If you open a text resource or type in some text in the text tab on the textivate edit screen, you'll see a new "Trapdoor" button. Click this to add a Trapdoor activity to your resource.
A Trapdoor activity is a multiple choice activity where students click their way through the options to (re-)build the text. It is called Trapdoor because if they get a section wrong, they fall through the trapdoor and they have to start again.
This is a step-by-step user-guide which demonstrates how simple it is to exploit a text with textivate.
Each of the steps below has an ">>> our resource so far" link at the bottom. Simply click this to see what the textivate resource would look like if you followed the instructions in each step.
Note that many of the steps are optional: a text-based resource is in fact ready to be used after step 2. (It just needs to be uploaded, which isn't mentioned in this post). The optional extras (steps 4+) add all sorts of extra features to your text resource, such as vocab activities, text-to-speech, parallel text, etc.
Click on the New Resource icon to clear the contents of all of the text boxes before you start.
The key thing to remember when making matching resources based on matching sentence halves is that the matches should be exclusive - i.e. you should make sure that there is only one sentence end that could possibly go with each sentence starter. It's no good making a resource based on the following data:
Je fais partie d'un club >> de foot
Je fais partie d'un club >> de tennis
Je fais partie d'un club >> de rugby
etc...
...because any of the ends can match perfectly well with any of the starters.
Instead, you need to do this sort of thing:
** NOT AVAILABLE RIGHT NOW :(
Want to try out textivate this weekend? (until Sunday 23rd April 2017)
Go to http://www.textivate.com/?new=1 and click the "Log in / subscribe" button. Select "Log in" and enter the following:
Vocab resources with an output focus ask the question "how do you say ...?" rather than "what does ... mean?".
The focus is on students' productive skills (speaking, writing) rather than on receptive skills (listening, reading), so they are more challenging for students.
The screen image above shows a textivate Match resource which has the following characteristics:
Vocab resources with a receptive (or input) focus ask the question "what does ... mean?" rather than "how do you say ...?".
The focus is on students' receptive skills (listening, reading) rather than on productive skills (speaking, writing), so they are less challenging for students. We want to know what they can understand rather than what they can produce themselves.
The screen image above shows a textivate Match resource which has the following characteristics:
We've added a new feature allowing users to select from names that are already on the scoreboard when they log in to a challenge.
Why?
