment #une voiture
je fais ___ planche à voile==de la |#du #de l' #de #la #des
Que fait le garçon après le dîner?==il regarde la télé |#il écoute la radio #il prend le dîner #il se douche
Me ___ bailar==gusta |#quiero #gusto #quieren #gustan
(Now, clearly, it would be a pretty weird resource if all of the above appeared in the same resource...;-)
It doesn't matter how many "wrong" answers you include.
And you don't need to include them for every question.
If you do include wrong answers, these will be used first (and any extra spaces will be used up with randomly selected answers from other questions in the resource).
You can use this feature along with a parallel text / audio / video to create reading or listening comprehension activities with a bit more of a challenge (i.e. where the answers are too obvious if they are randomly selected from the rest of the resource).
See this example of a listening resource created by adding wrong answers for most of the questions.
Thinking about it, you could even use this new feature to create multiple choice quizzes, grammar activities, all sorts.
(I think I'll be adding more to this later...)
Some Match activities have Random order / Original order options.
By default, these activities present the questions in random order.
But it can sometimes be useful to present the items in the original sequence, for example to make a "Find the French" activity simpler by having the questions appear in the same order as the vocab in the text, or to add comprehension questions to a resource which has a parallel text (reading comprehension) or audio or video (listening comprehension).
You can tweak your link urls -- add e1 to the activty url to make it start in the original order and no option to change. (See this blog post on tweaking your textivate urls.)
Here are a few examples:
French, multiple choice reading comprehension. (Questions follow the order of the text.)
French, reading comprehension, fill in the answers. (Word shapes provided. Again, follows the order of the text.)
Spanish, listening comprehension. Multi-choice.
Spanish listening comprehension, fill in the answers. (Initials provided.)
Remember, until this latest update, this sort of exercise would not have been possible on textivate as the questions would have appeared in random order.
This blog post looks at 30+ activity and worksheet generator tools that teachers can use to liven up their lessons.
All of the interactive activities mentioned run in a browser, so you should be able to use them on desktops, laptops, ipads (and other tablets) and reasonably modern smartphones.
Here is what we'll be looking at:
An interactive flashcard generator.
A re-order the words activity generator.
An interactive millionaire activity generator based on Q&A / matching items.
An interactive wordsnake generator.
A pairs / memory card generator.
An interactive match-up exercise generator.
A dominoes generator.
An interactive spelling game generator with various game options.
An interactive SNAP game generator.
An interactive anagrams game generator.
An anagrams worksheet generator.
A put-the-lines-in-order worksheet generator.
An interactive put-the-lines-in-order activity generator.
An interactive fill-in-the-vowels matching activity generator.
An interactive type-all-the-letters matching activity generator.
A printable mini-flashcards generator.
An interactive jigsaw-reading activity generator.
An interactive text-reconstruction activity generator.
An interactive quiz-quiz-trade strip generator.
A printable jigsaw reading generator.
An interactive cloze generator.
An interactive pelmanism / memory pairs game generator.
A cloze worksheet generator.
An interactive whole-text-based millionaire game generator.
An interactive anagram-text generator.
An interactive dictation generator.
An interactive translation generator.
An interactive Find-the-French (or Spanish, German, etc) generator.
An interactive multiple-choice reading comprehension generator.
An interactive fill in the answer reading comprehension generator.
An interactive multiple-choice listening comprehension generator.
An interactive fill in the answer listening comprehension generator.
With the most recent version of TaskMagic3 (3.2.8 - update available here for those with earlier versions of TM3) you can now copy the content of many of your TaskMagic files straight to textivate!
All you need to do is select the file in the TaskMagicCreate File Viewer (the grey box at bottom right of opening screen), and the content is copied to your clipboard, pre-formatted ready to paste into textivate.
See this video:
This works for the following types of TaskMagic3 files:
- TextMatch (limit of 200 matching items)
- GridMatch (converts your grid data to matching items)
- Mix&Gap - also copies your "Gap-fill" gaps (the original version) to be used as the user-defined gap-fill in textivate; also copies any "Find it!" data as matching items to accompany the text.
- Dialogues - also copies any "Find it!" data as matching items to accompany the dialogue.
These file types are those based on text only. (For the other file types, the matching data is copied across, but the name of the image or sound file is copied rather than the file itself.)
This is a really quick and easy way of re-using your TaskMagic resources in textivate.
Watch the video above to see just how easy it is >> Just click the file, then paste into textivate.
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More primary MFL resources, based on the same 13 sports as this previous post, this time with "juego al..." or "practico el... / la..." as appropriate.
Interactive activities
Each link below is to an interactive activity.
A resource blog, for a change.
The resources below are based on the list of 13 sports in the lightbulb languages scheme of work listed here.